Good or bad idea not to use tutor for super selective?

[Chocolatesandicecream]

Hi. Wanted to get peoples' opinions on whether I should persevere to find
decent tutor for dd or work with her myself?

Dd is y5 in a very poor performing school and, although top of her class, has never been given particularly challenging work ie she always gets either top marks or just misses a couple so I figure this must mean she could do harder stuff. Her school are in dire straits so no point talking to them. Things have been bad for a few years.

We have done stuff at home already and she got 90% in a verbal reasoning paper I gave her recently. We had a tutor last year who kept cancelling and when we had her recently, for the first time in ages, she clearly had no clue about the entrance exams and winged the lesson. I cancelled her as not paying 30 quid for this! I found someone else and we met with them today. This person uses exactly the same books we already have at home and didn't seem any more experienced than me.

All the good tutors seem to be booked and I don't want to pay for something I can do myself.

However, I was never taught grammar at school and my maths is rusty so I am worried I won't be able to get her up to the standard required especially as she will be competing against children in good or outstanding schools, preps etc and with tutors.

Our local secondary school is poor so I really want her to have a chance.

Her school levels are 4c for writing and maths and 4a for reading although she got near full marks for two lots of optional sats last year (4a) and more recently got 5b for sat paper in reading. She had about 20 supply teachers last year and no long term teacher.

Does she stand a chance with me tutoring her? I work full time but she does enjoy working with me and responds well.

Tutor yourself. Really, the maths is not hard. I tutored dd myself and got her from scoring 60% to over 90% in 3 months. I'm no maths genius, far from it. You're only tutoring 10 year olds! - really, the standard is not that high!

What matters is accuracy and having covered all the KS2 curriculum before the test which at a poor school is unlikely. You can do it now - we did it in a couple of sessions a week for 3 months. Get Bond How to do 11+ Maths. Do the test. Then - and this is the important bit - find out why your dc made every single mistake and resolve it. List all topics not yet covered - cover them. Where your dc gave the right answer but to the wrong question, focus on that. Where your dc made a careless error, eg in calculation then devise strategies eg bribes!, etc to reduce those. And that will leave a few questions that are really tricky, that are put in to show the most able candidates, and go through those slowly, explaining how to get the answer.

But IME careless errors were the real problem - worth spending time cracking down on those.

Chocolate - Dd was offered a place at spgs and we didn't do any tutoring - didly squat except the 3 papers on their website. We decided that she would have to be able to cope in the environment .
However would I do that again knowing what I know now - definitely not.
After dropping her off for the exams the talk all around was how much tutoring and preparation the girls had had and I felt physically sick. The prep schools had been practising very closely the type of papers and level of questions so it is not a level playing field.
Unless your dd is weak in an area then I don't believe you need a tutor and it is doable at home. I would definitely start by printing off the exam papers so you know the expected standard and take it from there.

Stressedbutblessed

Your post made me laugh and slightly sad too. That sounds just like the exam day at Colet Court/St Paul's Boys. Husbands hugging their distraught wives as their son nervously joins a group of boys for the exams. The atmosphere was thick with 200+ parents seemingly all seeing anything other than St Paul's or Westminster as a sign of failure in the knowledge that 95% would not make it. My son and I were perplexed but also, perhaps cruelly, laughing about it quietly whilst also considering the latest football scores.

Let nature take it's course, help steer a little but most of all, don't stress or make the hard to get the only goal.