Class divide: how wealthiest families shell out thousands to give children a super-tutor

Wanted: part-time tutor for a budding young architecture student. Potential pay: well over £2m. In the booming world of specialised private education for the super-rich, earnings for tutoring, even when moonlighting, now dwarf conventional salaries.

- Robert Booth

This week, architects reacted with astonishment when an Oxford tutor agency offered a salary seven times higher than that earned by the average building designer for an "excellent young professional architect to provide academic support and mentorship to an ambitious architecture student preparing to commence her university studies".

The client does not even want the successful applicant to quit their day job in exchange for £288,000 a year and nine weeks' holiday. They will be asked to help with course work and exams and "leveraging connections to secure placements in other prestigious architectural firms".

The arrangement could last the full seven years of the student's architectural training. The benefactor, who is not a family member, is said to believe they could be the next Zaha Hadid, the prize-winning IraqiBritish architect.

The search is the latest sign of a boom in private tutoring for the children of the 0.01% wealthiest people in the world. Adam Caller, founder of the 25-year-old firm that posted the advert, Tutors International, said: "I am absolutely swamped with inquiries. It's never been like this."

It also illustrates a new trend: buying tutors to boost professional connections.