Notre Dame Cobham 11+ Tuition

Notre Dame School, Cobham is an independent Catholic girls' senior school at Burwood House, Surrey KT11 1HA, where Year 7 is the main entry point. Leading Tuition prepares girls for its four-part assessment day: a 60-minute adaptive online test, a 30-minute creative writing task, a 10-minute chat and a leisure activity. The next assessment day is Friday 20 November 2026.

That opening is worth reading twice, because two of its details are the ones most commonly got wrong about this school. The online test adapts to the child as she answers it, so no two candidates sit the same paper. And the assessment falls in the autumn term of Year 6, not the spring — a difference of roughly four months in when preparation has to be finished.

There are several unrelated schools in the United Kingdom called Notre Dame. This page is about the one at Burwood House in Cobham, Surrey, a Foundation of the Company of Mary Our Lady. It is not the Norwich school, the Leeds sixth form college or the Plymouth school of the same name.

What our Notre Dame Cobham programme is built around

We build every Notre Dame programme from the school's own assessment booklet rather than from a general 11+ syllabus, because the day a candidate actually sits does not resemble a conventional entrance exam. The school's Year 7 page sets out four elements: the online entrance test at 60 minutes, a creative writing task at 30 minutes, an informal interview at 10 minutes, and a leisure activity of approximately 15 minutes. The booklet the school sends to candidates counts it differently, describing "3 parts: 1. An online assessment 2. A piece of creative writing 3. A chat with our friendly staff" — the leisure activity is there to settle nerves rather than to be marked.

Two consequences fall out of that shape and they govern how we allocate a programme's time.

The first is that the writing task carries a third of the assessed minutes on its own. A candidate who has spent every session on reasoning drills has prepared for two-thirds of the morning. The second is that the online hour is not one test but four skill areas sharing a single clock, and the school tells candidates there is practice time at the start of each section. Time pressure inside the hour is therefore distributed unevenly, and the section that most parents assume needs the most work is in fact the shortest.

Our programmes are structured around those two facts. We split preparation across the online test and the writing task rather than treating writing as an afterthought, and inside the online hour we weight time by how many minutes each area actually occupies.

Teaching for a test that changes as your daughter answers it

The school states the mechanism plainly in its candidate booklet: "It is an adaptive assessment, which means that it will ask you questions in accordance to your ability and also means that not everyone will have the same questions." The booklet names the product as well — "ONLINE (ATOM) ASSESSMENT — 60 MINUTES" — and the familiarisation button on the school's Year 7 page links to a Quest Assessments taster built specifically for Notre Dame. Quest is Atom Learning's school-entrance assessment, so the two names describe one test and the school uses both. If you want the underlying format explained end to end, our Quest Assessment Part 1 guide covers the four sections in detail.

Adaptivity changes what useful practice looks like, and it is the reason we do not hand families a stack of fixed-difficulty papers. On a conventional paper, a child who reliably answers the middle of the range will finish with a respectable mark. On an adaptive test, answering the middle of the range correctly simply moves her up until she reaches the point where she starts getting things wrong — and that upper boundary is what the test is measuring. Preparation that keeps a child comfortable therefore tells you almost nothing about where she will land.

So we work at the edge deliberately. Sessions push into material that produces errors, because the error boundary is the score, and we spend the time there rather than consolidating what is already secure. That is uncomfortable for perhaps two sessions and then it stops being uncomfortable, and it is the single largest difference between our Notre Dame preparation and a generic 11+ course.

Within the hour, the school tells candidates that "the NVR section lasts about 10 minutes out of the hour-long online assessment". That is a sixth of the online time, and it sets the ceiling on how much of a programme should go on pattern drills. Non-verbal reasoning is rarely taught in primary schools, so it does need introducing from scratch — our non-verbal reasoning parent guide sets out the question families see first — but a programme that spends half its sessions on NVR has mis-weighted five-sixths of the test. Maths, verbal reasoning and comprehension share the remaining fifty minutes, and that is where the bulk of our online-test work goes.

One detail from the booklet shapes how we teach the maths. The section "is made up of multiple choice questions and you will be given some paper for any working out you wish to do", and calculators are banned twice over in the same document. We therefore train written and mental method to the point where a girl can carry a multi-step calculation on rough paper under time pressure, and we train the specific multiple-choice discipline the school itself flags: checking back after the working out, because a distractor is usually the answer you get by stopping one step early.

How we train the 30-minute writing task

Notre Dame is unusually helpful here: it publishes a real past paper. The English writing task headed November 2023 gives candidates 30 minutes and two options — "Describe a scene or place, based on this picture" or "Write a story which includes the line: 'I'd just arrived in paradise…'" — with the instruction to choose one and write on lined paper. Candidates with extra time are given 37 minutes.

We use that paper as the spine of the writing work rather than a generic story-writing scheme, and three things follow from its wording.

The choice between the two tasks is itself assessed, in the sense that picking badly costs marks a child would otherwise have earned. A descriptive piece from a picture and a narrative built around a supplied line reward different strengths, and most girls are clearly better at one. We establish which, early, so that on the day the decision takes seconds rather than minutes. Thirty minutes is not long enough to spend five of them choosing.

The clock then has to be rehearsed rather than described. The school's booklet tells candidates they will be warned when five minutes remain and advises using that time to check capital letters, full stops and paragraphing. We build a programme's writing sessions to that shape — plan, write, and stop with time to proof-read — until the girl runs it without being prompted. Our wider approach to 11+ creative writing goes into the mark-scheme thinking behind it.

And the writing has to survive being handwritten on lined paper immediately after an hour on a screen. That is a physical demand as much as a compositional one, so late in a programme we run the two in sequence in a single session rather than on separate days.

Preparing for the chat without coaching the child out of it

The 10-minute interview is the part of this assessment where the wrong kind of tutoring does active harm, so it is worth saying what we do not do.

The school could hardly be clearer about its intent. Its booklet tells candidates the chat is with a Senior School teacher and that "there won't be any trick questions and we won't ask you anything about science or capital cities or the name of the Prime Minister, or anything like that". A tutor who supplies a bank of model answers is preparing a child for an interview this school has explicitly said it is not running, and a rehearsed answer delivered to a teacher who asked something else is more conspicuous than a hesitant honest one.

What we do instead is narrower. We work on the mechanics that a nervous ten-year-old loses first: answering in more than three words, finishing a sentence she has started, and having two or three genuine interests she can talk about without effort. None of that is scripted. The test we apply is whether the girl sounds like herself on a slightly better day, and if a session starts producing polished paragraphs we stop and change what we are doing.

It also helps to tell families what the day is actually like, because anxiety about the room is doing more damage than anxiety about the questions in most cases. The school's booklet says candidates sit "in an ordinary classroom with a group of other girls", in home clothes, with Sixth Formers on hand, and that girls with extra time are all together in one room. That is a very different picture from the sports hall most parents are imagining, and saying so out loud is usually worth more than another practice paper.

Who your daughter would work with

Notre Dame work goes to our specialist tutors with direct experience of girls' independent senior school entry and of adaptive digital assessments specifically. That second criterion matters more than it sounds: a tutor whose entire background is paper-based grammar school entry will prepare a child well for a test that this school does not set.

In practice that means a tutor who has worked with the Quest and Atom family of assessments before, who can teach primary maths and reasoning to the top of the range rather than to the middle, and who can mark creative writing against a mark scheme rather than responding to it as a reader. Where a girl needs both halves of the assessment developed, we would rather place one tutor across both than split her across two, so the writing work and the comprehension work reinforce each other.

We also match on temperament, and we treat that as a real constraint rather than a courtesy. This school has built an assessment day designed to be low-pressure, and a child who arrives having been drilled into anxiety by a high-intensity tutor is at a disadvantage in a 10-minute conversation with a teacher whose stated purpose is to get to know her. Families preparing for other Surrey and south-west London girls' schools on the same digital format may also find our Surbiton High School 11+ page useful, and we cover the wider area from Kingston upon Thames.

How long a programme runs, and when to start

A Notre Dame programme is dated by one fixed point: assessment day, which the school has set for Friday 20 November 2026 for entry in September 2027. Everything is worked backwards from there, and the registration and scholarship deadline of Friday 2 November 2026 sits three weeks ahead of it.

For a girl in Year 5 with no reasoning exposure, we would normally expect to run across three terms — the summer term of Year 5, the summer holiday, and the autumn term of Year 6 up to the assessment. That length is not about volume of content; it is about the adaptive ceiling, which moves slowly because it is a measure of what a child can do at her limit rather than what she has memorised.

For a girl already working confidently above her year group, a shorter programme concentrated on format is usually the right call: the online interface, the multiple-choice discipline, the 30-minute writing clock and the sequencing of the day. That is closer to a term than a year, and we would say so at the consultation rather than sell the longer option.

The one timing mistake we see repeatedly is families planning to a spring exam. Because this school assesses in November, the summer holiday before Year 6 is not an early start — it is the last substantial block of preparation time available. A family that begins in the January of Year 6 has missed the assessment entirely. Results are posted out in January, after the assessment rather than before it.

Year 4 and Year 5: when we tell families not to book 11+ preparation

Two groups of families arrive at this page who should not buy an 11+ programme, and it is worth saying so plainly.

The first is anyone considering the school's 9+ or 10+ entry to the Prep School. The school states that joining in Year 5 or Year 6 by that route "is achieved through ongoing academic monitoring rather than the 11+ Assessment", and that 9+ and 10+ entry "ensures a guaranteed offer of a place in our Senior School for Year 7". For a family whose daughter would be moving schools anyway, that route removes the assessment day from the equation altogether. Preparation for it is a matter of sustained classroom performance, not exam technique, and a course built around a 60-minute adaptive test is the wrong product.

The second is girls already at Notre Dame Prep. The school says progression "is subject to assessment of progress over Years 4 and 5", that formal offers are made at the end of Year 5, and that after that "girls will not be required to sit the entrance exam unless they would like to apply for an Academic Scholarship". If your daughter is an internal candidate and is not going for a scholarship, there is no entrance exam to prepare for. Where we can help those families is with subject support in the years being monitored, or with scholarship preparation if that is the goal — and those are different pieces of work with different shapes.

We would rather turn down a booking than sell exam coaching to a family whose child is not sitting an exam. It is also the honest reading of what the school publishes.

What the other Notre Dame tuition pages get wrong

The most prominent competing tuition page for this school tells parents the "11+ Entrance Exam" is "typically held in March" and that offers are "typically made in March". The school's own Year 7 page says the assessment day for September 2027 entry is Friday 20 November 2026, and the booklet the school sends candidates says results are posted "in January". The school's own published sample writing paper is headed November 2023, so the autumn timing is not a recent change either.

Work through what the error costs a family who believes it. They pace a programme to finish in the spring of Year 6. The assessment falls roughly four months earlier, in the autumn term — which means the child sits it having completed rather less than half of the preparation she was scheduled to do, and the summer holiday that should have carried the heaviest block was treated as an early-stage warm-up. There is no second sitting to recover it.

The same page carries a heading about a different school's scholarships entirely, which is a fair indication of how it was assembled. Across the other competing pages the pattern is consistent rather than malicious: one publishes a key-dates table whose rows read "See school website for current deadlines", one applies maintained-sector oversubscription criteria to a fee-paying independent school, and none of the six names the adaptive mechanism at all. A parent relying on any of them would prepare for a fixed-difficulty paper test in the spring.

This is the practical argument for choosing a tutor who has read the school's own material rather than a summary of it. Everything on this page comes from Notre Dame's Year 7 admissions page, its candidate assessment booklet and its published writing paper, and those three documents are freely available to anyone — including, one assumes, the people writing the competing pages.

Our track record

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For 11+ preparation specifically, the outcome we are asked about most is not a mark but a mood: whether a child walks into an unfamiliar building in November able to do herself justice. On an adaptive test that is not a soft consideration, because a girl who freezes at the point where questions get harder stops the test climbing at exactly the moment it is measuring her. Confidence at the boundary is the score.

Common questions about Notre Dame Cobham 11+ tuition