That if you had to...

[bananasinpjamas]

That if you had to... spend thousands on tutoring your child for them to pass the 11+ (barring those with sen), perhaps going into selective education isn't right for them?

Not unless you are prepared to spend thousands on extra tuition seeing them through school

YANBU. I read an article at the weekend about tutors who go to childrens houses after school to torment them.
If a child needs that level of help before the exam, they aren't going to magically improve once they get into the school.

It made me think when my friends DS passed an exam for a prestigious school with shock horror, no tuition AT ALL. But all his friends seemed to have tutors and well, I was thinking, if you need that to get in, what do you do when you get there?!

Because in our borough, the primary schools are not allowed to teach anything for the 11+.
However, children in the neighbouring borough (who are taught it in school) can attend the grammar schools here if they pass.

I wish to level the playing field.

We live in a grammar school area. I took advice from many teachers and other educational professionals on this question.

The 11+ pass mark round here is 121. I was told that any child scoring 115 to 121 would in fact do fine and cope fine at grammar school. But if they made the pass mark 115, then 2 thirds of children would pass. That would mean instead of an 'elite' going to the grammar school and the majority going to the community college, you would have the majority at the grammar school and a definite 'sink' group at the college. Not acceptable socially.

My daughter got 118 in the 11+ and went to the grammar on appeal. She has done fine, coped fine, got place at UCL for law, no tutoring.

Tutoring tends to improve the performance only by a few marks. So it could move a child from 117 over the pass boundary and save the uncertainity of an appeal. Tutoring a child whose untutored score would only ever be 108 say, would not raise them to the pass mark, so that probably is a waste of money.