For the average parents of a one-year-old child, a “good day” might be found in the few fleeting moments their offspring are happily tottering about and stacking a few blocks together, before the brief, shimmering mirage gives way to the desert of sleep deprivation and overflowing nappies.
But for the more aspirational breed of parent – those who see themselves as ambitious custodians of their children’s life-long prospects – this is a ludicrously low bar.
One family in north London is taking serious action. A job advertisement in the TES for a private tutor offers one lucky candidate £180,000 a year to successfully mould their one-year-old son into “an English gentleman”.
This doesn’t just mean giving him a bowler hat and sending him on his merry way, but involves embarking on a programme of cultural enrichment with the stated aim of setting him up for accessing the country’s most revered schools and universities.
“The role centres on immersing the child in British culture, values, and subtleties before any cultural bias takes hold. It seeks to harness a one-year-old’s innate curiosity and capacity for absorption, ensuring that what is learned is of the highest quality,” the advert states.
“Their ideal tutor will be someone well educated, with an extensive vocabulary, and who speaks with received pronunciation.”
The tutor must overall “provide a comprehensive British cultural environment”, replete with knowledge of Western classical music, while also helping expose the toddler to a “range of quintessentially British experiences to help hone his habits, outlooks, tastes and sporting preferences”, the advert says.
“There is no reason why the boy can’t visit Lord's, Wimbledon and Twickenham, for example, and be taught age-appropriate understanding of cricket, tennis, rugby and other sports such as equestrianism (including polo) and rowing.”
It adds: “In time, the family hope their son will be accepted at a top-flight school such as Eton, St Paul’s, Westminster or Harrow. It is important that [the] boy’s education, even at the early years stage, starts to prepare him for this kind of life.”
This is not the parents’ first child. The advert alludes to an older sibling whose immersion in English culture may not have begun early enough for the parents “to achieve their goal”.
“The child, who is just one, is in an important stage of early development,” the ad reads. “He comes from a multilingual family and his parents are looking to cultivate a truly bicultural child. Having started at age five with this child’s older brother, they felt that even this was too late to achieve their goal, hence their search for a tutor now.”
While people may scoff at the idea of taking a screaming one-year-old to a polo match, or somehow prepping an unruly toddler for Eton, even for many adults inhabiting this rarified world, those behaviours never fully retreat anyway.
Nonetheless, supporting children during their early years is widely recognised as giving them the best start in life, not least because 90 per cent of brain growth happens before the age of five.
The NHS emphasises the importance of these early years, stating that “a child’s experiences in their early years shape their rapidly developing brain”.
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