'£100 an hour' fees

The market for private tuition, particularly in London, is booming with the best teachers charging up to £100 an hour, according to industry sources.

In the provinces some teachers charge only £15 an hour for tutoring, but in London, where demand keeps increasing, it is difficult to find help for less than £20 an hour.

Dr David Cornelius, of the Association of Tutors, said: "During the last two years, in London especially, there has been a definite increase in the amount of tutoring."

Children as young as five are being given evening lessons. But the peak ages for tutoring are between 10 and 11 and between 16 and 18.

The boom is fuelled by anxious parents - even those who have sent their children to schools with a good reputation, like the Blair boys' London Oratory - that their children might not be doing well enough in their school day to get by without extra help.

The second factor fuelling the boom is the increasing number of teachers who take on extra work. They have to do so because many teachers in central London earn scarcely more than £20,000 a year at a time when would-be first time buyers are said to need a £50,000 salary to buy a property.

This even applies to the best known independent schools. Dick Davison, of the Independent Schools Council, said: "A young teacher at somewhere like Westminster might earn a little bit more than the equivalent teacher at a state school but not much - a few thousand a year at most."