Dunottar School 11+ Tuition

Dunottar School is a co-educational independent day school in Reigate, Surrey, taking pupils from ages 11 to 18, with main entry at Year 7 and Year 12 only. Leading Tuition prepares candidates for the Year 7 assessment day, which runs in two strands: Warrior Learner activities with an informal interview, and academic papers in English and Mathematics alongside an online verbal, non-verbal and numerical test. The 2027-entry assessment is Saturday 7 November 2026.

What we prepare a Dunottar candidate for, and what we leave alone

Dunottar says twice, in its own words, that preparation is not needed. Of the Warrior Learner activities the school writes: “No preparation for these activities is required.” Of the academic papers it writes that they are “based on the National Curriculum work that the pupils will have been doing in their current school, for which no tutoring is required.” Any tutoring company that quietly skips past those two sentences is selling you something the school has told you not to buy.

We take them at face value, and it defines the shape of our offer. There is a difference between a child needing tutoring and a child benefiting from preparation, and at Dunottar that difference is unusually easy to describe. The content is not the problem. A Year 6 pupil in a competent primary or prep school has already met everything on those papers. What a candidate has usually never met is the situation: a strange hall, a fixed clock, an adaptive screen that gets harder when you do well, a written task with no teacher to check in halfway, and an interview with an adult who is forming an impression.

So we teach three things and decline the rest. We teach timed accuracy on National Curriculum mathematics, because the paper rewards a child who finishes calmly rather than one who knows more. We teach extended writing under a clock, because a strong writer who has only ever written in twenty-minute lesson chunks will produce something shapeless in a single sitting. And we teach the reasoning question types on the online paper, because those question types are the one part of the day a child genuinely may never have seen. Everything beyond that we consider outside the honest scope of tutoring, and we say so at the first consultation rather than after you have paid for a term.

Choosing between the Year 5 early offer and the Year 6 route

Most families come to us having decided to apply and not having decided when. Dunottar runs two routes to the same Year 7 place, and the choice changes our programme more than anything else about the school. It is the first question we settle, before a tutor is allocated.

The Year 5 early-offer route assesses candidates roughly eighteen months before entry. For Year 7 entry in 2028, the school has published Saturday 27 February 2027 as the Warrior Learner and Academic Assessment date. The Year 6 route assesses in the autumn of Year 6; for Year 7 entry in 2027 that date is Saturday 7 November 2026, with registration closing on Friday 2 October 2026. The school has confirmed that the Year 5 route for 2027 entry has now closed, so a family currently in Year 6 has one route open to them and no decision to make.

Where the choice is still live, two published differences matter to us. First, the Year 5 academic papers are, in the school’s wording, “tailored for Year 5 pupils” — they are not the Year 6 papers sat early, and preparing a Year 5 child against Year 6 material is both unpleasant and pointless. Second, the Warrior Learner strand differs: at Year 6 the school describes “individual and group activities”, while the Year 5 description names group activities only. A child who is quietly capable in a small group but hesitant working alone in front of an assessor is in a slightly different position on the two dates, and that is worth a parent knowing before committing.

Our recommendation is not automatic. If a family is confident Dunottar is their first choice, the early route removes a year of uncertainty and we build a lighter, longer programme around it. If a family is still comparing Dunottar with other Surrey independents — and many are also looking at Epsom College, Ewell Castle School or Cranleigh School — the Year 6 route keeps options open, and we plan a programme that serves more than one assessment format rather than optimising for Dunottar alone.

How a Dunottar programme is shaped and how long it runs

We work backwards from the assessment date, not forwards from the day you enquire. For the Year 6 route that means counting back from the November assessment; for the early-offer route, from the February one. A programme that starts a year out and one that starts six weeks out are not the same programme delivered at different speeds — they contain different things, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend a short run can do everything.

That adds up to a run of roughly three to five months for a typical Year 6 candidate, and a longer, thinner version across Year 5 for the early-offer route. We do not run a Dunottar-specific bootcamp and we do not sell a fixed package of sessions in advance, because the diagnostic frequently changes the plan. Sessions are one to one, online or in person around Reigate and the wider Surrey area, and the same tutor stays with a child from diagnostic to taper.

One logistical point we raise early, because it has caught families out: the school states that “candidates must be able to attend the Warrior Learner and Academic Assessment Day in person.” There is no remote alternative, and the early-offer page notes that a family unable to make that date is directed to the Year 6 route instead. If a fixture, a holiday or a sibling’s exam clashes, that is a route decision, not a scheduling problem, and it is better made in the spring than in October.

The online reasoning paper the school does not name

Dunottar describes the online component precisely and anonymously. Its Year 6 page says the assessments “will cover English, Mathematics and an online test covering: Verbal, Non-Verbal and numerical exercises.” Nowhere on its admissions pages does the school name a publisher, a platform or a pass mark.

Third-party guides fill the gap, and they disagree with each other. ExamTutor markets its Dunottar page as a guide to a “CEM Select assessment”. Exam Papers Plus describes the same component as “an online Quest assessment”. Both then sell branded practice papers matched to their own label. They cannot both be right, and neither claim is made by the school.

Our position is to teach from the school’s description rather than from anyone’s branding. The named skills — verbal, non-verbal and numerical reasoning — are stable regardless of which platform delivers them, and the transferable work is in the question types and in screen behaviour. Where a child needs deliberate practice in an adaptive online format, our Quest assessment preparation covers the mechanics of adaptive testing, and the tutor is explicit with the family that this is format familiarity for an unnamed paper, not a leaked replica of Dunottar’s.

The practical teaching point that follows matters more than the label. On an adaptive test, early accuracy raises the difficulty of what comes next, so a child who rushes the opening questions to “bank time” is working against the scoring model. We coach the opposite habit: slow, deliberate accuracy at the start, and a willingness to leave a hard item rather than lose two minutes to it. Children who have only ever practised on paper papers, where speed is rewarded uniformly, often need several sessions to change that reflex.

Which of our tutors take Dunottar preparation

We do not allocate a Dunottar candidate to whoever is free. The assessment day has an unusual mix — two academic papers, an adaptive screen and a staff interview, all in one morning — and the tutor who suits it is not always the strongest subject specialist on our books.

The tutors we put forward for Dunottar are qualified teachers or experienced 11+ specialists who meet three conditions. They have taught upper Key Stage 2 English and mathematics to the level the National Curriculum papers demand, rather than only teaching older students. They have taught verbal and non-verbal reasoning as a taught skill, with a method for each question type, rather than handing a child practice papers and marking them. And they are comfortable with children who are ten or eleven and nervous, which is a different job from teaching a motivated sixteen-year-old.

We match on temperament as well as subject. Dunottar assesses seven Warrior Learning behaviours — aspiration, creativity, curiosity, tenacity, independence, inclusivity and collaboration — and a child who has spent months being drilled by someone brisk and impatient tends to present as the opposite of curious on the day. A tutor who has visibly enjoyed working with your child is worth more here than one who has covered more content.

If a family wants a different tutor after the diagnostic session, we change without argument or charge. That is not a concession we make reluctantly; a mismatch discovered in week one is cheap, and one discovered in week ten is not.

The interview, the Warrior Learner day and the school reference

The school describes the interview as “a friendly, informal interview with a member of staff”. We prepare for it, and we are careful about how. What we do is give a child practice at talking to an unfamiliar adult about what they actually like — a book, a sport, a thing they built — for long enough that a full sentence comes out naturally. What we refuse to do is script answers. A rehearsed eleven-year-old is obvious to anyone who interviews children for a living, and it reads as coaching rather than confidence.

The Warrior Learner activities we do not coach at all. The school says no preparation is required, the activities are designed to see how a child works with other children, and there is no version of preparing for that which does not amount to teaching a child to perform. If your child is anxious about the group element, we will talk to them about it and we will tell them honestly what the morning involves. That is the limit of what we think is useful or fair.

One part of the process sits entirely outside both your control and ours: the school “will also contact your child’s current school to request a confidential reference.” No tutor influences that. It is worth knowing it exists, because it means the picture Dunottar forms is not built only from one morning, and it is a reason to treat the current school as an ally in the application rather than something to work around.

Our track record and how to check it

Across all the subjects and levels we support, 91% of our students achieve their desired grades. On Trustpilot we are rated Excellent, at 4.8 out of 5 from 54 reviews, and those reviews are written by families and students who worked with our tutors rather than by us. We would rather you read them than take a claim on this page at face value.

It is worth being clear about what a track record can and cannot tell you at a school like this one. Dunottar does not publish a pass mark, a number of Year 7 places or an oversubscription ratio, so nobody — us included — can honestly quote you an offer rate for this specific assessment. What we can tell you is what the school itself publishes about the pupils who get in and what happens to them: at GCSE the school reports a grade 9 to 4 pass rate of 99%, and its May 2024 Independent Schools Inspectorate report found that “pupils flourish in their academic work from their individual starting points.”

That last phrase is the reason many of our Reigate families choose Dunottar in the first place. The school has been in Reigate since 1926, joined United Learning in 2014 and became co-educational in the same move, and now sits within a group of over 90 independent schools and academies. It is not a school that selects only the highest-scoring children and then reports their results as its own achievement, which is worth remembering when you are deciding how hard to push a ten-year-old through the autumn.

Frequently asked questions about Dunottar School 11+ tuition