Ambitious parents are used to spending money on extra tuition. Weekly French lessons from a heavily perfumed chain-smoker were the bane of my early years. My poor brother was unwillingly coerced into elocution. There are lots of arguments against this approach, of course. But in a week that four-in-10 British five-year-olds missed out on their first choice of primary school, many have come to regard after-school lessons as essential to getting ahead in life. Mandarin classes, music lessons, remedial maths – you name it. The list, like the bill, goes on.
Image: Children as young as five are dispatched to bootcamps, where they learn how to develop business ideas and raise funding from grown-up investors Photo: Alamy
