‘Always keep a-hold of nurse/ For fear of finding something worse,’ warned Hilaire Belloc in his poem ‘Jim’, about a little boy who ran away and got eaten by a lion. These days, Jim would be lucky to have a nanny at all given their exorbitant cost. Recent figures released by the nanny payroll provider Nannytax show that the average salary in London has risen to more than £50,000 as pushy parents demand ‘additional services’ such as training in autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and special educational needs (SEN). A far cry from Sebastian Flyte’s Nanny Hawkins in Brideshead Revisited , the new breed of ‘hybrid nannies’ can command up to a 20 per cent salary premium by catering to the growing number of families who now require SEN expertise.

Nannies have always divid

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