The high-class tutors who know how to give your child an educational Bonas

Lunches with the headmaster, privileged information and Cressida’s well-connected brother. Joshi Herrmann reports on the expensive antidote to private school ‘admissions anxiety’
13 January 2014

On Saturday, nervous parents dropped off their six-year-old sons on the edge of Pimlico’s Vincent Square, where the prestigious Westminster Under School was holding its all-important 7+ exams. Most of the parents had spent more than a year thinking about that moment, having registered for the prep school — which is attached to nearby Westminster School — as early as 2012 and by last autumn at the latest.

Across town, St Paul’s, the academic powerhouse that taught George Osborne and regularly sends a third of its leavers to Oxford and Cambridge, will next Tuesday begin interviewing 10-year-olds who excelled in an online pre-test a few months ago and are hoping to join in 2016, subject of course to impressing the teachers in this interview and getting at least 70 per cent in their Common Entrance exams in two years’ time.

It’s enough to muddle and sink the heart of any parent — and is making a new brand of private tutoring very lucrative indeed.

“Placement consultancy” is private tutoring for parents — where well-connected agencies charge through the nose for their advice on how to get your child into the right school. High-end tutoring agencies say “admissions anxiety” among parents — the result of unprecedented competition from foreign students and constantly changing admissions procedures, among other factors — means “consulting” work is now a bigger part of their business than teaching. For parents who can afford it, the strategic advice can relieve the pressure of having to think about things like verbal reasoning tests, application-to-place ratios and which schools will require their child to sharpen up their French a year in advance. Inevitably, though, tutoring’s growing “advisory” side causes unease. The headmaster of an elite west London prep school says he worries about what advice is being given to some of his charges, and regrets that schools are losing talented senior staff to agencies who can pay them more money for less work in the placement consulting game.

“We do as much work placing children at schools and advising parents on their application strategy as we do actual tutoring,” says Charles Bonas, 42, the aristocratic managing director of educational company Bonas Macfarlane (and half-brother of Prince Harry’s girlfriend Cressida Bonas, who is said to be doing some tutoring for the company at the moment). Bonas employs a team of five full-time consultants for the work, and pays ex-headmasters as advisers to provide insider knowledge so that parents have the most useful information. In a breathtakingly comprehensive, nine-stage process, Bonas Macfarlane’s placement consultants assess a child, produce a fully profiled shortlist of appropriate schools, carry out “school liaison”, arrange special school visits, guide the child through entrance exams, give them interview practice, handle all the fiddly documentation involved with the admission process and then tutor the child in the areas where they need to improve.

“There are some consultants out here who will say, ‘I can get your son into Eton or Westminster’ and that is about connections, but we don’t say that,” says Bonas. But Bonas Macfarlane is able — “in some instances”, according to its website — to “negotiate with schools for exams to be retaken”. The website also offers to write “strong personal recommendations, which are highly respected by schools” and says that if a child is placed on a school waiting list, “we then do all we can to find movement within that list”. The firm charges parents £56-£75 an hour.

“We are not saying for a moment that we have special access or backdoor ways,” says Bonas. “We don’t purport to be able to get kids through back doors or with secret handshakes, but there are a huge number of strategies at play with school admission now.” He has just got off a plane from Kazakhstan, where his wife lives and the company has an office (it also has one in Dubai). “I was joking to the stewards — it [the plane] was like a school bus,” he says. The trend that plane symbolises is part of what is driving the placement consulting boom — the result of a private education market where the schools are king.

Kate Shand, 32, a friend of Pippa Middleton’s, whose tutoring agency Enjoy Education started in 2005, says anxiety on the part of parents about foreign competition and fast-moving goalposts are driving demand.

“We do a huge amount of schools consultancy,” she says. “Because of how well we get to know children we are in a very strong position to offer top-up help on things that are needed for admission to different places.

“St Paul’s and Westminster have this year introduced online testing, so these things are changing very quickly and parents need advice on what is required for which school.”

Shand mentions that she recently had lunch with Dr Joe Spence, the headmaster of Dulwich College, something she says she does regularly with other heads. She also says her company’s “important network” of friendly prep school teachers gives Enjoy Education’s staff an idea of what the admissions pass-mark might be that year: “It is actually quite hard [for parents] to get hold of that kind of information,” she says, adding that an increasing number of her clients are middle- and upper-class families who have chosen state primaries for their children and need additional help finding the right private secondary place — a trend noted by Tatler magazine this month, which for the first time published a guide to state schools. “We are always really careful — it’s not for us to lobby for different children,” she says. “They [the schools] have their processes to find the right children. Maybe it does happen [agencies using their relationships to get children in] but it is not something we do.”

Magoo Giles, a former adjutant in the Coldstream Guards and personal equerry to the Queen, is head of exclusive prep Knightsbridge School and something of a pin-up among west London parents. As the head of a school that sends dozens of privileged children to Eton, Harrow and other top private schools, he has observed the emergence of placement consultants at close quarters and is candid about his concerns. “I do find this whole development difficult,” he says. “There’s a lot of concern and worry about getting into schools and you’re competing with children from all over the world now — it’s terrifying. So people are parting with a lot of money for an ex-head or an ex-registrar to help their child get where they need to get.

“I can’t stop them giving advice — but the best people to go to are the schools themselves. If you are going for Eton, they will tell you exactly what they require. Of course there are people who know the system and can make money from passing on that information, and I can’t stop that happening. What worries me is when a tutor agency tells a parent their son can get into Eton and we are advising them that they need a back-up. Then in a good year they don’t get in.”

Giles asks that the agencies operating in the blossoming placement consulting trade keep him and his colleague abreast of what they are advising parents, and says he hopes “they are willing not to knock us” — referring to the old tension that has always simmered between schools and traditional private tutoring agencies. For the agencies, though, the jangling parental nerves outside the red-brick walls of Westminster Under School over the weekend — never mind inside — represent a rich seam to mine.

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