11+ Prep - tuition recommendations - HELP!!!

[John1976]

Hello everyone,

I am hoping to enrol my children into a Grammar School in my local area - however they need a lot of help with their maths and non-verbal reasoning to pass the entrance exam. Does anyone know of anyone/anywhere that deals with this? Some of my friends mentioned that Explore Learning was really good with aiding their children in the build up to their respective exams. Does anyone here have feedback on this at all? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I know a fair number of people who used Explore Learning. Those who soley relied on it did not pass, at least that was my experience. Go visit the Elevenplusexams forum and they have a section on tutors and how to get a good match.

We prepared with DD ourselves - we tried Explore Learning for a couple of months - one month of which was the eleven plus course which will now be well underway as it starts each Sept. It was also really pricey. Yes I also work full time so DD did a lot of the work herself with our guidance. Mock tests were also helpful for us. It did work as DD passed all three of the local grammar tests with flying colours.

Good luck on your eleven plus journey!

We did preparation at home. A professional tutor was financially out of reach, so I spent some time researching the exam format and content. I spent about £100 on materials, of which £40 was past exam papers from the exam board. There are a lot of free materials on the Internet and once we knew the format certain sites were very useful. We made sure she practiced exam technique etc.

Each 11+ test is slightly different, the one DD sat had no non verbal reasoning, for example. Others are more reliant on quick answering or multiple choice. The one DD sat requires quite a high level of english vocab/grammar/punctuation and knowledge of language, so we did a lot of reading etc.

DD absolutely excelled and got her grammar school place this year. The fact that she was the only girl (one other boy got similar marks) to get a definite place in her year did not give me a very good impression of local tutors. Forty children in her year took the test with her and almost all of them were heavily tutored, some of them from infant school. Two of them had parents who were professional tutors themselves.

The eleven plus forums on the eleven plus website are very good, you can look by region and also by subject. Good luck!