EVER since the King And I screen musical of the 1950s, actress Deborah Kerr has defined the perfect English governess.

Just when you thought modern education had wiped out these prim live-in nanny-teachers, along comes York resident and Cambridge graduate Catherine Suckling to re-establish them in her own image.

Catherine has launched a new agency, called The English Governess, which places residential teachers with private families throughout the world, on both a temporary and permanent basis.

She plans to recruit as many teachers as possible, including "student governesses" - student teachers drawn from the training schools of York and North Yorkshire on summer placement at family homes in Europe.

Catherine was living in Italy when, to keep her two children abreast with the English curriculum, she employed a student teacher for a few weeks every summer.

Partly as a result of an inspirational music teacher, both her children went on to win music scholarships at Minster School, York, and Bramcote School, Scarborough.

Families, both British and Italian, expressed an interest in employing a governess, but didn't know how to go about it. Catherine spotted the market niche, and The English Governess is the result.

Not that she is a teacher - she majored in history of art at Cambridge and for ten years managed her own public relations consultancy.

But she spent much of her childhood at Winchester College, one of the UK's most illustrious boys' public schools, where her father was housemaster and her mother taught Latin.

She said: "Home education is how the majority of children learned for centuries. It produced Mozart, George Washington and every British monarch up to and including our present Queen - to name but a few."

She claims that employing a governess can often make financial as well as educational sense.

Although qualified teachers command salaries of more than £20,000 per year (and can earn substantially more), an overseas family could easily end up spending this amount to send just one child to an English prep school.

For the teacher, it means a similar salary, but with food and board paid for.

As well as ex-pats, Catherine hopes her new business will appeal to families throughout the world who want their children to become fluent in English from an early age.

"Children taught by a governess over a period of years will generally become completely bilingual," said Catherine, who speaks three languages fluently.

"This phenomenon was widely understood in 19th century Russia, when children of the aristocracy were often more fluent in their 'second' language, learned from their governess, than they were in their mother tongue."

Updated: 10:51 Thursday, January 26, 2006