Preparation built around the assessment Putney High School actually sets.
Book a Free ConsultationPutney High School is a Girls' Day School Trust day school in Putney, London, that sets its own two-stage 11+, not a shared consortium test. Stage one is a bespoke digital Maths and English assessment of about an hour, sat at the school on 20 November 2026. Stage two is the Athena Assessment, which the school states needs no preparation and ends with a 15-minute interview. Leading Tuition prepares candidates for stage one and that interview.
The school runs two assessments and only one of them is teachable. Stage one is the school's own digital Maths and English assessment, sat on a computer or an iPad that Putney High School provides on its own premises, and lasting about an hour for both subjects together. Stage two, the Athena Assessment, is a morning of group activities and a creative task, followed by a one-to-one interview of around 15 minutes with a member of staff; candidates are on site for roughly two hours.
The school is direct about the second stage: “there is no preparation necessary for the Athena Assessment”. We take that at face value. Our work sits almost entirely in stage one, plus a small amount of interview practice, and we tell families that on the first call rather than after they have bought a term of sessions.
| Stage | What we teach | What we will not sell you |
|---|---|---|
| Stage one — digital Maths and English, about an hour, on site | Subject gaps closed first, then pace under a clock; comprehension read on a screen; written answers produced at speed; the habit of moving on from a question that is not coming | A verbal or non-verbal reasoning course. The school does not publish a reasoning section |
| Athena Assessment — group activities and a creative task | Nothing. The school says no preparation is necessary and we agree with it | Mock Athena days, group-task drills, or a “creative thinking” package |
| The interview, around 15 minutes, on the Athena morning | One or two sessions on speaking audibly, holding an opinion about a book or an interest, and answering a question she has not been asked before | A script. Rehearsed answers are obvious to anyone who interviews children for a living |
Source: Putney High School senior admissions page, read 18 August 2026.
Applying to Putney High School?
Book a free consultation and we will tell you what is worth preparing for this school, what is not, and how long it should take. If the honest answer is that you do not need us, we will say so.
Rated Excellent on Trustpilot: 4.8 out of 5 from 54 reviews.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppPutney High School's own admissions pages describe an assessment it sets itself. The wording is “a bespoke digital assessment in Maths and English, together approximately one hour”. We checked the school's joining page, its senior admissions page and its own site search: nothing there refers to a consortium, a shared paper, or a test marked jointly with other schools.
Published guidance disagrees, and it disagrees in two different directions. One page ranking for searches about Putney High School tutoring describes the first stage as “papers in English and Mathematics”, which reads as a paper exam. Another sets out three stage-one sections and adds one the school does not publish — “Reasoning: verbal and non-verbal pattern recognition” — and calls the assessment adaptive, which the school does not say either.
This matters because a parent acts on it. A family who reads that there is a reasoning paper buys a reasoning course, and spends a term of a child's evenings on material that is not in front of her in November. A family who reads that the exam is on paper prepares on paper and meets a screen. What is lost in either case is not the sessions; it is the weeks.
So the rule we work to is simple, and it is the same rule we would want a tutor to apply to us: where a tutoring page and the school's own admissions page disagree, the school wins. Arrangements do change — schools join and leave shared assessments between cycles — so we re-read the school's pages before each intake rather than carrying last year's format forward. You can read the current arrangements yourself on Putney High School's senior admissions page.
Most 11+ preparation on the market is built around paper practice for a two-hour sitting. Putney High School's stage one is neither. Both subjects sit inside about an hour, on a machine the school provides, and that changes what is worth teaching.
The first change is pace. An hour split across Maths and English gives a candidate far less time per question than a conventional paper, so the skill that pays is deciding quickly which questions to leave. We teach that as a habit rather than as advice: the child works to a clock in most sessions from the October half term of Year 6 onwards, and we count what she left rather than only what she got wrong. Our guide to running 11+ mock exams sets out how we structure those timed runs.
The second is reading on a screen. Comprehension read in a scrolling window is measurably harder to hold in the head than the same passage on a page, because a child cannot see the whole of it at once and cannot mark it up. We work on that specifically — where to look first, how to find the line a question refers to without re-reading from the top. The question types themselves are the ordinary ones, and our breakdown of 11+ English comprehension question types is what we teach from.
The third is what the school does not tell us. It publishes the subjects and the length, and it does not publish a section-by-section breakdown, a mark allocation, or whether the English asks for extended writing. We do not fill that gap with a guess. We prepare comprehension and extended writing both, treat the split as unknown, and say so, which is a less comfortable sentence than a confident section list but a more honest one. General exam-room habits carry across regardless, and those are in our 11+ exam technique guide.
Every tutor we place on an 11+ candidate is an experienced teacher of the age group, DBS-checked and interviewed by us before they take a family. For Putney High School specifically we look for two things beyond that. The first is recent work with London independent girls' schools, because the assessment style in that group is closer to reasoning-about-a-text than to grammar-school paper-drilling. The second is comfort teaching to a clock, since pace is the binding constraint here rather than syllabus coverage.
Where a diagnostic shows a gap in one subject only, we put one tutor on it rather than selling two. Where both subjects need work, we usually split them, because the person who is best at teaching a child to structure a piece of writing is rarely the same person who is best at teaching her to spot that a question is a ratio question. Interview work goes to a tutor who has done it before, which is not automatically the academic tutor, and it is a session or two, not a strand.
What we will not claim is a tutor's alma mater as a selling point, at Putney High School or anywhere else. It tells a parent nothing about whether a person can teach a ten-year-old to keep moving through a comprehension. Our wider approach is set out on our 11+ tuition page.
Want a plan for the November assessment?
A free consultation gets you a diagnostic, a realistic timetable counted back from the stage-one date, and the tutor we would put on it — before you commit to anything.
Rated Excellent on Trustpilot: 4.8 out of 5 from 54 reviews.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppRegistration for Putney High School opens at the start of the summer term of Year 5, and the stage-one assessment falls in the November of Year 6 — 20 November 2026 for September 2027 entry. A family who starts when registration opens has roughly a year and a half, which we treat as three unequal phases.
The first and longest is diagnostic and gap-closing, running from the summer term of Year 5 to the October half term of Year 6. Nothing is timed. We find what is missing in Maths and what is thin in written English, and we fix it, usually weekly. The 11+ preparation timeline from Year 4 to Year 6 shows how that maps against the wider 11+ calendar.
The second phase is short and it is about conditions rather than content. From the October half term of Year 6, most of what we do is timed, on a screen, in blocks that match the real sitting. This is the phase families most often skip when they prepare alone, and it is the one that changes marks most.
The third is the interview block, and it barely exists. The school writes to all candidates before Christmas; shortlisted girls go to the Athena Assessment in January. In between, we do one or two interview sessions and then we stop. Families sometimes want more, and we say no, because a fifteen-year-old could tell you when a child has been coached and a member of staff who interviews children every January certainly can.
Not every family arrives with a year and a half. If you come to us in the September of Year 6, we will say which of the three phases we can compress and which we cannot, and if the honest answer is that the timing is against you, you will hear that on the free consultation rather than after you have paid for anything.
The Athena Assessment is the part of Putney High School's process that tutoring companies are most tempted to sell, because it sounds mysterious and it comes with a name. The school's own description removes the mystery: a morning of group activities and a creative task “designed to assess how your daughter thinks, rather than what she knows”, and then the sentence that ought to end the conversation — “there is no preparation necessary for the Athena Assessment”.
We do not run mock Athena days. We do not sell group-task practice. A child who has been drilled for a task designed to reveal how she thinks arrives having been taught to perform thinking, which is the opposite of what the morning is looking for, and staff who run it every year are the wrong audience for that.
What we do prepare is the interview, and only lightly. Around 15 minutes with one member of staff is long enough for a child to run out of things to say about a book she has not really read, and short enough that being inaudible costs her most of it. So we work on three things: having something genuine to say about a book, a subject or an activity; speaking loudly enough to be heard by an adult across a table; and answering a question she has not been asked before without freezing. Two sessions is normal. Our 11+ interview preparation guide covers the same ground for families who would rather do it themselves, and doing it yourself is a perfectly good answer here.
91% of our students achieve their desired grades, measured across the students we teach rather than a selected sample, and it is the figure we stand behind site-wide. Families rate us Excellent on Trustpilot: 4.8 out of 5 from 54 reviews.
What we do not publish is a Putney High School offer rate. Two reasons. The number of candidates we have taught for any single London girls' school is small enough that a percentage would move several points on one child, and the school itself publishes no pass mark and no Year 7 places figure, so there is nothing to measure a rate against. A tutoring company quoting a school-specific success rate under those conditions is quoting something it cannot show you. We would rather give you the site-wide figure, the reviews below, and a consultation in which you can ask exactly what we have and have not done.
One piece of context that is worth having and is not ours: the school was inspected by the ISI in April 2026, and the report identified its approach to teaching and learning as a significant strength. That tells you something about what a successful candidate is walking into, and it is on the school's own site rather than on ours.
No. Putney High School's own senior admissions page describes “a bespoke digital assessment in Maths and English, together approximately one hour”, set by the school and sat on its own premises, followed by the Athena Assessment. Nothing on the school's joining, senior admissions or search pages refers to a consortium, a shared paper or a jointly marked test. Several tutoring guides still describe one. Where a published guide and the school's own admissions page disagree, we work from the school, and we re-check before every cycle rather than carrying a format forward.
About an hour for Maths and English together. The school states that “all applicants will be invited into Putney High School to sit this using either a computer or an iPad (both of which will be provided on site)”. For September 2027 entry the school set it for 20 November 2026. An hour covering two subjects leaves little time per question, so the single most useful thing a tutor can build is a working pace under a clock the candidate cannot negotiate with. That is most of what our autumn sessions do.
Not in the sense of rehearsing it, and we will say so on the first call. The school states plainly that “there is no preparation necessary for the Athena Assessment”, which is a morning of group activities and a creative task designed to assess how a candidate thinks rather than what she knows. We do not run mock Athena days. What we do prepare is the one-to-one interview of around 15 minutes that closes the morning, and only in one or two sessions.
Registrations open at the start of the summer term of Year 5, and the stage-one assessment falls in the November of Year 6. A programme that begins when registration opens therefore has roughly a year and a half, which is enough to close subject gaps without turning the family's evenings over to it. Families who come to us in the September of Year 6 get a shorter, blunter plan: we say what can realistically be moved in the weeks left and what cannot.
No. The school publishes no pass mark, no standardised score threshold and no number of Year 7 places on its admissions pages. We would rather say that than repeat a figure from a tutoring site, and a page offering “pass marks and target scores” for this school is offering something the school does not release. In place of a target score we benchmark against timed work in our own sessions, and we tell families where a candidate sits against the other children we teach for London independent girls' schools.
The school does not publish a Year 7 figure. It does publish that its Junior School admits two Reception classes of about 22 girls each, so a share of Year 7 is filled from inside the school before any external candidate is considered. That is as far as the published evidence goes, and we do not turn it into a ratio. We plan on the assumption that external competition is strong, which is the same plan we would write if a places figure existed and were tight.
Yes. The school states that “we can accommodate applicants sitting this exam overseas”, so an overseas candidate is not shut out of stage one. We teach those families online, in their time zone, and we build the timing practice around whatever arrangement the school confirms in writing for that candidate rather than assuming it matches the on-site sitting. Ask the admissions office to confirm the arrangement before you book sessions around it.
Partly. The school runs its scholarship assessments and auditions separately, in January, for candidates it has shortlisted, and it tells families in the same letter that carries the stage-one result. We do not coach instrumental auditions, gymnastics or cricket trials, and we will point you elsewhere for those. We do prepare the academic assessment that decides whether a candidate is shortlisted at all, and the interview that runs alongside the Athena morning.
My son was low in confidence after COVID and the gaps in learning were building up. Using this service helped plug those gaps, rebuild confidence, and improve his ability to learn properly again.
We arranged maths and English tuition ahead of GCSEs and both tutors were brilliant. My daughter's grades improved, and by results day she achieved two grades higher than in her mock exams.
I attended an English bootcamp with Leading Tuition and the experience was excellent. The teacher gave focused attention to the small group while keeping the lessons interactive and engaging.
Tell us where your daughter is now and we will tell you what the run to the November assessment should look like — and whether she needs one at all.
Rated Excellent on Trustpilot, 4.8 out of 5 from 54 reviews. See our 11+ tuition and the rest of our 11+ school pages.
Book a Free Consultation