How to Choose an 11 Plus Tutor: The Evidence Parents Can Check

Most advice on choosing an 11 plus tutor is a checklist with no numbers attached. This page attaches them. The Education Endowment Foundation puts one-to-one tuition at +6 months in primary and +2 months in mathematics; the law on tutors' DBS checks changed on 21 January 2026; and the test providers themselves publish what a tutor may and may not sell you.

Which exam is your child actually sitting?

Before you assess a single tutor, settle what your child is being entered for. The phrase "11 plus" covers at least four different arrangements, and a tutor fluent in one of them is not automatically fluent in another. A Kent grammar place, a Buckinghamshire grammar place, an Essex CSSE place and an independent senior school place are won on different papers, sat on different timetables, set by different organisations. The most useful opening question is not how long someone has taught. It is which specific assessment they are preparing your child for, and whether they can describe its structure without looking it up. Everything in this section is what the admissions authorities and test providers publish about themselves.

The independent-school route is the one most often misdescribed. The ISEB Common Pre-Tests are taken online and adapt to the child as they go, which is why "past paper practice" as a business model does not really apply to them. ISEB states that "the tests cover English, mathematics, verbal reasoning (VR) and non-verbal reasoning (NVR) and will take 2 hours 15 minutes to complete" — 2 hours and 15 minutes is 135 minutes across four tests. The calendar is nothing like the grammar one: ISEB records that "Tuesday 1st September 2026: Live testing for the 2026-27 session commences", and the session runs on into the following May. So the familiar line that the 11 plus happens in September of Year 6 is true of the state grammar route and simply untrue of the independent one.

Essex is different again. The CSSE writes its own papers, and its specification moved: "with effect from September 2024 (2025 Entry) the English paper does not contain Applied Reasoning questions". That single sentence is the fastest way to date a tutor's material. If their English resources still drill Applied Reasoning, those resources were built for a paper that no longer exists, and you can establish it in one question rather than three months. CSSE also publishes its timings: the English paper lasts sixty minutes with ten minutes of additional reading time, and the maths paper lasts sixty minutes.

Buckinghamshire publishes both its format and its familiarisation arrangements on the council's own site. The Secondary Transfer Test is two multiple-choice papers, and the council states that each paper "is about 45 minutes long (60 minutes including the introduction and examples)". Two papers of about 45 minutes is about 90 minutes of testing, and about 120 minutes of room time. The council also runs a full-dress practice test inside school; it says those practice papers "take about 40 minutes each", and they are deliberately not marked and not sent home. Notice what that does to a sales pitch built on rehearsal: a timed, invigilated rehearsal already exists, at no charge to the family, in the school day.

Kent builds familiarisation into the exam room itself. Kent County Council states that "each section will involve a 5 minute practice exercise followed by a 25 minute test". Add those together and each section runs 30 minutes, of which 5 minutes — a sixth of the time — is guided practice with the invigilator present. The writing exercise is the part tutors misrepresent in both directions, some treating it as the whole decision and others ignoring it. Kent's own published position is narrower than either.

One constraint sits underneath all four routes. GL Assessment says of its English and maths papers that they are "based mainly around curriculum content reached during the early part of Year 6". That is a ceiling on how much can usefully be front-loaded into Year 4. A tutor cannot teach tested content early if the child has not met the underlying curriculum, and a plan that claims otherwise is selling hours rather than progress. Our overview of admissions tests sets out which papers each route uses.

What does the evidence actually say one-to-one tuition is worth?

Every page on this subject tells you that tutoring works. Almost none of them says by how much, or cites anyone. The Education Endowment Foundation's Teaching and Learning Toolkit does both. Its entry on one-to-one tuition reads: "evidence indicates that one to one tuition can be effective, providing approximately five additional months' progress on average". Read the hedges rather than skipping them. "Can be" is not "is". "Approximately" is not a promise. And an average across a large body of studies is not a forecast for one child in one subject with one tutor over one term.

The two caveats underneath the headline are the numbers no competing page carries, and they point in inconvenient directions. On phase, the toolkit states that "studies undertaken in primary schools tend to show greater impact (+6 months) compared with secondary schools (+4 months)" — which is good news for an 11 plus family, since this is primary-phase work. On subject, it states that "effects in mathematics appear to be substantially lower (+2 months) than in literacy (+6 months)". If you are buying tuition mainly to lift a maths score, the expected gain in the toolkit is +2 months against +6 months for literacy: a third of it. That is not an argument against maths tuition. It is an argument against expecting maths tuition to behave like English tuition.

The most quotable thing on that page is the EEF discounting its own finding. It states: "the security of the evidence around one to one tuition is rated as moderate. 123 studies were identified that meet the inclusion criteria for the Toolkit. The topic lost two additional padlocks because:" — and among the reasons it gives is that evaluations run by tuition providers themselves push the average upwards. Sit with that while reading any tutoring company's results claims, this one included. A provider quoting its own internal outcome data is doing exactly the thing the EEF deducted marks for. It does not make the data false; it makes it weaker evidence than a parent is usually invited to assume.

The practical consequence is that you should not buy on a promised outcome at all, because the strongest available evidence base declines to make one. Buy on mechanism instead: what will be assessed at the start, what will be taught, how the tutor will know it landed, and what they will tell you when it does not. A tutor who can answer those four questions in specifics about your child's subject tuition is offering something checkable. A tutor who answers with a pass rate is offering something you cannot audit.

How often should sessions actually happen?

The standard 11 plus arrangement is one hour a week, sustained for a year or more. The EEF's own dosage finding describes something quite different: "short, regular sessions (about 30 minutes, three to five times a week) over a set period of time (up to ten weeks) appear to result in optimum impact". Shorter, more frequent, and time-limited — with an end date built in from the start. Nothing in the toolkit says that a longer engagement produces a bigger effect. The pattern it identifies is intensive and then finished.

Take the top of that range and do the arithmetic, because the totals are closer than they look. Five sessions of 30 minutes is 150 minutes a week; across ten weeks that is 1,500 minutes, or 25 hours. Delivered instead as a single hour a week, the same 25 hours takes twenty-five weeks. The quantity is identical. The shape is not, and the shape is the part the EEF says matters. Most families cannot run five sessions a week with a private tutor, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But the finding does support a different split: fewer tutor hours, arranged closer together, with short structured practice on the days in between.

The timetable makes this concrete. Ten weeks is 70 days. Counting 70 days back from Kent's test date of "Thursday 10 September 2026" lands at the start of July 2026 — the end of the summer term and the holiday that follows. A ten-week block aimed at that date is therefore a summer block, not a Year 4 subscription. And GL's statement that its English and maths content is drawn from "the early part of Year 6" means the material is only fully available to teach very close to that point in any case. If you want a fuller view of how the whole timeline fits together, our guide to grammar school entrance preparation works through it school by school.

The honest reading of the dosage evidence is uncomfortable for the industry. It gives no support at all to the idea that starting two years out and never stopping produces a better result than a focused block. It gives no support to three-hour Saturday sessions. What it supports is short, frequent, ending. A tutor who proposes an open-ended arrangement with no stated finishing point is proposing something the evidence does not describe, and it is fair to ask them what their evidence for it is.

What changed for tutors' DBS checks on 21 January 2026?

This is the section that dates every other article on the subject. For years the standard advice was to ask whether the tutor is DBS checked. For a self-employed tutor working directly for families, that question used to be close to empty, and GOV.UK said so: "currently, self-employed people can only apply for a Basic DBS check. If they need an Enhanced check, an employing organisation must apply on their behalf". A Basic check shows unspent convictions. It does not show the barred lists. So a direct-hire tutor answering "yes, I'm DBS checked" could be answering truthfully about a certificate that told you almost nothing relevant to leaving your child alone with them.

That changed. GOV.UK states: "from 21 January 2026, self-employed people and personal employees can apply for Enhanced and Enhanced with Barred List(s) DBS checks through an Umbrella Body". The Disclosure and Barring Service's own worked example of the new route is, of all things, a self-employed maths tutor: "Peter is able to apply for an Enhanced with Barred List DBS check in the child workforce via an Umbrella Body". That gives you the exact wording to expect on a certificate. Not "a DBS". An Enhanced with Barred List check, in the child workforce, obtained through an umbrella body.

Is weekly tuition the kind of work that makes that level appropriate? The DBS child workforce guidance sets a frequency threshold for people "who provide teaching, training or instruction to children on more than 3 days in a 30-day period". A weekly tutor teaches four times in most 30-day windows — 30 days holds four whole weeks with two days to spare — and sometimes five. Four is more than 3. Ordinary weekly 11 plus tuition is therefore squarely the kind of arrangement the enhanced-with-barred-list level exists for, and asking for it is not an unusual demand.

The distinction between the two enhanced levels is worth stating precisely, because tutors blur it and parents rarely push. GOV.UK describes "an enhanced check with barred lists, which shows the same as an enhanced check plus whether the applicant is on the list of people barred from doing the role". An enhanced check adds local police information to a standard one. Only the barred-list version answers the question a parent is actually asking, which is whether this person has been barred from working with children. If the certificate does not carry the barred list, it does not answer it.

How do you check the certificate itself?

Holding a check and being able to evidence it are different things, and this is where a five-minute conversation earns its keep. DBS guidance written for private individuals is blunt about the format: "copies or digital photographs are not acceptable and must be rejected". A photograph of a certificate sent over WhatsApp is not evidence. Ask to see the paper certificate, in person, before the first session or at it. A tutor who is properly checked will find this entirely normal. A tutor who treats the request as an insult has told you something without meaning to.

Next, look for a date, because there is no expiry to rely on. GOV.UK states that "a DBS check has no official expiry date. Any information included will be accurate at the time the check was carried out". So "I'm DBS checked" is not a statement about the present tense at all — it is a statement about a moment in the past, which may be a decade ago. Either the certificate is recent, or the tutor is registered with the DBS Update Service so their status can be re-checked online rather than taken on trust. One of those two things needs to be true for the check to mean anything today.

Then look for what the check cannot see. GOV.UK is explicit: "DBS checks will not cover the time someone lived outside the UK". Tutoring recruits internationally and many excellent tutors have worked abroad, so this is a gap rather than an accusation. The Tutors' Association fills it where GOV.UK does not require anyone to: it states that "any members of the TTA or TTA staff who have lived abroad in the past 5 years will also require an overseas police check". That is a fair standard for a parent to borrow. If a tutor has spent recent years overseas, ask what covers those years.

Finally, read the position-applied-for field. The DBS example above specifies a check "in the child workforce". A certificate obtained for a different workforce is not the right document, even at the right level. Four checks — original not photograph, dated or Update Service, overseas gap addressed, child workforce — take about ten minutes at a kitchen table and are the difference between a safeguarding question you asked and a safeguarding question you answered.

What does good practice look like when the law requires nothing?

It is worth being clear about the legal floor, because it is lower than most parents assume. The Tutors' Association states it plainly: "there is no legal requirement for a tutor even to have passed a DBS check, let alone be signed up to any sort of code of conduct". Nobody licenses private tutors. There is no register you can search and no regulator to complain to. Anyone may advertise 11 plus tuition tomorrow morning. That is not a scandal so much as a fact about the market, and it explains why the verification work falls to you.

In the absence of a legal standard, the useful move is to borrow a published one and hold every tutor to it, whether or not they belong to the body that wrote it. The Tutors' Association requires that "a member of TTA has to have passed a DBS check (no older than 12 months)", alongside references and a signed Code of Practice. Its Code goes further at clause 2.1, requiring that "you hold an Enhanced DBS certificate ("DBS") and are signed up to the DBS Update Service", or alternatively a certificate under a year old that the member undertakes to renew. That is far more specific than anything else on this topic, and a parent can ask for it word for word.

The Department for Education approaches the same problem from the other end, and refuses to let any single document carry the weight. Its guidance for parents on out-of-school settings states that "there is no single check that can be undertaken to show that a volunteer or staff member is suitable to work with children". It then sets a proportionate floor for a solo tutor rather than demanding institutional paperwork: no written procedures are expected, but "we would expect them to have a written child protection policy". And it draws the conclusion most parents miss — "a lone provider will be the designated safeguarding lead".

That last line reframes the conversation. With a school or an agency, there is somebody else to escalate to. With a self-employed tutor there is not: the person teaching your child is also the person responsible for safeguarding them, and there is nobody above them in the structure. So the question is not whether the tutor has a safeguarding lead. It is what safeguarding training that tutor has had, what their written policy says, and what they would do if your child disclosed something. The same holds for older entry points such as independent senior school entry, where the same tutors often work.

Agency, marketplace or direct hire?

Most tutoring is arranged privately. The Tutors' Association estimates that "some 10 per cent of tutor/tutee arrangements are made through agencies", which means roughly nine in ten families are doing their own vetting, contracting and dispute resolution. That is the default, not the exception, and it is worth naming because a great deal of tutoring advice is written as though an agency sits behind every arrangement, absorbing the checks. For nine arrangements in ten, nobody is absorbing anything.

Where an agency is involved, the obligations are heavier than the marketing usually explains. The Tutors' Association's compliance material notes that agencies "must fulfil the necessary safeguarding, health and safety and other checks required under the Act (these go beyond an Enhanced DBS)", referring to the Employment Agencies Act. That converts a vague comparison into a specific question you can put to any agency: what do you check beyond the DBS, and will you show me your vetting policy? An agency that cannot answer is either not doing it or not documenting it, and from the outside those look the same.

There is one practical asymmetry to plan around. You cannot obtain a check on a tutor yourself. Before 21 January 2026 an employing organisation had to apply on a self-employed person's behalf; since that date, the tutor applies in their own name through an umbrella body. Either way the application is theirs, not yours, which means the only lever you hold is asking to see the certificate they already have — or waiting while they obtain one. That is a good reason to raise it early rather than in the week before a September test date.

A marketplace profile sits somewhere between the two, and it pays to know which one you are looking at. Some platforms verify identity and checks; others host self-written profiles with a badge that means only that a document was uploaded at some point. The test is the same in all three cases: name the level, name the date, show the original.

Familiarisation or coaching — what do the test providers publish?

This is the ground on which tutor claims are easiest to falsify, and almost nobody uses it. Start with Cambridge University Press & Assessment, whose entrance assessments page states that "we do not provide any commercially available practice materials (including practice or past papers) nor endorse any other commercially available resources or tuition services". Two things follow immediately. No tutor can hold an endorsement from that organisation, because it issues none. And no tutor can be selling its official past papers, because it publishes none for sale. Any claim to the contrary is checkable in a single sentence.

Cambridge also draws the line between familiarisation and coaching in its own words, and the stated purpose is revealing: "all candidates receive standardised familiarisation materials designed to prevent undue anxiety for candidates sitting the assessments". Familiarisation is issued to everyone, deliberately identical, and framed as anxiety reduction rather than advantage. A test designed that way is trying to make preparation non-differentiating. That does not mean preparation is pointless — a calm child who knows the format performs closer to their ability — but it does mean the marketing promise of an edge through familiarisation is a promise the test designers are actively working against.

GL Assessment publishes the opposite policy on volume and the same one on ownership. It states that "we provide 10 hours of free familiarisation materials", which is a real benchmark: any paid package should be described in terms of what it adds to those 10 hours, not as though the child would otherwise arrive cold. GL also states that "private tutors or other organisations may not feature this page and/or these materials (or any part of them) on their websites". That is the fastest website audit available to a parent. If a tutor has reproduced GL's familiarisation material on their own site, they are doing something GL explicitly forbids, and you have learned how they treat rules generally.

Individual schools set their own limits, and the strictest are the most useful. The Henrietta Barnett School states of its second-round assessment: "we do not release any past papers or offer any resources for Round Two". Read that against tutor advertising. A tutor offering Henrietta Barnett Round Two past papers is offering material the school says does not exist in released form, which means it is either invented, reconstructed from pupil recollection, or mislabelled. None of those is what a parent thinks they are buying, and the school's own admissions page settles it in one line.

Buckinghamshire completes the picture from the state side. Its practice test papers "take about 40 minutes each", are run under exam conditions in school, and are deliberately not marked and not sent home — precisely so that they cannot be turned into coaching material. Between Cambridge's refusal to endorse, GL's 10 free hours, HBS's refusal to release, and Buckinghamshire's unmarked rehearsal, the providers have collectively said something the tutoring market rarely repeats: familiarisation is theirs to give, not anyone's to sell.

How competitive is this, really?

Competition anxiety is usually described in adjectives. Denominators are better. The Henrietta Barnett School states that "the published admission number (PAN) for September 2027 entry is 120". That is the number of places, and it is fixed regardless of how many families prepare. We are not going to convert it into an applicants-per-place ratio, because we did not verify an application figure, and an invented ratio is exactly the kind of number that circulates for years once someone publishes it. What the PAN does establish is that preparation cannot change the size of the prize; it can only change your child's position relative to others.

For how many others are preparing, the Sutton Trust's tutoring polling is the best public source, and it is administered by Ipsos rather than by the tutoring industry — which matters when a survey is about a market. Its methodology records that "3,214 interviews were conducted among young people aged 11 to 17". The headline finding is that "29% of secondary school students in England and Wales have had private tutoring at some point". Roughly three secondary pupils in ten, then, have been tutored at some stage — not necessarily for an entrance exam, and not necessarily for long.

The geography is where the number becomes recognisable. The same research reports that "in London 45% of pupils had received private tutoring, compared to 27% in the rest of England and 24% in Wales". That is 45 against 27, a gap of 18 percentage points between London and the rest of England. If you live inside the capital and the school gate conversation feels relentless in a way friends elsewhere do not recognise, this is why. You are not imagining a different environment; you are in one.

Be careful what you conclude from it. Nothing in that data says tutoring works better in London. It says more London families buy it. Higher uptake in a fixed-places competition partly cancels itself out: when a larger share of the cohort prepares, preparation stops being a differentiator and becomes a floor. That is an argument for preparing well, not for preparing more, and it is a reason to weigh the EEF's dosage pattern — short, frequent, ending — over the instinct to simply add hours because everyone else is.

What should you ask before you commit?

The value of a first conversation lies entirely in whether you can tell a good answer from a fluent one. These questions are built so that you can. Start with the exam. Which assessment does each school on our list set for our child's entry year, and where on the school's site is that stated? A tutor who names the school's admissions page and the format is working from primary sources. One who answers in terms of a GL-versus-CEM choice is working from material that no longer describes state grammar selection, and you now know roughly how old their reference points are.

Then date their materials. Do your English resources still include Applied Reasoning questions? For the Essex route the answer settles it: CSSE states that "with effect from September 2024 (2025 Entry) the English paper does not contain Applied Reasoning questions". A tutor still drilling that section is teaching to a specification that has been retired for two entry cycles. Ask the same question in other forms — when did you last rewrite this scheme of work, and what changed in it?

Then the safeguarding sequence, in this order. What level is your DBS check, and is it Enhanced with Barred List in the child workforce? When was it issued, given that a certificate has no expiry date? Are you registered with the Update Service? May I see the original certificate rather than a photograph? Have you lived outside the UK in recent years, and what covers that period? And, following the Department for Education's framing that a lone provider is their own designated safeguarding lead: what safeguarding training have you had, and may I read your written child protection policy?

Then the plan. How many sessions a week, over how many weeks, and when does this end? The EEF pattern of about 30 minutes, three to five times a week for up to ten weeks gives you a reference point to compare against, and a tutor who proposes something different should be able to say why. What will you assess in the first session, and what will you send me afterwards? Finally, the disqualifying question: what can you guarantee? The correct answer is nothing. The strongest evidence base in the field says "can be effective" and rates its own security as moderate, and any tutor promising a place is claiming more certainty than the research supports.

Where do these figures come from?

Every number on this page comes from a primary source, retrieved on 23 August 2026, and none of them is ours. The progress figures are from the Education Endowment Foundation Teaching and Learning Toolkit. The check levels, the change to self-employed applications, the expiry position and the overseas gap are from Disclosure and Barring Service guidance on GOV.UK and its guidance for self-employed people and for private individuals. The safeguarding expectations are from the Department for Education's guidance for parents on out-of-school settings. The membership standard is from The Tutors' Association Code of Practice.

The assessment details are from the organisations that set them: Cambridge University Press & Assessment on entrance assessments, GL Assessment on free familiarisation, Kent County Council on the Kent Test, Buckinghamshire Council on the Secondary Transfer Test, the CSSE on the Essex papers, ISEB on the Common Pre-Tests, and The Henrietta Barnett School on its own admissions rounds. The prevalence figures are from the Sutton Trust's tutoring research. Where a source did not state a figure, this page leaves it out rather than estimating it.

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