BEN Burcombe-Filer is the man behind the scenes who gives some of the wealthiest children a helping hand with their exams.
But this has given him a unique insight into a world of privilege few of us can imagine.
At only 24, Ben is the go-to tutor for many parents of the super rich.
Now he is to feature in a documentary series on how the wealthiest in society live.
Though Ben is naming no names, clients have included offspring of peers, sports stars and major business leaders, many of them with a net worth of upwards of £10m.
Super rich families have hired Ben’s services for whole weeks or even a month at a time and sometimes he will live in with the family.
In three years of tutoring, Ben has been offered the chance to accompany rich families on holidays as a tutor to places like Italy, Monaco and Kazakhstan.
The nature of Ben’s richer clients means that they expect him to be on call at any time and he has received calls at 1am from panicking students.
One student who he had given his number to on a Sunday, in case there were any problems, had called him three times before 9am on Monday.
“You have to be willing to go above and beyond,” said Ben, from Waltham Chase.
He fell into tutoring after struggling to find a job, which he suspects may have been down to his cerebral palsy, after he graduated from Clare College, at Cambridge University, but found it was something he loved.
He normally tutors around 20 students, aged 14 to 20, a week for exams and Oxbridge entrance interviews and says on average he can raise a student’s results by two grades in three months.
Clients include the Hampshire area, but will come to him from further afield like London and he does Skype calls.
Ben, who has now launched his own company, Celebration Tutors, says none of his clients want to be tutored, so at first he can receive an unenthusiastic response.
“Some of them are like ‘why do I need to study because mum and dad are minted and I won’t have to work?’ or the phrase ‘my mummy or daddy earns more in a week than you earn in a year, why do I need to listen to you?’.”
However, this attitude he says is quickly stamped out by parents and Ben says one thing he has noticed about the super rich is they are scrupulously polite with |no arrogance.
For Ben the wealth he sees has been an eye-opener into how the other half live.
In one case a child who had raised their grades was gifted a £40,000 car.
He was given a tip once that amounted to three days’ extra work.
“I’m in a house where they say ‘if you want something you pull this’,” he said.
“They’ll talk about their weekend and it will be the sort of thing you dream of doing.
“They say I popped across to France or I was in the director’s box at Twickenham, the sort of thing I might kill to do is dropped into the conversation like it’s nothing. I have to keep a straight face – to them that’s normal.”
But underneath all that privilege Ben says they are just parents with the same worries about their children’s future as anyone else.
With such important clients success is vital and the former Kings School and Peter Symonds College student admits he feels the pressure and can find it frustrating if a client is not prepared to put in the work.
“I don’t sleep very well over results week. The law of averages says one or two are going to struggle,” he said.
“I don’t do miracles. It can really dent your reputation.”
Ben’s experiences will feature as part of a Sky Living six-part documentary called Who’d want to be a billionaire in the episode, What the Super Tutor Saw broadcast today.
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