What kind of job do you have and how much do you earn?

Lucy Alexandra Spencer spent 16 weeks abroad last year in Oman, France, Switzerland and Portugal.

Unlike many people, she travels to make money, not spend it.

Spencer’s employer will cover the cost of the trip. They are wealthy Europeans and Americans who hire her to travel with their families for weeks or even months at a time.

Spencer is a former elementary school teacher with experience working with students with learning disabilities. She embarked on her itinerant teaching job for the first time seven years ago.

Since then, she said she has spent about two years abroad, including an eight-month trip to Europe, the United States and the Middle East.

The cost of hiring a teacher like Ms. Spencer, who is based in the UK, is comparable to the cost of private school tuition for multiple children, which costs about 8,000 pounds (about $10,050) a month for three children. Her family also pays for her airfare, accommodation and meals.

If a family requires a teacher with specialized skills, such as playing an instrument or teaching a foreign language, the fee can rise to £10,000.

However, teaching assistants to help with the basic curriculum can be hired for around £2,500 per month.

The children Spencer teaches attend about four hours of class each day. That’s because one hour of tutoring is equivalent to three hours of regular school, she said.

She said she consults with teachers at her school to create lessons that cover what they learn at home. You can also prepare for the exam after returning home.

Spencer also incorporates information about local culture, cuisine, and customs into his sessions. For example, Spencer said that when she was in Oman, she worked with a family that had never experienced an Arabian country before.

“It’s not about me passing on knowledge,” she told CNBC Travel. “It’s about me being there as a facilitator, getting them interested, asking questions about what they’re going through, finding differences, finding similarities.

“Teaching skills are required because you have to really understand families and their cultural beliefs, and how you can make the little humans you’re working with even better versions of themselves than their parents. Because you need to understand.”

Spencer’s progressive outlook doesn’t apply to all families, she says.

She said she often works with startup founders who want to expose children to different ways of learning and thinking.

She said she prefers to be known as a “facilitator” or “educator” rather than a teacher or tutor.

“There will always be educators who travel with their families. It’s like a school,” she says. “But for me, it’s not global schooling, which is what I specialize in, but just international tutoring.”

The title change also means she has to live up to her family’s expectations for her role, Spencer said. She needs to ensure that her family does not confuse her with a nanny, who provides her extensive child care, or an au pair, who is expected to do light housework.

“My mission is definitely education. I’m not with my family, I’m at their house. I’m always separate, but sometimes we go to dinner together. It’s an interesting conversation. Defining that idea and expectation is that it’s not an education ‘holiday nanny role,’ she said.

That means the interview is a two-way street, she said.

“For a lot of families, it may feel like I’m interviewing you, the educator, but I’m just as much interviewing them as I am.”

Now that Spencer has her own home and two dogs, she only accepts short-term business trips of up to four weeks. But she can match her one of her 30,000 teachers who is part of her private tutoring business, Education, with her family who needs a traveling teacher.

About 10% of Education Boutique’s business comes from on-site teaching, and the rest is from matching educators with students who have learning issues or need to prepare for private exams. Mr Spencer started the business in 2016 after spending nearly four years as a school teacher in the UK and Dubai. She holds her Bachelor’s degree in Elementary Teacher Education.

Spencer said she hopes to make traveling teachers available to more families by creating cheaper options, such as pairing families with trained students who take a gap year.

“There are a lot of very attractive young people who are paying big money to travel the world as part of a gap year and are likely to go on to a good degree or career in the future,” Spencer said. .

“Why couldn’t you position a gap year to travel around the world and educate students in exchange for someone paying for it?” she says. “And if a family knows they’re going to, say, Thailand, instead of them paying for a flight for an educator to come with them, we can be the link.” [for] Someone who is already planning to go there. ”

Spencer said both sides of Education Boutique are committed to finding jobs for itinerant teachers and people who want to support special education children.

“We believe our role is important in supporting the most disadvantaged children around the world and the most disadvantaged locally,” Spencer said.