In the Famous Five the tutor always did it. He was the sinister figure with the beard, brought in to help Dick and Julian catch up on their schoolwork, but so mean that he wouldn’t let Timmy the dog into lessons, and was later caught stealing Uncle Quentin’s secret formula.

Fifty years ago only the rich and eccentric had tutors and governesses. Everyone else went to school, came home and played with Meccano. Today they barely have time for a rice cake before sitting down with their Oxbridge graduate to revise prime numbers and adverbs.

Tutoring has replaced fish knives as the middle-class totem. Tony Blair led the way, hiring teachers from Westminster School to cram his supposedly state-educated children, and now, according to the Sutton Trust, 43 per cent of 11 to 16-year-olds at state schools in London receive extra — privately paid at up to £45 an hour — coaching.

So you can see Gordon Brown’s and Ed Balls’s logic when they announced this week plans for ten hours’ one-to-one tuition for 7 to-16-year-olds. Those pushy middle-class parents are getting a huge advantage, so why not give everyone tutorials to help them to catch up? It’s the perfect answer. Graduates need jobs, children are leaving school illiterate. It will cost only £468 million and they need only 100,000 more tutors.

But what Mr Brown and Mr Balls don’t understand is that tutoring, far from being a cunning middle-class secret, is damaging the lives of many children, as they lose their few hours of relative freedom (and possibly their only chance to play sport).

Often it doesn’t help their education either. Cramming children from the age of 5 can put them off learning before they reach their teens. And it lets schools off the hook. If teachers do their jobs properly, the school day should be long enough to teach pupils what they need to know and to give extra help to most who require it. When a school is lucky enough to have a good teacher — there are shortages, particularly of science graduates — she or he should be teaching 25 children from the front of the class, not one in a room on their own.

If the taxpayer starts forking out for this perk, it will still be the forward middle-class parents who use the service because Emily, “a bright girl”, has inexplicably fallen behind in French. Schools, desperate to improve their results, won’t want to waste precious tutoring money on pupils who are failing anyway.

Enid Blyton was right, tutors are sinister, robbing children of their spare time and us of our money.

So please, Mr Balls, don’t let the State institutionalise a flawed middle-class fad.

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