The 1% Of Tutors Who Get 11+ Students Into Top Schools
Yesterday, we mentioned 11 Plus parents are regularly using tutors to help ensure their child stands the best chance possible of winning a place. In fact, this is the main way parents choose to give their child the competitive advantage.
Today, we will share with you our perspective on what you should look for in a tutor for your child. Our recommendation is easy to understand in three parts: specialisation, ability and differentiation.
Contents:
Specialisation 🤷♂️
The typical approach offered to parents tends to involve a local 11 Plus tuition company or private tutor. Regions all over the UK have 11 Plus tuition providers local to the area, some are even recommended by primary schools. They usually specialise in the specific type of 11 Plus exam for the schools in your locality (we will discuss more about this later). Though very rarely do they specialise in an 11 Plus subject area, often positioning themselves as able to teach anything: maths, non-verbal reasoning, comprehension, writing and verbal reasoning, plus any other variant of these core subjects for your target school. This generalist approach would be ok for any other exam primary school children need to take; a single primary school teacher will almost always teach both English and maths to their class. However, for the 11 Plus, this generalised, multidisciplinary approach does not deliver the quality of tuition required to set your child apart from the competition.11 Plus exam questions can be very challenging and the level of subject knowledge required to adequately explain important concepts, or the reason for an answer being what it is, can be highly complex, even for highly competent, experienced subject specialist teachers. Just take a look at an 11 Plus exam for yourself! Not to mention the huge range of definitions, explanations and questions a tutor could be asked by students. This is particularly true for the English 11 Plus subjects (comprehension, writing and verbal reasoning) — perhaps less so for maths. A subject specialist tutor is a requirement if you want your child to be head and shoulders above the competition and secure a place.
Adopting this broken-down, subject-specific approach to the 11 Plus is what we’ve seen parents of almost all of our successful candidates do in the previous years. Generalist tutors can lull you into a false sense of security. Progress seems like it’s being made, though it’s unclear exactly where and to what level. The tutor might state your child is scoring highly. Yet, as we repeatedly communicate to parents, having your child surpass a particular pass mark regularly is not the critical point of focus. The most important point they should be measured on is how they fare against the competition for the places at your school. The aim, therefore, should not be to surpass a certain score but to reach the highest level. Oftentimes, a generalist tutor can improve a child’s level, but they can’t bring them into the top category of candidates because the teacher’s subject knowledge and teaching ability is not strong enough across all of the 11 Plus subjects. This is why having a true specialist, rather than a generalist, can give your child the advantage over the rest. Almost all students sitting the 11 Plus are able to score well on the basic parts of the syllabus; the vast majority of 11 Plus tutors can help with this. Only the specialists can help your child produce work stands out above the rest and wins places. This is why our first recommendation is to find a specialist in the 11 Plus subject.
Ability 🧠
Even if you have found a subject specialist who can help your child prepare for their target school, parents should still take into consideration the tutor’s ability. The tutor’s knowledge must be expert level, and they need to be an outstanding teacher. Just because a tutor states they are an 11 Plus subject specialist does not qualify them as an excellent 11 Plus tutor capable of raising your child to the required level. Many parents can’t understand how their child didn’t win a place when they used their recommended local tuition provider or tutors. The school recommends them, they are subject specialists for the grammar school or independent school exam in your area, and they have good experience. What’s missing?
We interview and run trial lessons with hundreds of tutors every year in order to ensure our team is delivering at the very highest standard possible. During these trials, we see first hand how many tutors who have good experience within their local community do not have the academic ability or teaching skills to teach to the level we know is required to win places. You must be an exceptional practitioner of English and a highly capable teacher to teach 11 Plus English to the required standard. This means knowing the subject inside out without relying on generalisations. You must be able to give highly articulate and precise explanations whilst also making them accessible to young children. In addition, you need to be able to relate the material to the exam context to ensure everything taught focuses on scoring marks in the 11 Plus exam. It’s difficult to find an individual with a sufficient combination of deep subject knowledge, exceptional communication skills and a relentless focus on relating the learning points to the exam context.
In terms of probability, this difficulty makes sense because within each locality your choice of tutor is limited to those who are physically located within the area. Often the tutors provided locally are not full-time teachers, have a level of subject knowledge considered just enough to be able to teach a group of young primary age students and generally just aren’t as competent, experienced or skilled as what’s available if you were to search nationwide. They are primarily chosen because of their availability and proximity, their skill and ability is secondary.
Over the last five years, teaching standards have been under a level of scrutiny like never before. The main reason for this has been the shift to online learning that gained huge momentum during the covid pandemic. For the first time ever, parents could see exactly how teachers were teaching their children. They could sit in on the lesson with the teacher having no idea they were looking over their child’s shoulder. This gave schools, teachers and tutors alike an enormous amount of feedback and it changed expectations and teaching standards drastically. No longer was a lesson just delivered to students, now parents would also be able to highlight anything that wasn’t clearly presented or explained, or if something was not up to the standard they expect.
This has also greatly increased parental expectations when it comes to the quality of 11 Plus tutor for their child. Any good tuition provider or teacher should welcome the criticism and scrutiny. The 11 Plus is a competitive process, it therefore makes sense that the tutors are also selected by competition and excellence. The students are selected under this criteria, so the teachers should be too — it’s only fair! It’s ok to say some teachers are better than others and it’s your right to think critically and rationally about what is best for your child. The more competitive the school that you are applying for, the higher the calibre of tutor you need. The way material is delivered, the explanations given, the structure of the learning, and the learning objectives, must all be scrutinised and critiqued. Tutors and teachers who are the most open to showing you what they are doing with your child and receiving your feedback, are very often those who will also deliver you the optimal result.
As a parent, you can probably still name the three best teachers you had and the three worst! It’s a truth we all know from school — some teachers are better than others. It’s the parents who not only understand this truth but act upon it who end up positioning their child to excel in their 11 Plus exam.
Here are a few things to look out for:
🧠 Did your tutor sit the 11 Plus?
🏫 Did they attend a grammar or independent school?
🎓 Which university did they attend? Is it part of the Russel Group?
👩🎓Which subject did they specialise in at university? For 11 Plus English tutors, we’ve found English or History graduates are often the highest quality. For 11 Plus Maths, maths and science subjects.
👨🏫 Are they a full time teacher?
⏲️ How many years of teaching or tuition experience do they have?
🗣️ Do you sense their communication skills are such that they would be able to make ideas and concepts accessible for your child?
📆 How detailed and organised is the tuition programme you are considering? Any tutor should be able to show you examples of learning materials, lesson objectives, homework, marking and how it all fits together to achieve the desired result.
✅ Does the programme involve the required coverage of the 11 Plus syllabus to ensure all potential questions are covered? Even those which have not appeared in previous years.
📝 Does the tutor show a strong focus on the exam? As opposed to just imparting general skills and knowledge without applying them within an exam context.
⏰ Is time being used efficiently to ensure your costs are under control? For example, not spending too much time on basic topics or skills. Focussing mainly on where the places are decided, that is, the more challenging topics and 11 Plus skills. (If your child is performing solidly in Year 4 or 5, they will already have a good grasp of the basics.)
🖊️ Is homework marked outside of lesson time? What level of detail does the marking show?
🎥 Ask to see some live teaching! Post-covid this is now a reasonable request and any tutor should be willing to provide this for you. It’s only right that you experience first-hand the person who will be preparing your child for a very important exam.
In summary, tutor ability varies widely and you need to make a careful decision about who you will entrust with your child’s 11 Plus preparation. This requires some thorough research and investigation rather than picking the most readily-available or recommended options.
Differentiation ↔️
Let’s say, for instance, you’ve found a good specialist in your area. You’ve observed the way they teach, and you’re satisfied they will be able to take your child to the necessary level to win a place. The next issue we have come across in previous years is that your child will very likely be tutored by the same local teacher or tutor as every other child competing for the same local grammar or independent school places in your area. If this tutor is genuinely excellent, it is a good move to employ their help and many others will also — it’s why some tutors are able to charge very high hourly rates. Though, we would also strongly recommend you take steps to help separate your child from the competition. When everyone in an 11 Plus area is receiving the same type of tuition from the same tutor, it becomes more difficult to stand out from the other candidates competing for the same places. For example, we’ve seen many students tutored by the same tutor in the same local area or county using the same question answering style or rehearsed examples for their creative writing. From the examiner’s perspective, this makes their work blend in with all of the other exam scripts they’ve marked. Yes, the quality of the work may be high, but because English is subjective, the work that stands out as high quality but also a little different and unique can have the edge over the rest.
Not only should you look for differentiation in who tutors your child, but also in the kind of 11 Plus material they are exposed to. Local providers will focus intensely on the target grammar or independent school exam. They might state very specific details or question types which only appear in your target school’s exam that they are experts in. Or how your target school’s exam is totally unique and requires a local specialist. We can tell you this is often exaggerated or just not true.
We’ve done some work to shed some light on this here. In this article, you can read a comparison of all the 11 Plus exam boards and formats. What connects them all? They are all very, very similar and based on testing the same concepts and skills.
Therefore, it’s very likely your target school’s exam shares many similarities with other schools. It’s unwise to believe that your school will have a completely different comprehension, or writing, or verbal reasoning exam, to all the rest and only a few select local tutors hold the keys to unlock success in your exam. Rather, it’s more of a marketing ploy used by local tutors than anything else. The core skills examined for in the 11 Plus are the same across every school in the UK. The 11 Plus is always primarily based on the Year 5 British national curriculum with some extension questions from the Year 6 national curriculum — plus the involvement of subjects such as verbal reasoning and non verbal reasoning which will not have been taught in schools. Maths, comprehension and writing will all have been. The 11 Plus is just an extension of the curriculum that goes into more detail and breadth. That’s all. Don’t let a local tutor over complicate things for you and convince you only they know the particular ins and outs of the exam your child will take. We always say, if a student can learn the core 11 Plus skills and gain good exposure to a wide variety of question types and formats, they are very well placed to achieve highly in any 11 Plus exam.
Furthermore, studying content or question types that have not been featured on your target school’s exam in previous years can be very useful indeed. There is nothing to say schools or exam boards cannot change the types of questions they ask. Every year, 11 Plus examiners always throw in one or two curve balls to help separate the good candidates from the great. Knowing how to deal with a wide range of 11 Plus questions may well help your child gain the upper hand on exam day. Whereas, if they expect only a particular type of question style and format to appear, a small change to this on exam day may cause them problems.
In summary, you should differentiate your tuition plan from others in your local area in order to stand out. Yes, use what you can verify as worthwhile but don’t pay too much attention to tutors who over emphasise how unique the 11 Plus exam in your area is — it almost always is not. Expose your child to different types of questions, even those that may not have been in the target school paper for a while. Build strong 11 Plus skills so your child can handle any challenge set on exam day. This is what we’ve seen the vast majority of successful applicants do in the past.
Summary 🔁
It’s important to gather all the advice and recommendations you can for outstanding 11 Plus preparation. But it’s also important to understand how following the crowd will very likely not give the desired result — outstanding performance. It’s the parents who can mix and match what they think is appropriate based on their knowledge of their child, and what they know it takes to stand out, who often come out on top.
Here’s How We Do It ✅
Our service is built around addressing the three factors outlined above.
Specialisation 🤷♂️: We specialise only in the English subjects (comprehension, writing and verbal reasoning). That’s all we do. We’ll leave the maths and non-verbal reasoning to the one-to-one tuition experts.
Ability 🧠: We only hire teachers with very high ability. As a consequence, we only have five tutors on our team. This way, we can control the quality of the learning experience very closely. We then put our superb administration, resource creation and marking team around exceptional tutors, this supports them to do what they do best — help students win places!
Differentiation ↔️: As we are a 100% online provider, we take students from all over the UK and internationally. We put them together in small groups, we work with them, and then in their local area they stand out as something different.
