Reign of the tutors

AS a nation, we're not there yet - but heading that way. With tutors. For our high school students, our uni students, our primary students (especially in their Naplan and high-school entrance exam years) and even, dispiritingly, with our kindergarten kids.

It's a big industry in England. We pulled out just as our eldest was heading along the path of his Eleven Plus entrance exams, when he was surrounded by mates deprived of several years of their childhood because of the gruelling examination treadmill. The stress we witnessed was enormous. Anxiety rashes on cheeks - parents' as well as kids'. Mothers declaring "he hated me" of their child, stories of them chasing their kids around the back garden with practice exam papers. "It's child abuse," declared one harried mother.

The top UK tutors are Oxbridge graduates and they can command up to $1500 an hour among the super wealthy who want their kids to get into top universities. Some tutors have waiting lists of a year. Some have turned evening jobs into full-time professions. Nursery tutoring - to prepare four-year-olds for primary school - can cost up to $360 an hour. In New York and Hong Kong, there are tutors who've attained celebrity status; their faces are plastered on billboards. This is the international world that Aussie kids are competing with, and it's with a sinking heart I say that in some parts of our major cities we're doing our best to catch up.

What I hear around me: that "most" of the private school kids are tutored, on top of their parents paying stratospheric school fees. One mum informed her child's teacher of a new tutoring regime and was told "good", because a bit of extra help may boost the school's precious Naplan ranking. At least two private schools I know of gave past Naplan tests to their students for homework during the recent holidays - this certainly didn't happen in my primary-aged kid's state school. How do those children compete in such an environment?

Anxiety is like a disease. If you hear others are being tutored, you think, hang on, should my kids also? Am I doing mine a disservice by not having them tutored? As a parent, you just want a level playing field; want your kid to feel like they're keeping up. These things aren't cheap. It's a grey area, a dirty little school-gate secret. I know one thing: I was dux of my primary and high schools but would never come close to achieving that in this new environment. The system's utterly different now. The tutored child is getting the accolades; is taught "exam technique" often in after-school coaching colleges as well as having their personal tutor. It's preparing them mentally and psychologically for crucial exams, boosting their confidence and giving them an edge over their peers. I see it. I think it's a huge shame. But it's the system now.

From the teacher's perspective, many will say they don't like tutoring because they don't know what's being taught beyond the classroom; because it may be different to how they're teaching; because of the added anxiety placed upon the student; and because the tutored child - the rote learner - is "boring" to teach. Increasingly, I'm hearing that qualities like innovation and eccentricity and individuality and lateral thinking are valued - entrance officers at some elite institutions are not just looking at academic success, but how likely the student is to attain success beyond their years of education.

Paul Tough wrote in a New York Times article about educators observing that "students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically ... They were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence". Personally, I think the key to success is drive. Tenacity. The will to succeed, a killer instinct in terms of competitiveness. And those things are hard - perhaps impossible - to teach.