Could any child get into SW London Grammars with tutoring?

For the London consortium new problem solving section if you are prepared for the other sections, you should be fine to do it. My dd said it was not difficult. We did nothing to prepare for it. Although, someone suggested a puzzles type website a week or two before the exam. But my dd was mentally done with prep by that time so we decided not to do anything from the website. I am sure now there are tutoring companies that have come up with ways to prep for that, but you don't really need it. But nothing wrong if dc want to try and prepare for it.

DD thought Tiffin was much easier than the SPGS exam.

It is looking for certain kind of pupils. Compared to Grammar exam it is easier (at least I feel) as it is not testing something probably a lot of student would know how to do it with time if curriculum is covered but you just need to handle pressure and accuracy to stand out.

I wonder both quality is those superselective looking for as they will deliver good exam results for the school in the future anyway.

They are obviously not looking for 'most 10 year olds', though. I think it's an interesting paper because you really can't prepare for the content, though obviously exam technique is teachable as I said earlier.

Both format , with proper guidance and practice (call it tutor or not), can and will make good improvement.

In an ideal world, you might want no preparation or specific practice to have a fair playing ground among all students. But in reality, when something can be improved by efforts and preparation those who can afford (time or money) will do it.

I honestly think most qr or vr tests would give a non tutored, state primary educated, child a vastly better chance than that would. needs a lot of time management and a lot of practice tailoring answers to the number of marks available per question, skills that are totally unknown to most 10 year olds.

CEM pretest definitely need to prepare, it is logic but with time constraints so strategy and mechanical practice is important, especially you are competing against a lot of other students that with a lot practice.

I think they say they don't believe tutoring is necessary rather than the exams are untutorable- the exam is based on the curriculum alone- none of the NVR which other 11+ exams include- just maths, English and writing.

Nonsuch website says whole KS2 curriculum and while TGS website says end of y5, this was not the experience of my DD who sat them for Sept 2023 entry.

Anecdotally, Tiffin is more selective than the Sutton grammars, I don't know if that's definitely true but my DD found the TGS exams harder and more time pressured than Nonsuch.

But before that one has to past the CEM pretest which you will need practice and prepare

I don't think you need that much prep, though I am sure it is possible to tutor for it and suggest strategies. Again, it's just logic. DD really enjoyed it.

@BonjourCrisette SPGS comprehension paper is good one, my DD enjoys solving that. But before that one has to past the CEM pretest which you will need practice and prepare, even though the pass level is quite high compared to grammar stanndard.

From last year London consortium is doing problem solving kind of section which is some what similar to the style of the SPGS comprehension. But again it is not an untutorable format, and I am aware of some west london prep students attend those targeted tutor course before the exam.

For grammar, the is somehow constrainted by the curriculum to some extent so it is difficult to have things as such.

Extraordinary.

Re untutorable tests, the best I have seen is the SPGS comprehension paper. Everything you need to answer the questions is in the paper and it doesn't rely on any extra knowledge. You just need to be logical.

https://spgs.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Sample-Comprehension-Paper-3.pdf

For maths or MC English comprehension I might be OK, but not VR or NVR without proper prep for sure, not at the intensity level I have observed in some of the 11+ exam Im aware of.

Not for tiffin exams but I mentioned this in other MN threads before, I once gave some 11+ NVR paper to my colleagues to try out fresh with time limit (one from cantab, the other from imperial), the first attempt they have will put them at the bottom 30-40% of the exam cohort.

they do exist on a very limited scale. some of the comps round us do assessments for language and art places and and so on. no-one seems to know what the content of the assessment is (the places aren't all that prestigious anyway), on the day it apparently relies on stuff that's been written or drawn on a blackboard at the front of the room. my eldest scraped a fairly borderline pass in one of these tests but I suspect in the end comfortably passed a test for a superselective on the back of what in the period leading up to the exam was a fairly heavy duty amount of parent led 'tuition' (multiple hours per week). a fair bit of the difference between performance in the two presumably boiled down to thoroughness of preparation.

For those exam questions, I have to admit I will not have a chance to pass unless prepare.

I do hope you are joking.

In the open day of 2 of the most selective private school we visited last year, when asking about 11+ exam contents by the prospective parents , both school encourage no tutoring is required.

For those exam questions, I have to admit I will not have a chance to pass unless prepare.

I would tend to agree I think although I don’t know much about it…. But I’d don’t think they would say on one hand it’s untutorable but then make tutors absolutely essential by testing Year 6 stuff?

@Mangotime untutorable test for 11+ is oxymoron

@Outnumbered4321 thanks for sharing. We did the 11+ last year and I agree in bulk park what your DD took is the average effort level that for a top set state school kid to stand a good chance to enter the superselective like TGS.

For private superselective only probably the effort can be reduced by a bit (from hingsight) but it is a different focus game.

For sutton mocks, one definitely some Y6 curriculum to cover the maths, the level state students learnt by starting of Y6 will be disadvantaged. But most importantly is the practice with speed and accuracy, it is essential.
For English it is hard to say, but judging from the vocabularies used in the text I think it is way beyond Y6 curriculum.

I would have preferred a Co Ed school but we haven’t got any coeducational state schools that we could get into. All our state options are single sex.

@Ladybowes the headmaster did say they would be tested on the curriculum up to end of y5 and the admission FAQ on the website explicitly say the same thing. https://www.tiffinschool.co.uk/_docs/admissions/Year%207%20Admission%20FAQs%202023.pdf

Whether they tested on y6 stuff honestly I can’t say as I outsourced the entire thing to a tutor and have no idea what is even on the curriculum! I don’t think they would lie tho and Tiffin prides themselves on having an untutorable test and I don’t think they would do anything which encourages people to get a tutor (although obvs everyone did).

You can learn to be social with the opposite gender outside of school. Atm my dd goes to a mixed primary and she made the decision she wanted to go to all girls for secondary. She said boys cause disruption during class. I am not worried about her social skills with the opposite gender. She has a little brother 20 months younger then her, who has friends over. She has many friends with older brothers, one w a twin brother etc. She does tennis with mostly boys, one boy in her gymnastics class, her art class also has some boys. We also have close friends with boys the same age as my dd (ones that we holiday with or stay with when visiting). I am sure others have similar experiences.

My daughter is starting at TGS in Sept.

The fact of the matter is that the exams for Tiffin and the Sutton Grammars cover the whole KS2 curriculum but are sat at the start of y5.

Most state primaries will introduce some content beyond y5 curriculum to the kids working at greater depth but are extremely unlikely to be teaching so far ahead that a child at the end of y5 will have already covered the entire y6 curriculum in school. Prep schools might have done but the state primaries in my local area (in the catchment for both Tiffin and Sutton grammars) definitely do not.

Even the brightest child will need to have covered the curriculum to stand a chance in the exam. They aren't going to be sitting there deriving the area of a circle from first principles in an exam- they need to have seen the formula before.

Not all of the exam will be y6 content, but certainly in the exams sat in oct/nov 2022 for both the second stage of Nonsuch and for Tiffin girls a good proportion was. A child unfamiliar with that y6 content wouldn't have passed no matter how brilliant they are.

You can either cover the curriculum with them at home yourself (self tutor) or use a tutor to cover the curriculum. On top of this, there is time pressure and a lot of the other kids sitting the exams will be heavily tutored, so it would be worth doing a bit of work on exam craft and timing - just being familiar with filling out the answer sheets can help with time. For the multiple choice exams, they need to answer each question in under a minute.

I find people are not that open about how much preparation their children have had for these exams. A lot of people who sneer at you for using a tutor turn out to have done hours of prep on their own at home. Other parents go a bit mad, a friend of my daughter's was attending a tutor 6 times a week. She's got in too, and is a clever girl. I don't know that she "needed" that much preparation but the lack of transparency can send people into a kind of madness... It left me wondering if the once a week tuition we were doing was going to be enough or if I was going to send her in terribly unprepared and knock her confidence.

We sent our daughter to group tuition once a week in year 5 with a tutor who was very familiar with these schools. She is an avid reader and consistently worked at "greater depth" throughout primary. The tutor set additional homework that took about 30 mins each night and in the holidays we did extra practice papers to try to speed up her maths which was solid but slow.
She's a bright cookie and hard working but I wouldn't delude myself that she would have got in without the additional work, her state primary wouldn't have got her anywhere near ready despite being in my opinion a very good school- why should they teach a year ahead after all?

I hope she holds her own once she's in- time will tell!

This is nonsense. And these schools are not single gender. They are single sex.

Where is your evidence for this... I simply don't believe it. Children who go to single sex schools often have siblings of the opposite sex and I sure they are more than capable of interacting with them.

Whether or not single sex schools are a good idea is much debated and there is some evidence that children perform better in there GCSEs if they have been to single sex schools - but social skills never seen that before.

And that one gender schools 🤦‍♀️. This puts the kids from grammar behind in terms of social skills with the opposite gender