Should I Use a Tutor for the 11+?

Two things are true at once. The Education Endowment Foundation finds one-to-one tuition adds roughly five additional months of progress — but only +2 months in mathematics against +6 in literacy. Meanwhile Winchester College, Kingston Grammar School, Channing and the London 11+ Consortium all state in writing that their assessments do not require tutoring. This page puts both on the record, with every figure quoted from the body that published it.

Should you use a tutor for the 11+, or not?

The honest answer depends on two things you can measure and one thing nobody has. You can measure the distance between where your child is now and the score the school publishes — Buckinghamshire, Queen Elizabeth's School in Barnet and Kingston Grammar School all put their thresholds or ratios in public. You can measure whether the test contains question families your child has never seen, which is the one place preparation demonstrably moves a mark. What nobody has measured is whether you and your child can work through practice papers at the kitchen table without the relationship taking damage, and in a great many households that is the real deciding factor. Every article on this question answers it confidently. Almost none of them cites a single figure.

This page is published by a tuition business, which you should hold against it — and which is exactly why what follows leads with the strongest published arguments against buying tutoring at all. The Education Endowment Foundation's own toolkit says one-to-one tuition is weakest in the subject most families buy help in first. Four selective schools tell applicants in writing that their assessments do not require it. The only UK study that links coaching to actually winning a grammar place reports a very large gap, and then explains in the same paper why that gap overstates the effect. All of it is quoted below beside the source. Where the evidence does support paying for help it is specific about what kind, in which subject and for how long, and that specificity is far more useful than a yes or a no.

The second assumption worth dropping early is that preparation has to be bought. GL Assessment, which supplies most state grammar school tests, publishes 10 hours of free familiarisation material. Kent County Council builds a 5 minute practice exercise into each section of the real test before the timed portion begins. Buckinghamshire gives every candidate a shorter practice test two days before the main one. Queen Elizabeth's School in Barnet and Tiffin School both fund free access to an online preparation platform for eligible families, and none of it sits behind a paywall. A parent who works through that lot has covered more ground than most paid programmes manage in a first term. Our own grammar school entrance preparation assumes families have already used it.

What does the evidence actually say about one-to-one tuition?

The Education Endowment Foundation maintains the largest plain-English summary of what educational interventions do, and it is not funded by anyone selling tuition. Its verdict on one-to-one tuition is positive: "Evidence indicates that one to one tuition can be effective, providing approximately five additional months' progress on average." That single sentence is the most-quoted line in British tutoring marketing. The four findings printed around it almost never travel with it, and they change what the headline means for an 11+ family considerably.

Start at the bottom of that table, because it is the row that governs all the others. In the EEF's own words: "A large percentage of the studies were not independently evaluated. Evaluations conducted by organisations connected with the approach – for example, commercial providers – typically have larger impacts, which may influence the overall impact of the strand." A research summary that flags its own inflation risk in public is being considerably more careful than most of the industry quoting its headline. The average is a ceiling to treat with suspicion, not a floor to build a sales pitch on.

The phase split works in an 11+ family's favour. Studies run in primary schools show +6 months against +4 months in secondary, so the relevant figure for a Year 5 or Year 6 child is the higher one. The subject split cuts the other way, and it cuts hard: "Effects in mathematics appear to be substantially lower (+2 months) than in literacy (+6 months)." Maths is the subject most families reach for first, and it is where the measured return is thinnest — +2 against +6, which is a third of the return for the same hours. Nothing in that data says maths tutoring fails. It says the average measured gain in maths is a third of the gain in literacy, and a parent deciding where to put a limited amount of time deserves to know that before they choose.

The dosage finding is the one that directly contradicts how 11+ tuition is usually sold. The EEF: "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." That is a short block of frequent contact with a finish line attached — not one hour every Saturday from the middle of primary school until the test. If you are arranging help, the shape of the evidence favours a diagnosed, time-boxed intervention that is designed to end.

Group courses sit lower again, and the EEF gives you a specific number to ask about: "Once group size increases above six or seven there is a noticeable reduction in effectiveness." That is a straightforward question to put to any 11+ course before you sign up — how many children will be in the room? If the answer is more than seven, the evidence base being waved at you does not describe the thing you are being offered.

What do the selective schools themselves say about tutoring?

Not one competing page on this search result quotes a single school. That is a strange omission, because the schools are unusually direct about it, and their admissions pages are public. Four of them are set out below, verbatim, covering four different admissions models.

Winchester College states the principle in its own admissions material: "Good assessment should be accessible, challenging and aligned with curriculum. It shouldn't be stressful or require additional tutoring." That is a statement of design intent rather than a promise about outcomes, but design intent is exactly what a parent needs to know. It tells you the school believes it is testing something that sits inside ordinary schooling, and that it regards a candidate needing external coaching as a sign the assessment has failed.

The London 11+ Consortium, whose assessment is used by a group of London girls' schools, is blunter still: "These are all skills that your daughter will be developing in school anyway, so your daughter does not need special tuition or intensive practice for this assessment." On the reasoning sections it draws a line worth memorising, because it separates the preparation that works from the preparation that does not: "The questions can seem strange to candidates who have never seen those sorts of questions before, so we recommend that all candidates look at our familiarisation materials. We do not, however, recommend intense preparation as any gains quickly become very marginal." Familiarise, yes. Drill, no. The Consortium also caps its own content: "The questions are based on the National Curriculum for Year 5 and we do not test anything on the Year 6 curriculum." A tutor teaching Year 6 material for that assessment is teaching content the paper will not ask about.

Channing School's published parents' guide to the London 11+ opens its tutoring answer with an instruction rather than an argument: "Please don't tutor your child! In our view tutoring has two serious distorting effects, both of which have a long term impact on the wellbeing of students when they move into senior school." Its recommended alternative is deliberately narrow: "Familiarisation rather than tutoring. Working through a small number of past or sample papers helps her feel comfortable with the format." A small number of papers. Not a programme.

Kingston Grammar School answers the preparation question by pointing at the curriculum: "The entrance exams are broadly in line with the expected knowledge gained from National Curriculum teaching at the appropriate Key Stage in English and Mathematics. We do not recommend tutoring in these subjects." Read the logic rather than the headline. The school is not saying preparation is pointless; it is saying the content is what school already teaches, so content is not the thing an outsider can usefully add.

Four institutions, four different assessment models, one consistent message: these tests are built so that ordinary school learning plus familiarisation is sufficient. If your shortlist is made up of schools that say this, the case for a long tutoring programme is weak on the schools' own published terms, and you can verify each one on its admissions page in a single evening. Where the picture genuinely changes is on admissions tests containing question families the primary curriculum never teaches at all.

Why do the schools and the EEF seem to disagree?

One body says tuition adds months of progress. Four schools say tuition is unnecessary or actively harmful. Both are accurate, and the contradiction dissolves the moment you notice they are describing different products.

The Education Endowment Foundation Toolkit summarises interventions run inside schools. Its own optimum-dosage guidance — "Short, regular sessions (about 30 minutes, three to five times a week) over a set period of time (up to ten weeks)" — describes a defined block of support running alongside normal lessons to close an identified gap. There is a diagnosis at the front of it and a finish line at the back. That is the thing the studies measured, and it is the thing the +5, +6 and +2 figures describe.

What is commonly sold as 11+ tutoring has a different shape entirely: an already-strong child, an hour a week, no diagnosis, no end date, and a syllabus made of exam formats rather than curriculum gaps. Quoting the EEF average as a forecast for that arrangement is not supported by the studies behind it, and we are not going to do it. Equally, the schools are not saying that teaching does not work. Channing recommends working through "a small number of past or sample papers". The London 11+ Consortium recommends its familiarisation materials to every single candidate. What both are rejecting is volume, not preparation.

Hold the two together and you get a position defensible from either direction. Diagnose first. Work in a short block on the specific things that are missing. Use the free material for everything the schools themselves describe as familiarisation. Then stop. That is what the evidence actually supports, and it is a considerably smaller commitment than the 11+ market usually proposes.

Is interview coaching ever a good idea?

On this one question, two entirely independent sources say almost the same thing in almost the same words, which makes it a rule rather than a matter of taste. The London 11+ Consortium: "We actively discourage preparation for the interview. Our interviewers can easily identify the candidate who has been coached for this part of the process."

Kingston Grammar School: "We strongly discourage interview coaching, as we prefer to observe the candidate's authentic personality." Both statements carry the same warning, and it is not a soft one: the coaching is visible from the other side of the table, and being spotted is not a neutral outcome. An interviewer who notices a rehearsed answer has learned something about the household as well as about the child.

The preparation that is welcome is different in kind. A child should know roughly how long the conversation will last, who is likely to be in the room, and that it is entirely acceptable to pause before answering or to say they do not know something. That is orientation, and it is precisely what both schools describe elsewhere as familiarisation. Rehearsed answers to predicted questions are the specific practice being warned against, and they are the easiest item to strike off any preparation plan.

Where does the "everyone gets tutored" figure come from?

One statistic dominates every conversation about 11+ tutoring, and it is almost always presented as something it is not. Here is the whole of it, from the Sutton Trust's Private Tutoring 2026 report, before the interpretation.

Now the part that is routinely left out. The report's own methodology states that "3,214 interviews were conducted among young people aged 11 to 17", drawn from the Ipsos Young People Omnibus Survey. Every single respondent is already at secondary school. Not one of them is a Year 5 or Year 6 child currently preparing for an entrance test. The survey asks whether a pupil has ever been tutored, so some of that 29% will reflect entrance-test coaching from years earlier — but the figure cannot tell you what proportion of this year's 11+ cohort has a tutor, and we could find no published source that does.

The internal pattern makes the point sharper still. Tutoring peaks at Year 11 with 25%, followed by Year 10 at 10%. That is a GCSE signal, not an entrance-test one. The regional splits are more interesting and more defensible: 45% in London against 27% in the rest of England and 24% in Wales, and 33% in urban areas against 19% in rural ones. Tutoring does cluster where selective places are scarcest, and that is a real finding. It is still not a measurement of 11+ tutoring, and any page presenting 29% or 45% as "how many children are tutored for the 11+" has misread its own source. The earlier version of this page was one of them.

Does coaching actually get children a grammar school place?

One UK dataset connects coaching for the entrance test to whether the child actually got in. Working with the Millennium Cohort Study, Jerrim and Sims report that "almost three-quarters of children living in a selective area who were coached to pass the test gained entry, compared to only 14 percent of those who were not coached". Taken at face value that is the most powerful argument on this page for hiring somebody, and it is absent from every competing article on the subject.

The same paper immediately explains why it should not be taken at face value. Coaching is heavily concentrated among children who were already ahead: "less than five percent of children in the bottom reading achievement quartile reported receiving coaching to get into their selected school, compared to 29 percent of those in the top quartile." The coached group and the uncoached group were not comparable before any coaching began. A substantial part of that gap is the children, not the coaching, and nobody has yet separated the two cleanly. Anyone quoting the headline as a causal effect is quoting a number the authors themselves qualified.

What does survive statistical controls is narrower and more troubling. Once prior attainment, area and family background are accounted for, "the difference between high and low income pupils in grammar school entrance rates falls from around 24 to 13 percentage points after private tuition has been taken into account". That is 24 − 13 = 11 percentage points of a 24-point gap, a little under half of it, attributable to private tuition. It is a finding about fairness in the selective system rather than a promise to an individual family, and it ought to make everyone slightly uncomfortable, this business included.

The neatest detail in the paper is a natural control that nobody quotes. The income gradient shows up in tutoring for the subjects the entrance test covers, but "the same is not true for tutoring in science, which is not part of the grammar school entrance test." Families are not, on the whole, buying general academic enrichment. They are buying the test. That is worth being honest with yourself about before committing a year of Saturday mornings to it, because it also tells you what the tutoring should be aimed at if you go ahead.

What can you get free, and who publishes it?

The bodies that write these tests publish a surprising amount, and almost no article on this question inventories it. Everything below comes from the test owner's own site, and every item is available without payment.

Two rows deserve pulling out of that table. The first is GL Assessment's own warning about its own materials: "The exact timings for, and number of questions in, your local 11+ test may differ from those in our familiarisation and practice materials." Any page — including the previous version of this one — that hands you a fixed question count and timing for "the GL test" is contradicting the board that writes it. There is no single national GL format. There is a bank of question types that each local authority assembles differently, which is why the regional pages matter more than the generic ones.

The second is Buckinghamshire's Spatial Reasoning section, sitting at page 24 of its familiarisation booklet alongside English at page 10, Verbal Reasoning at page 14, Non-Verbal Reasoning at page 20 and Mathematics at page 27. Spatial reasoning is the question family that generic 11+ workbooks most often omit entirely, and it is precisely the sort of content that fits the schools' own description of useful familiarisation: strange the first time a child meets it, unremarkable the fifth. If Buckinghamshire is on your list, this is where an hour of free material changes a score more reliably than a term of general practice.

Then there are the pupil-premium schemes, which are badly underused. Queen Elizabeth's School in Barnet states: "If your child has been eligible for free school meals at any point in the last six years, they will be given entirely free access to Atom Home by registering via Queen Elizabeth's School below. You do not need to be planning to apply to Queen Elizabeth's School to be eligible and the materials are equally open to girls as well as boys." Tiffin School funds an equivalent through its Quest partnership for all Pupil Premium pupils. If your family qualifies, register before you consider paying anyone for anything.

What can tutoring not buy?

Several schools have deliberately engineered their assessments against coaching, and if one of them is on your shortlist it changes the calculation before you get anywhere near a decision about tutoring. Tiffin School states its position plainly: "Each year we work with Quest to create a bespoke test specifically for Tiffin, which also changes annually." Nobody holds last year's paper in any meaningful sense, because last year's paper is not this year's test.

Sutton's Selective Eligibility Test removes the two subjects that format coaching is best at: "The test is made up of two papers; a multiple-choice Maths paper and a multiple-choice English paper. The tests do not include verbal reasoning or non-verbal reasoning." A child drilled for months on verbal and non-verbal reasoning has prepared thoroughly for a stage of the Sutton process that does not exist. The participating schools also close the sit-it-early-for-practice loophole: "Children can only sit the Selective Eligibility Test once. A younger child cannot sit the test in earlier years as a practice. The participating schools will conduct year on year comparisons of the names of registered children."

The Henrietta Barnett School points families at "GL Assessment familiarisation booklets for our First Round Entrance Test", which "include packs of free materials" — and publishes no past papers or resources for the second round at all. Any tutor claiming to hold genuine second-round material does not have it. The London 11+ Consortium meanwhile caps its maths at the Year 5 National Curriculum and tests nothing from Year 6, which puts a hard ceiling on how much content anyone can usefully add.

The pattern across all of these is consistent and, once you see it, quite reassuring. Where a school believes its test can be prepared for, it usually publishes the material to prepare with. Where it believes preparation should not matter, it engineers the assessment so that it does not, and says so in public. The narrow space where preparation still moves a score is the gap between a primary curriculum that does not teach reasoning and a test that examines it — which is why our subject pages treat reasoning as a discipline of its own rather than an add-on to maths and English.

How big is the gap you are actually trying to close?

"Is my child good enough?" is not an answerable question. "How far is my child from the number this school publishes?" usually is, because a useful number of schools and authorities publish theirs.

Kingston Grammar School publishes the competition rather than a mark: "At 11+, the ratio it is approximately 800 – 900 candidates for 150 places." At the top of that range, 900 ÷ 150 = 6 applications for every place. That figure is useful precisely because it is not a pass mark. A child can perform well and still not receive an offer, and no tutor can honestly promise otherwise at that ratio — which is a good test of anyone you speak to.

Buckinghamshire and Queen Elizabeth's publish thresholds instead, which is far more actionable. Buckinghamshire: "Children who achieve a score of at least 121 in the test are considered qualified for a Buckinghamshire grammar school." Queen Elizabeth's: "Those candidates achieving a combined score of 225 or higher will be deemed to have met the standard required by the Governors to be eligible to be considered for admission to the school." Read the second one carefully — eligible to be considered, not admitted. Sit a free familiarisation paper under timed conditions on a Saturday morning and you will learn more about the size of your gap than a whole term of unstructured practice will tell you.

And two Sutton schools move the bar itself. At Nonsuch High School for Girls and Wallington High School for Girls, "candidates who are registered as Pupil Premium at their Primary School are eligible to achieve up to 20% lower than the standardised pass mark for the SET". If your family qualifies, that is a larger structural effect than anything tuition has ever been shown to produce, and it requires nothing more than being registered correctly at your primary school. It appears on almost no 11+ advice page, which tells you something about how those pages are written.

So, should you use a tutor for the 11+?

Here is the decision the evidence actually supports, reduced to four signals. Three of them you can check this week. The fourth, nobody can check for you.

Signal one is question families. If your target test contains reasoning your child has never encountered — Buckinghamshire's spatial reasoning, or verbal and non-verbal reasoning where the local test uses them — familiarisation is worth arranging, and every school quoted on this page agrees with that. If it does not, as at Sutton where neither appears, that reason simply disappears. Signal two is distance to the threshold. Sit the free papers first, then compare against the published number. If your child is close, the work is narrow and targeted. If the gap is large, be honest about whether one year of anything closes it. Signal three is shape: the EEF's optimum is about 30 minutes, three to five times a week, over up to ten weeks — a diagnosed block with an end date, not an open-ended weekly arrangement. Signal four is the one no study will ever speak to. If working with your child on practice papers is damaging the relationship, that is a perfectly legitimate reason to hand it to somebody else, and you do not need research to justify it.

What the evidence does not support is a year of generic weekly coaching begun two years out because other families are doing it. The subject split says the return in maths is a third of the return in literacy. The schools say intensive preparation produces gains that "quickly become very marginal". The dosage research says short and frequent beats long and thin. The Sutton Trust number everyone quotes is not measuring 11+ families at all. And the free material from GL, Kent, Buckinghamshire and three London schools covers the familiarisation stage that the schools themselves identify as the part that works. Start there. If a gap remains afterwards it will be a specific gap, and a specific gap is the only kind that anyone can actually help you close.

Families whose shortlist includes independent senior schools should read this alongside our guide to senior school pre-tests, where the assessment landscape, the timetable and the schools' published positions are all different again.

Frequently Asked Questions