Preparation built around the two written papers the school actually sets
Book a Free ConsultationRadnor House Twickenham 11+ tuition is one-to-one preparation for the Year 7 entry assessment set by Radnor House Twickenham, the co-educational independent day school at Pope’s Villa on Cross Deep. That assessment is two written papers of one hour each, English and Mathematics, sat across the weekend of 14 and 15 November 2026 for September 2027 entry. Leading Tuition plans every programme backwards from that weekend.
Most preparation sold for this school is generic 11+ coaching with the school’s name attached. Ours is not. What follows is what we teach, who teaches it, how long it takes and how we tell whether it is working — all of it derived from the admissions document Radnor House Twickenham publishes itself.
Preparing for Radnor House Twickenham?
We match your child to a tutor who prepares children for extended writing and comprehension under timed conditions, and we build the plan around the format the school sets — two written papers, one weekend, then a group activity day.
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Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppThe school’s Year 7 admissions document is explicit about the assessment. “The entry assessments consist of two papers, each of one hour in duration, with content based on the National Curriculum for Key Stage 2.” The English paper is a creative writing piece and a comprehension. The Mathematics paper is a selection of general maths questions. There is a break between the two, and the written assessment runs two hours in total.
Two things in that sentence decide how we teach. The first is that one English hour has to carry two different jobs. A child who writes beautifully but runs out of time on the comprehension scores no better than one who reads well and produces four rushed paragraphs of story. So our English sessions for this school are run against the clock from early on, split the way the paper is split, and the writing is marked to a rubric rather than commented on. Our guide to creative writing for the 11+ sets out the criteria we mark against, and our breakdown of comprehension question types and mark schemes covers the second half of the hour.
| What the assessment demands | What we do about it |
|---|---|
| One English hour carrying both a creative writing piece and a comprehension | Every English session is split the way the paper is split and run against a clock from the first week, so neither half gets eaten by the other |
| Writing that is marked, not commented on | Each piece is scored to a rubric and the score is tracked, so the child can see movement rather than a page of ink |
| Maths content anchored to the Key Stage 2 curriculum | Accuracy, method and speed inside material already taught, with no detour into topics the paper does not draw on |
| Two hours sat in one morning with a break between the papers | Complete back-to-back papers before November, so the second hour is not the first time the child has had to concentrate twice |
| A group activity day for invited candidates on 23 January 2027 | A separate rehearsal block after the papers, working on how a child behaves in a group task rather than on more maths |
The second is the phrase “based on the National Curriculum for Key Stage 2”. That is narrower than a typical independent-school 11+ maths paper, several of which reach into topics a child meets in Year 7. It means the productive work here is accuracy, method and speed inside material the child has already been taught, not a scramble through algebra they have never seen. Parents who have been sold a syllabus-stretching maths programme for this school have usually been sold the wrong thing.
Search for a tutor for this school and the answers you are given are, in several cases, wrong. The AI summary Google returns for “Radnor House Twickenham 11+ tutor” describes an online adaptive test with drag-and-drop question types and a character-focused interview. The school’s own Year 7 admissions document describes neither. Atom Learning’s Radnor House Twickenham guide, published on 30 April 2026, is at least honest about it: “We don’t have any up-to-date information about Radnor House Twickenham admissions on this page right now.”
Part of the confusion is a genuine name collision. There are two schools called Radnor House. Radnor House Sevenoaks, in Kent, is a separate school, and its senior entrance process does use standardised testing: “a combination of academic testing, a written English paper, an interview, and a reference from your child’s current school”, with the academic testing being CAT4. A family that reads the Kent process and prepares for it will spend months on the wrong assessment. This page is about the Twickenham school only.
What this means in practice is that we do not put verbal or non-verbal reasoning on a Radnor House Twickenham plan. Neither appears in the school’s stated format, and hours spent on code-breaking and shape sequences are hours not spent on the two things that are actually marked. The exception is a family who is also entering their child for a grammar school that tests reasoning — the 11+ market across Twickenham and Richmond upon Thames often means two or three different assessments in one autumn, and we plan for the whole set rather than one paper at a time.
Programme length is not a fixed package here. It is arithmetic, and the school publishes the numbers that drive it. Registration for September 2027 entry closes at midday on Friday 30 October 2026. The papers are sat on 14 and 15 November 2026, with each child allocated one of the two days. Outcomes are emailed on Friday 5 February 2027.
We plan in two blocks around that. The first is foundation work: reading volume, writing stamina, and complete coverage of the Key Stage 2 maths content the paper draws on. This is the block that benefits from time, and a child starting in Year 5 gets a materially different experience from one starting in Year 6. The second block is narrower and starts in September of the entry year: complete papers to the clock, marked, reviewed, repeated. Nothing new is introduced in this block. Its whole purpose is to make an hour feel like an hour.
Families often decide after seeing the school. The whole school Open Morning for 2027 entry is on Saturday 3 October 2026, which leaves about four weeks to the registration deadline and six to the papers. That is a short runway, and we say so rather than pretending otherwise. Six weeks is enough to build timing, exam routine and a reliable writing structure. It is not enough to fill a two-year gap in written accuracy. At the first consultation we will tell you which of those two situations you are in, and if it is the second we will say what a realistic outcome looks like. If you want the broader picture first, our 11+ tuition service covers how selective entry works more generally.
The part of this process that ordinary tutoring ignores comes after the papers. The school runs a “Beyond the Classroom” day on Saturday 23 January 2027, by invitation only, described in its own document as “a group team-building activity session”. Scholarship interviews are held the same day, for children whose scholarship application went in by the 30 October deadline.
No school publishes the content of an activity like this, and we will not pretend to know it. What we can remove is the novelty. A child who has never been asked to solve something in a group of strangers behaves differently from one who has done it a dozen times. So the work we do here is rehearsal of the behaviours a group task rewards: taking a turn and then stopping, building on somebody else’s idea out loud, disagreeing with the idea rather than the person, noticing the quiet child and bringing them in, and finishing something within a time limit.
We frame that work using the school’s own language, because the school has told everyone what it values: “Our core values are courage, excellence, perseverance and respect, and everything we do as a school is underpinned by these values.” Courage in a group task means saying the idea you are not sure about. Perseverance means staying with a problem after the first approach fails. These are coachable, and they are coachable in a handful of sessions between November and January. They are not coachable the night before.
Radnor House Twickenham publishes no pass mark. Its Year 7 admissions document sets out the format, the dates and the access arrangements, and no mark, percentage or standardised score appears anywhere in it. Anyone quoting you a Radnor House Twickenham pass mark has invented it, and we would rather say that plainly than repeat a number we cannot source.
That changes what a progress report can honestly contain. We do not issue predicted scores for this school, because there is nothing to predict against. What we track instead is a trend the family can see: complete papers sat under exam conditions, marked to a consistent rubric, with the writing scored on the same criteria every time and the maths scored for accuracy and for how much of the paper was reached. Three of those, spaced across the autumn, tell you far more than any single figure.
It also changes what we are willing to promise. If the trend is flat and the assessment weekend is four weeks away, we will say so. Across our work as a whole, 91% of our students achieve their desired grades, and that number holds up because we are honest with the families where the target is wrong.
The paper split drives the match. The English work needs a tutor who marks extended writing routinely and can explain why one paragraph scores above another, not simply that it does. The maths work needs someone comfortable teaching within Key Stage 2 content and drilling accuracy rather than reaching for harder material to look impressive. Sometimes that is one tutor. Often it is two, working to a shared plan, and we would rather say that at the start than stretch a single tutor across both.
Every tutor who reaches a family has been through the same filter: an application and CV screen, a written subject-knowledge test, a teaching interview in which they explain a hard idea to someone playing a confused student, a supervised trial lesson with a real student, an enhanced DBS check and two independently taken references. About 3% of applicants make it through. We have delivered over 7,000 lessons and taught more than 500 students, and tutors are reviewed after they join through parent feedback and student progress, not left in place because they have been with us a long time. You can read the full selection process on our tutors page.
If the fit is wrong, we rematch, without argument and without a charge for the change. That matters more at 11+ than at any other stage, because a ten-year-old who does not want to sit down with their tutor will not do the work between sessions, and the work between sessions is where most of the progress happens.
Radnor House Twickenham will grant access arrangements — extra time, or use of a computer — for applicants with a diagnosed special educational need or disability. The evidence requirements are strict, and they catch families out every year. The school requires “a written report from a recognised educational professional, dated within two years of the published assessment date”, submitted with all other documentation by the registration deadline. It will seek evidence of the history of that provision from the child’s current school, and it grants arrangements only where the child would receive the same concession in external formal examinations, judged against the Joint Council for Qualifications regulations, cited as the 2025-2026 edition in the Year 7 document.
Two of those clauses do the damage. The first is the two-year recency rule: a report written when the child was seven has expired, whatever it says. The second is that the deadline for the report is the registration deadline in October, not the assessment in November. So at the first consultation we ask for the date on any existing report and work back from it, and where a new assessment is needed we tell the family immediately, because educational psychologists in this part of London are routinely booked weeks ahead.
Where an arrangement is expected, we run practice under it. A child who has done every practice paper in an hour and then sits the real paper with extra time has not been prepared for the paper they are actually sitting.
We teach families for this school both in person across Twickenham, Richmond, Teddington and St Margarets, and online. Online is not a lesser option for this work: a shared document with a piece of writing on it, annotated live, is in some ways better than two people leaning over one sheet of paper, and it removes the travel time that makes a weekday session hard in the autumn term. Several of the families we prepare for schools across south-west London, including Hampton School, work with us entirely online.
Radnor House Twickenham’s main entry points are Year 7 and Sixth Form in September; every other year group is treated as an occasional place, offered as and when one comes up. If you are approaching this at an unusual point in the year, say so at the consultation, because the preparation for an occasional-place assessment is shorter and shaped differently from the November route. The school’s own admissions process page is the place to confirm current dates before you register.
Two written papers of one hour each, sat in a single sitting with a break between them, two hours in total. One paper is English, comprising a creative writing piece and a comprehension. The other is Mathematics, described by the school as a selection of general maths questions. Content is based on the National Curriculum for Key Stage 2. For September 2027 entry the papers are sat on the weekend of 14 and 15 November 2026, with each child allocated one of the two days. Children may then be invited to a Beyond the Classroom activity day on 23 January 2027.
Not for Radnor House Twickenham on its own. Neither appears in the format the school publishes, so hours spent on reasoning drills are hours taken from the English and maths papers that are actually marked. We do teach reasoning where a family is also entering a grammar school or another independent school that tests it, which is common in this part of south-west London. That decision is made at the first consultation, once we know the full list of schools your child is sitting, rather than assumed from a standard 11+ package.
A child starting in Year 5 gets a foundation block and a timed block; a child starting in September 2026 gets the timed block only. Six weeks is enough to build exam routine, timing and a reliable writing structure, and it is not enough to close a long-standing gap in written accuracy. Registration itself closes at midday on Friday 30 October 2026, so the practical deadline for deciding is earlier than most families expect. We will tell you at the consultation which of those two situations you are in.
No. They share a name and both sit within Dukes Education, but they are separate schools with different assessments. Radnor House Twickenham is at Pope’s Villa, Cross Deep, Twickenham, and sets two written papers. Radnor House Sevenoaks is in Kent, and its senior entrance process combines academic testing using CAT4 with a written English paper, an interview and a reference from the current school. Preparation built for the Kent process will not match the Twickenham papers, and the mix-up is common enough that we check which school a family means at the first call.
Partly, and we are careful about what we claim. The school describes it as a group team-building activity session, held on Saturday 23 January 2027 by invitation only, and it does not publish the content. Nobody can rehearse the specific task. What can be rehearsed is behaviour in a group of children your child has never met: taking a turn, building on someone else’s idea, disagreeing about an idea rather than a person, and finishing inside a time limit. We frame that around the school’s stated values of courage, excellence, perseverance and respect.
Radnor House Twickenham does not publish one. Its Year 7 admissions document covers format, dates and access arrangements, and contains no mark, percentage or standardised score. We therefore do not issue predicted scores for this school. Instead we track complete papers sat under exam conditions, marked to the same rubric each time, and report the trend across the autumn. If a tutoring service quotes you a Radnor House Twickenham pass mark, ask them where it is published, because it is not published by the school.
Yes. The school offers what it calls an Assured Pathway process for children attending a school within Dukes Education, and its own document is clear that registration is still required. Families on that route usually want lighter, confidence-focused work rather than a full programme, and we will say when that is the sensible option rather than selling more sessions than the situation needs. Registration for September 2027 entry closes at midday on Friday 30 October 2026 whichever route applies.
Yes, and for this school it works well. The English half of the assessment is written work, and a shared annotated document is a better teaching surface for extended writing than a paper script passed back and forth. Online also removes travel time, which matters in the autumn term when a weekday session has to sit between school and homework. We teach in person across Twickenham, Richmond, Teddington and St Margarets as well, and many families use a mix: in person for the first sessions, online once the routine is set.
We match your child to a tutor for the two papers the school sets, run complete papers against the clock through the autumn, mark the writing to a rubric so progress is visible without a published pass mark to aim at, and add a short rehearsal block for the Beyond the Classroom activity day on 23 January 2027 if your child is invited. We also check access-arrangement paperwork against the school’s two-year recency rule before the registration deadline of 30 October 2026. Rated Excellent, 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 54 reviews.
Leading Tuition is rated Excellent, 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 54 reviews, and 91% of our students achieve their desired grades.
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 which schools your child is sitting and when, and we will set out what the autumn should look like — including whether the Radnor House Twickenham papers need their own preparation alongside anything else on your list.
Rated Excellent, 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 54 reviews. 91% of our students achieve their desired grades. See our tutors and our wider 11+ tuition.
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