University undergraduates are hiring private tutors to help them pass exams because they feel they are receiving inadequate teaching on their degree courses.

Tutoring agencies have traditionally been used by affluent parents — including Tony Blair, the former prime minister — to boost the prospects of school-age children.

Now, however, they say they are finding a burgeoning market among university students who claim to suffer from a lack of face-to-face teaching.

Institutions where the practice is becoming established include Oxford, University College London (UCL), and Warwick.

The willingness of undergraduates to pay up to £40 per hour for private tuition — on top of annual fees of £3,145 — is the latest evidence of students’ discontent about teaching standards that do not match their expectations.

Students at universities including Bristol and Manchester have recently staged protests against cuts in teaching hours, growing class sizes and a rise in the use of postgraduate students to fill in for academic staff. Recent government research has found that British undergraduates have the shortest teaching hours in the European Union.

Fleet Tutors, one of the country’s biggest private tuition agencies, with offices in Hampshire and London, has seen a 30% rise in the number of undergraduate clients in the past year.

“This is one of the highest growth areas for us,” said Mylène Curtis, the company’s managing director. “Students are finding they get to university and have inadequate teaching. Contact time is not enough and those who are struggling need more face-to-face contact to enable them to cope with their workload.

“Others find it difficult to structure their thoughts into coherent essays. They are not arriving at university with adequate skills.”

Chris Guy, a retired physics lecturer from Imperial College London, said he was providing private classes to undergraduates at Oxford and UCL. He also recently taught students at Queen Mary, a college at London University.

“Lectures are so huge at many places that it has become the norm to have courses that simply do not succeed in getting the information across,” Guy said.

Joanna al-Zahawi, 22, in the third year of a business economics course at Kingston University, London, has received coaching from at least two private tutors, including a course of seven hour-long lessons costing £210, to prepare for exams that end tomorrow.

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Unlocking the cruellest prison
• Prince Charles named in £81m court battle