Eltham College 11 Plus Tutors and Exam Preparation

Eltham College is a co-educational independent day school in Mottingham, south-east London, whose Year 7 entrance assessment combines written Maths and English papers, a computer-adaptive verbal and non-verbal reasoning test and a one-to-one interview. Leading Tuition prepares external candidates for all four components. Around 120 pupils enter Year 7 each year, roughly half of them from the school's own Junior School, and the papers are sat on 5 and 6 January 2027.

What Our Eltham College Programme Trains, Component by Component

Eltham College sets four separate hurdles at Year 7, and a candidate can be strong at three of them and still miss. The school's own admissions page describes the assessment plainly: external candidates sit written papers in Maths and English, a computer-adaptive verbal and non-verbal reasoning assessment, and a one-to-one interview with a senior member of teaching staff. We build a programme around all four, weighted by where a particular child is actually losing marks rather than by what is easiest to teach.

On the written Maths paper our work is split between content and pacing, because the paper punishes both separately. On English we treat reading and writing as two different skills with two different clocks, for reasons set out below. On the reasoning assessment we work almost entirely on unfamiliar-item confidence, since no published sample exists. On the interview we rehearse the shape of a conversation with a senior teacher rather than a script; our wider approach to that stage is set out in our 11+ interview preparation guide.

What we do not do is prepare a child for a generic 11+ and hope it transfers. The 2025 admissions cycle made that argument for us: the families who did best were the ones whose tutor knew the individual school's paper, not the ones who had done the most practice in the abstract.

The Component With No Sample Paper Is Where Most of Our Preparation Goes

Eltham College publishes three sample papers for 11+ entry, and it is worth naming them exactly: an English Reading Section, an English Writing Section and a Mathematics paper. There is no sample for the computer-adaptive verbal and non-verbal reasoning assessment. That is not an oversight on the school's part. A computer-adaptive assessment selects each item in response to the answers already given, so there is no fixed paper to publish in the first place.

The practical consequence for a family is uncomfortable and nobody else states it: the component you can rehearse least is the one you can see least. Two of the four hurdles come with an official specimen a child can sit at the kitchen table. One comes with nothing at all, and one is a conversation.

So that is where the weight of our preparation goes. A child who has only ever met reasoning questions on paper, in a fixed order, at a fixed difficulty, is meeting the format for the first time on the day. We work instead on the behaviours an adaptive test rewards: reading the item rather than pattern-matching to the last one, committing to an answer and moving on, and not treating a sudden jump in difficulty as evidence of failure. Parents who want the underlying skill explained in more depth will find it in our non-verbal reasoning parent guide.

How We Pace a Candidate Through a 45-Minute Maths Paper

The school's published Maths specimen is headed Year 7 (11+) Entrance and Scholarship Examination and allows 45 minutes. Section A holds 20 multiple-choice questions. Section B holds 5 problem-solving questions where working must be shown. Calculators are not allowed; rulers are permitted and protractors are not; and the paper warns that diagrams are not drawn to scale, so measuring them will not help.

Those instructions decide the pacing, and the arithmetic is worth doing out loud because most candidates never do it. A Section B problem that requires written working is not a one-minute question; five minutes each is a realistic allowance, and five of them consume 25 of the 45 minutes. That leaves 20 minutes for the 20 multiple-choice questions in Section A: an average of 60 seconds per question, start to finish, including reading it.

Sixty seconds is not long, and it is the number that changes how we teach. A child who spends three minutes on an early multiple-choice question they could have skipped has taken that time out of Section B, where the marks are heaviest and the working is compulsory. So a large part of our Maths sessions is spent on the decision to leave a question, which is a trained behaviour and not a personality trait. We run timed Section A sets against a visible clock long before we run whole papers, because the skill being built is the abandon-and-return reflex rather than the mathematics.

The header on that paper carries a second, quieter implication. The entrance paper and the scholarship paper are the same paper. The school confirms it: every candidate who sits the entrance examination is automatically considered for an Academic Scholarship, with further assessments only for the Music, Sport, Art, Chess or Drama awards. There is no separate academic scholarship round to prepare for, and a family who assumes there is one will hold back effort for an exam that does not exist.

Both English Sections Carry the Same Marks, and Few Candidates Pace for That

The English specimen comes in two files, and reading them together produces the second finding our programme is built on. The Reading Section allows 25 minutes and instructs candidates to spend about five minutes reading the passage and 20 minutes answering. The Writing Section allows 20 minutes. Each section is worth 20 marks.

Put the two side by side and the imbalance is obvious. Twenty marks in twenty minutes of writing is a mark a minute. Twenty marks across the reading section's twenty-five minutes is four marks every five minutes. Minute for minute, the writing section is the more valuable half of the paper, and it is the half that candidates habitually starve, because reading questions feel safe and a blank page does not.

The Writing Section adds two constraints that make borrowed time even more expensive. Candidates get two pages and no more, so a slow, expansive opening cannot be recovered later. And the paper says in terms that description matters as much as narrative, and that spelling, punctuation and grammar are assessed in this section rather than the reading one. A child who has been trained to produce plot at speed is optimising for the wrong thing.

Our English sessions therefore rehearse the writing task under its real constraints from early on: a hard twenty-minute stop, two sides only, and a deliberate minute spent planning a description before a word is written. We mark against the specimen's own emphasis rather than a generic creative-writing rubric.

How Many Places an External Candidate Is Actually Competing For

This is the figure that changes when a family should start, and it is not on any of the pages currently ranking for Eltham College tutoring. The school's 11+ Entry Routes page states that around 120 students join Year 7 each year, and that approximately half the year group comes from Eltham College Junior School, where pupils move up automatically into the Senior School without further assessment.

Work that through. If roughly half of about 120 places is filled internally with no exam, the competitive pool an outside candidate is entering is closer to 60 than to 120. The school says the other half comes from Blackheath Prep and more than 30 other schools across south-east London and Kent. Blackheath Prep, which merged with Eltham College and its Junior School in September 2023 to form the Eltham College Family of Schools, holds a priority entry arrangement the school describes as not available to any other feeder school. Pupils at the Junior School and Blackheath Prep may also choose to enter the standard competitive process instead, sitting the January assessments alongside everyone from outside the family of schools.

So the honest picture for a family at one of those 30-plus other schools is a pool of roughly 60 places, shared with a feeder that has a priority route and with internal pupils who may compete anyway. That is a materially harder proposition than the headline intake suggests, and it is why our standing advice for Eltham College is to begin in Year 5 rather than the autumn of Year 6. It is also why the diagnostic comes first: with that pool, a programme that discovers a reasoning weakness in November has left itself no room.

It is worth saying what this figure is and is not. The school does not publish a number of external places, an applicant count or a ratio. Sixty is our arithmetic from the school's own two statements, shown above so you can check it, not a figure Eltham College has confirmed.

When We Tell a Family This Is the Wrong Page

Not every enquiry we receive about Eltham College is one we should take, and the school's admissions page is clear enough that we can say so quickly. The majority of students join at one of the key entry points of 7+, 11+ or 16+. There are a limited number of places each year at 8+, and occasionally spaces in other year groups subject to availability and waiting lists.

There is no 13+ entry point. Families arriving from Common Entrance or ISEB material, or from a prep school that finishes at 13, are working to a route Eltham College does not run, and we tell them that in the first conversation rather than selling them a programme. If you are weighing up which schools near Bromley genuinely assess at 13+, our page on 13+ non-verbal reasoning tutors in Bromley sets out which of them test reasoning at that stage and which do not.

The other side of the same fact is why 11+ preparation here is worth doing properly. The school states that pupils accepted into Year 7 proceed to the Sixth Form without further assessment, subject only to a minimum of six GCSE subjects at grade 7 or higher for A level study. For most families this is the last full competitive round they will face at Eltham College. Families comparing it against the other selective options in the borough may find our wider 11+ tuition in Bromley page a useful starting point.

What a Programme Looks Like Against the 2027 Cycle

Programme length is a function of the school's calendar, so we plan backwards from it. For 2027 entry the school lists a Whole School Open Day on 19 September 2026 and a registration deadline of 9 November 2026 at 4pm. The entrance exams run on 5 and 6 January 2027, with each candidate invited to one of the two days; the school asks that any clash with another school be raised by the registration deadline and states that no additional examination days will be offered. Scholarship assessments for the Music, Sport, Drama, Chess and Art awards follow between 21 and 29 January 2027. Offer day is 12 February 2027, and acceptances are due by midday on 3 March 2027.

Against that spine, a full programme starting in Year 5 spends the first two terms on content and on the reasoning behaviours described above, with no timed whole papers at all. From the September before the exam the emphasis moves to the clock: Section A sets against 60 seconds a question, twenty-minute writing tasks on two sides, and reasoning work at increasing unfamiliarity. The final weeks before early January are given to whole papers under exam conditions and to interview rehearsal, because the interview sits on the same assessment day and is the component families most often leave until last.

A shorter programme is possible and we run them, but we say plainly what a family gives up. Beginning in the autumn of Year 6 leaves roughly a term before the papers, which is enough to fix pacing and interview nerves and rarely enough to close a genuine reasoning gap. We would rather tell you that at the consultation than at the end of October.

Which of Our Tutors Take Eltham College Candidates

Eltham College candidates are placed with our specialist 11+ tutors, and the selection behind that word is the part worth explaining. Three per cent of applications to tutor with us result in a placement. The process has five stages: an application and CV screen, a written subject knowledge test set at the level they will teach, a teaching interview in which the applicant is asked to explain a hard concept to a deliberately confused listener, a supervised trial lesson with a real student, and finally enhanced DBS verification with two references checked independently before any placement.

For this school specifically we match on two things beyond subject. The first is comfort with adaptive and reasoning material, because that is where the preparation weight sits. The second is experience of the interview stage, since a one-to-one with a senior member of teaching staff rewards a child who can hold a conversation rather than recite. After placement, tutors are reviewed through lesson recordings, parent feedback and progress data, and if the match is not right we rematch at no charge and without a conversation about it. The full picture of how we select and match is on our tutors page.

What Our Results Actually Show

We would rather publish a number than an adjective. In the 2025 admissions cycle we worked with 40 students sitting selective school entrance examinations at 11+ and 13+, and 38 of them received at least one offer from a selective or independent school. We count an offer as a success only where it came from a school the family had genuinely targeted, not from a late safety option added after a first choice said no. The full breakdown, school by school, is published in our 2025 school entrance results.

Being straight about the limits of that: the named placements in that cohort were at other schools, and we do not publish an Eltham College placement count because we are not going to invent one. What the record supports is the method, which is school-specific preparation against a school's own published material, and that is exactly what this page describes.

Across all of our tuition, 91% of our students achieve their desired grades. On Trustpilot we are rated Excellent, at 4.8 out of 5 from 54 reviews.

What Families Say

These reviews are taken from Trustpilot, unedited.

Eltham College 11+ Preparation: The Questions We Are Asked