Bonas MacFarlane tutors are usually employed to help children over the major hurdles of school and university entrance... ‘We drop talented young people into families,’ says Charles Bonas, MD of Bonas MacFarlane. ‘They’re artists, West End actors, PhD scholars... gifted, exciting people who can offer a lot to children.’

Kept deliberately small and ‘bespoke’, this [Bonas MacFarlane] is the seriously upper crust of the consultancy and tutoring industry, blended, kneaded and done to a crisp according to the precise educational recipe for your privileged progeny.

Even parents who already pay for schooling no longer seem to think that tutoring is unnecessary: Charles Bonas, the managing director of a London-based tutoring agency, Bonas MacFarlane, says most of its clients are privately educated... Underlying this demand is increasing competition to get into the most prestigious universities.

The intense competition for entrance higher up the education ladder means the race for places starts sooner... Parents believe that certain nurseries open doors. Bonas Macfarlane [will] "promote your best possible chances" to find a place in a nursery school - and the next stage, be it a pre-preparatory (pre-prep) school (for boys aged 4-8) or preparatory school (for girls aged 4-11).

In a breathtakingly comprehensive, nine-stage process, Bonas Macfarlane’s placement consultants assess a child, produce a fully profiled shortlist of appropriate schools, carry out “school liaison”, arrange special school visits, guide the child through entrance exams, give them interview practice, handle all the fiddly documentation involved with the admission process and then tutor the child in the areas where they need to improve.