Practical guidance from the Leading Tuition team
Book a Free ConsultationBy the time the March 2025 offers arrived, most of our families had been building towards this moment for two or three years. Our 2025 cohort was our largest ever — forty students drawn from across London and the Home Counties — and the results reflected something we had been watching develop across several admissions cycles: school-specific preparation, done with enough time, is consistently outperforming generic exam practice. This post sets out the 2025 outcomes in full: what the numbers show, what our tutors observed, and what any family beginning this process now should take from it.
In the 2025 admissions cycle, we worked with 40 students sitting selective school entrance examinations at 11+ and 13+. Of those, 38 received at least one offer from a selective or independent school — a success rate of 95.0%.
We define success as receiving at least one offer from a school the family had genuinely targeted. We do not count offers from schools added as late safety options if the family's first-choice school did not make an offer.
2025 was our largest and most geographically diverse cohort to date. Families worked with us from across North, South, East and West London, as well as from Hertfordshire, Kent, and Berkshire. The common thread in our most successful outcomes was consistent, school-specific preparation — tutors who knew not just the 11+ in general, but the precise format, question style and marking approach of each individual school.
Something we saw clearly in 2025: the gap between generic 11+ preparation and school-specific preparation is widening. Schools like QE Boys and St Paul's Girls' have exam formats that are genuinely distinctive — the question style, the level of difficulty, the time pressure and even what a 'good' answer looks like differ meaningfully from GL Assessment or CEM papers. A child who has done 200 hours of GL Assessment practice but never worked on QE Boys papers is underprepared for QE Boys, even if their GL scores are strong.
We asked several families if they would share a brief reflection.
Writing to us after results day, a parent whose son gained a place at QE Boys wrote: "The tutor knew the QE exam specifically — the structure, the time pressure, the level of difficulty. That specificity was what we were looking for and what we found. Our son went into the exam knowing exactly what to expect."
Writing to us after results day, a parent whose daughter gained a place at St Paul's Girls' wrote: "St Paul's has its own paper and its own standard. We had tried a general 11+ tutor first and it was not working — the practice material was too easy and the approach was too broad. When we switched to Leading Tuition the difference was immediate. The tutor had worked with St Paul's applicants before and the sessions became much more targeted. Our daughter got her offer in March and we are still a little in shock."
If your child is in Year 4, Year 5 or Year 6, and you are beginning to think about selective school entry, the most important first step is understanding which schools and which exams are relevant to your child — and what realistic preparation looks like for each one. You can find school-specific guides on our 11+ school preparation pages, or book a free consultation to talk through your child's specific situation.
How do you measure your success rate?
We count the proportion of students who received at least one genuine offer from a school the family had identified as a target school before the admissions cycle began. We do not include offers from schools added as late backup options.
Do you only work with high-achieving children?
No. We work with a wide range of students, including children who need to build foundational skills before beginning focused exam preparation. Our tutors assess each child individually and build a programme around where they are, not where they need to be.
How early should preparation start?
It depends on the target school. For the most selective grammar schools — QE Boys, Henrietta Barnett, Tiffin — most of our successful students began working with us in Year 4 or early Year 5. For boarding school 13+ entry, the ISEB Common Pre-Test is taken in Year 6, so preparation typically begins in Year 5.
What does 1-to-1 tuition offer that group tuition or online courses don't?
A specialist tutor can identify exactly where a specific child is losing marks and address that precisely. Group courses and online platforms can build general exposure to exam content, but they cannot adapt in real time to an individual child's misconceptions, gaps, or exam technique weaknesses.
Book a free consultation and we’ll help you find the right support for your child.
Book a Free Consultation