13+ Tutors in Sheffield for 2026/27 Entry

Search "13 plus tutors Sheffield" and every result sells generic Late Transfer Test coaching without naming a single school. The real picture is smaller and more specific than the search results suggest: only four schools around Sheffield genuinely admit pupils at Year 9 for the 2026/27 fee cycle — Sheffield High School GDST, Birkdale School, Westbourne School and Ackworth School in Pontefract, West Yorkshire. We checked three further names by their own websites and ruled them out rather than padding the list to five. Mount St Mary's College in Spinkhill, Derbyshire, which some tutoring and directory sites still describe as an active 13+ option, closed permanently on 30 July 2025 according to the Department for Education's own school register. Worksop College publishes no Year 8–10 admissions detail we could verify on its own site. And a site trading as "The Sheffield Private School" turns out to be a UAE-curriculum school with a Dubai contact number — unconnected to Sheffield, England. None of the four genuine schools uses the ISEB Common Pre-Test or Common Entrance for Year 9 entry, continuing the same pattern found in Leeds this week, just with a smaller and more rolling market.

Which Sheffield-area schools actually take pupils at 13+ (Year 9)?

Sheffield High School GDST, part of the Girls' Day School Trust, states that its "main points of entry are Reception, Year 7 and Year 12," but adds that it "also welcome[s] applications to all year groups throughout the school year" — Year 9 included. Birkdale School's own admissions page lists exactly three standard entry points — Prep entry into Years 3–6, 11+ into S1 (Year 7), and Sixth Form — and nothing for Year 8, 9 or 10; the page instructs families outside those points to "always contact the Registrar before completing the Registration form," which makes a Birkdale Year 9 place possible but its process entirely unpublished. Westbourne School is a non-selective, co-educational school for ages 4–16 with a single, uniform admissions journey that applies at any year group, Year 9 included. Ackworth School, in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, is the most explicit of the four: it says it "usually admit[s] new students to years 7, 9 and Lower Sixth Form," naming Year 9 as one of only three standard entry points across the whole school.

None of this is what the top search results for "13 plus tutors Sheffield" actually sell. Superprof's Sheffield tutor marketplace advertises "3,652 private teachers available" with "lessons from £15 an hour" — a general-subject marketplace, not a 13+-specific offering; the dedicated /lessons/sheffield/13-plus URL that Google's own snippet promises actually returns a page-not-found error. Teachers To Your Home prices a 13+ tutor "from £50.00 ph" at home, "from £44.00 ph" online, or "from £17.50 ph" in a small group, treating "13+" as one subject tag among dozens a tutor can list rather than a route into a specific school. Neither site, nor the other tutoring pages ranking alongside them, names a single one of the four schools above, publishes a single admissions date, or distinguishes a taster-day assessment from an unpublished process. A parent arriving from that search has no way to know, for example, that Birkdale sets no published Year 9 test at all, or that Sheffield High School GDST's Year 8–10 assessment is arranged around each family's availability rather than a single fixed date.

What Year 9 entry costs at each school

Annual cost is the first thing the search results never mention. Below is each school's own published termly tuition fee for the year group that includes Year 9, for the 2026/27 academic year, alongside the registration and acceptance costs a family pays before that.

Westbourne is the only one of the four where no separate registration or acceptance fee is published on the public fees page — the honest answer, in that case, is that the figure simply isn't stated rather than that it is zero. All four termly figures above are the school's own current published rate for the 2026/27 cycle, inclusive of VAT where the school states that it applies, rather than a third-party estimate or a figure carried over from a previous year. None of the four schools breaks its published fee down specifically for Year 9 alone; each states a single rate for the wider year-group band — Year 8–13, Middle School Years 9–11, Year 8–11, or Senior Years 7–11 — that Year 9 sits inside.

What the Year 9 assessment actually involves — and why Birkdale publishes nothing for Year 8–10

Three of the four schools run a describable Year 9 assessment. Sheffield High School GDST's Years 8–10 applicants attend a taster day "in a class with girls of their own age," sitting assessments in English and Mathematics, with the school offering "flexible testing arrangements where possible and subject to there being places available." Ackworth School states plainly that "all new pupils will sit our entrance assessments covering both English and Mathematics," backed by a reference from the applicant's current school, with an offer depending on "there being a vacancy in the relevant year group." Westbourne runs no dedicated entrance exam at all: its published process is the same taster-day journey used for every applicant regardless of year group — enquiry, visit, register, taster day, reports and reference, offer, enrolment — consistent with its status as a non-selective school where 76% of pupils achieved at least one grade 7 at GCSE.

Birkdale is the outlier here, and a sharper version of something already found in Leeds this week at Woodhouse Grove. Birkdale requires the ISEB Common Pre-Test for every Year 7 (S1) applicant — that route is academically selective and clearly documented on the school's own site. But the same admissions page lists no assessment format, no test, and no process at all for Year 8, 9 or 10 entry; the only instruction given is to contact the Registrar. A parent tutoring for a "Birkdale 13+ exam" is tutoring for something the school has not published as existing in any standard form — the Middle School (Years 9–11) fee of £7,227 a term is public, but what a Year 9 candidate is actually assessed on is not.

A Sheffield 13+ school that search results still list — but that closed in 2025

Mount St Mary's College, in Spinkhill, Derbyshire, appears in enough 13+ directories and entrance-exam resource sites that a Sheffield-area search can still surface it as a live option. It is not. The Department for Education's own Get Information About Schools register lists Mount St Mary's College (URN 113010) with an establishment status of "Closed," a closed date of 30 July 2025, and the reason recorded simply as "Closure." The same record shows the school's admissions policy was "Non-selective" throughout its final years (URN: 113010).

Despite this, Owl Tutors' own entrance-exam guide for the school still describes "Mount St Mary's College" in the present tense as "an independent school," offering free practice papers and a "ready to be matched with your ideal tutor" call to action — as if a family could still apply. The schools-comparison site SchoolFinder answers its own "How do you get into Mount St Mary's College?" question with "Mount St Mary's College admits pupils at 11+, 13+, 16+. Entry is assessed by Interview, Assessment," with no indication anywhere on the page that the school no longer exists. A parent who tutors a child for a Mount St Mary's 13+ assessment on the strength of either page is preparing for a school that will not open its gates to receive the application. This is exactly the kind of stale directory information that generic "13 plus tutors Sheffield" content never checks, because none of it names a real school in the first place.

It is also a reminder of why a Year 9 search looks different from an 11+ one in the first place. Families searching for 13+ tuition in Sheffield are rarely planning years ahead the way an 11+ family typically does; the search is more often prompted by a house move into or within Sheffield, a change of circumstances at a current school, or a family deciding partway through Key Stage 3 that an independent place would suit their child better than their current setting. That later, more reactive timing is precisely why a rolling, "subject to availability" process at three of the four schools matters more here than it would for a Year 7 applicant with eighteen months to plan around a single January exam date. It is also why checking a school's own current admissions page — not a directory that may not have been updated since the school existed — is the first, not the last, step.

Deadlines, fees and how rolling admissions actually work in Sheffield

Unlike Leeds, where GSAL runs Year 9 on the same fixed 30 November deadline and January test date as every other year group, Sheffield's Year 9 route is mostly rolling: Sheffield High School GDST offers additional testing dates rather than one fixed cycle date, and a place at any of the four schools depends on a vacancy existing in that year group at the point a family applies. See our Leeds 13+ guide for how a fixed-date school runs the same decision differently.

Registration and acceptance costs are separate from tuition fees. Sheffield High School GDST charges a £50 registration fee and a £300 deposit on acceptance of a place. Birkdale charges £50 to register and a further £250 "once a place has been offered." Ackworth's admissions page states a £400 acceptance fee once an offer is made, though its separate, published 2026/27 fee schedule for day places lists a £75 registration fee and a £500 acceptance fee — the school's own two pages do not fully agree with each other, so families should confirm the current figure directly with Ackworth's admissions team rather than rely on either page alone. Westbourne does not publish a separate entrance or acceptance fee on its public fees page.

Leading Tuition is rated 4.8/5 on Trustpilot by families across the UK. Every Sheffield 13+ plan we build starts from what the target school's own admissions pages actually say, not a generic "12+/13+" curriculum sold the same way in every city. See also our 13+ tuition service, our Maths tutoring for the subject every one of the four schools that publishes a format tests, and — for context on the national system that none of these four Sheffield schools currently uses — our guide to the Common Entrance exam.

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