Tutoring and the 7+ / 8+ exams

[User44444]

What do you mumsnetters think of tutoring for these exams? I am following a 8+ thread here and another debating tutoring for 7+ Bute exams with interest.

My son just sat the 8+. He is at a pre prep that prepares boys. Although I had some serious concerns over the quality of teaching and preparation for the exams, which wasn’t great, I stuck to my guns and did not tutor. He is a bright boy and he works hard at school, we did all the homework and over the Christmas holidays in particular got our heads down with additional work using resources like Bond papers.

He did well, got invited for interviews at all the top 3 schools applied. One rejected him outright and he is currently on the waiting list for 2 of the schools. Not the outcome I hoped for but not disastrous.

Looking at the boys who were offered places none are particularly bright but all have been subjected to hours of extensive professional tutoring every week - for months! Some have hired so-called “super tutors” at sky high fees and even former headteachers to coach their boys. When money is seemingly no object....
I guess I just feel disappointed in these schools who make a big deal out of claiming not to want tutored children but year after year cannot see through the tutoring and seem to pick mostly heavily tutored applicants. It makes me wonder if they actually care or pretend to care.

I have no experience of tutor or private schools, but I do think that even naturally bright children need to learn from someone/something.
You said you done work with him during holidays. I see no difference between hiring a tutor and doing work yourself. Just that results could have been better if your dc was tutored by someone professional.
I have a naturally bright child, but without teaching, he will remain where he is.

Yes, Hhks it’s Sussex House I was referring to.
Agree with the poster who said mathematics is too easy compared with English at 7+ and 8+ especially for boys.

Hhks I used the WUS composition test as a GOOD example of how schools can get closer to testing for true ability rather than regurgitation and over tutoring. I don’t think we’ll ever get the perfect entrance tests but current system is dysfunctional and can definitely be improved with a bit of initiative.
BringonSpring thank you 💐

What happened to user8700 ? Do come back. All views interesting regardless of how extreme!

I agree that WUS did better at attempting to identify natural talent. They hold thorough interviews to make boys think on their feet, and observed interaction in a classroom setting. But we would never know how much interview weighed in the final decision.
In that respect, bute house is also doing great in a relaxed testing environment.
Have you asked feedback from the schools? Do you think your son didn't make it because of English? It seems very common in boys, including my own. But as I said before I think as long as they have come this far, they are all bright boys, and they all deserve a place in any school. Good luck on the RL movement.

Neither KIngs nor WU would give feedback because son is on the waitlist - a WL place means you’ve fully qualified for a place so on that basis schools don’t like to give any feedback just as boys with confirmed places don’t get feedback. Kings went as far to say if I want to take my son off the WL they’d give feedback at that point!! WUS gave me titbits - that his creative writing was his strongest paper re,active,y speaking. I agree WUS interview day was thorough but I also think their maths and reasoning papers seemed a lot easier this year compared with previous years based on everything I had read such that they were unable to distinguish between candidates and didn’t successfully identify the superstar kids. Everyone scored so well it came down to a bit of luck and likeability of your child at interview day. Same can be said of Kings written papers - too easy, decision based more on the Activity Day?

St Paul’s on the other hand had a very challenging (if unimaginative) written papers especially maths and reasoning maths therefore better able to identify talent. They were therefore less interested in observing boys in a classroom lesson setting although the “interviews” were very pressured. Challenging maths puzzles thrown at the boys in groups of 3 or 4 and the boys were effectively forced to compete with each other. Yikes!

User44444 and Hhks the interview day doesn’t count for much. They are just going through the motions and using the 2 hours as a “heads up” to get to know the boys they have already decided to offer places to. It all comes down to the written exams. It is very rare that a low ranking child from exams will be offered a place because they stood out at interview. Sadly not.
I say this because last year my son sat 7+ at Kings, SP, WU and Latymer. He got to second round of 2 schools but got no offers, not even waitlisted. He did a lot better this year for 8+ think God. Last year when I got feedback none of the schools even mentioned his performance at the interview day. They just gave me his scores to justify their decision. Kings helpfully added that I needed just to do a bit of work on his English and try again. I got a tutor, not silly hours just an hour a week and he did well for 8+.

So I’m afraid for the time being anyway it’s a lot about the written exams and none are tutor proof.

I don’t think WUS identified “natural talent” at all. Quite the opposite. Can’t give specific examples will end up revealing too much but they definitely offered some very dubious boys places this year both 7+ and 8+.

I agree SPJ selection process was more brutal but ultimately also more objective. Boys ranked after exams, top 80 invited to interview, top 36 offered unless they struggled at the interviews. Simple.

Reading your posts it sounds to me the boys 7/8+ has some serious issues. I clicked the thread out of interest because my daughter sat the 7+ at a few schools - City of London, north London Collegiate, SHHS and Habs. Lucky she got 2 of them. I did not hire a professional tutor but worked with her at home starting in the summer holidays. I don’t think you can throw a 6 year old into these exams situations with no exam prep regardless of their “natural intellect” and expect a good outcome. You have to do some coaching, with or without a tutor but the process was straightened and transparent.

Also hearing a lot of grumbles about WU this year especially for 7+ some very surprising offers made to boys at our school not considered particularly bright. Kids in our part of London don’t tend to sit SPJ and Kings so don’t know much about those. But it sure sounds “brutal” as someone above aptly describes it!

rockabyba, nice to hear the experience. so it further proves that the exam itself at this stage is not able to identify bright kids, but better prepared kids. How can the same kid be not bright and suddenly bright after a short year?
For the exams, I bet the super tutors will like the super difficult exams as that's when they can step in and charge up the kids in short time with their insider knowledge.

Momthregals, yes, the boys' battle field is a lot worse. The papers are a lot harder, and the boys are less mature than their girl peers. And that drives parents mad, too. congratulations on your offers on those amazing schools!

Yes the boys 7+ sounds horrendous! I have a reception age son who will remain at his current school until 11+ before I would even contemplate any kind of exams!
I think BringonSpering made a very good point about pre prep and prep heads riding high on good exit results based on tutoring. Of course all these heads will openly tell parents not to tutor then rejoice at good results, pat themselves on the back even though they know fine well the outcomes has very little to do with the school and more to do with parental input, external tutoring etc.
Lots of different parties to blame. As parents we just play the game as best as we can but we don’t make the rules. The schools do.

Putting my new supertutors hat on, I know it sounds churlish, but a native English speaker would never say "as green as an emerald", it's "as green as emerald".

But I agree with whomever upthread said that this style of "writing" displays nothing of the child's ability to think. It's stultifying, and ultimately writing in clichés does the child no favours in the long run.

Even finding a tutor is a nightmare. We are currently looking in North London for someone with a proven track record at 7+ but I want 1:1. If anyone is willing to share the golden egg I'd much appreciate any hints!

This thread is nuts, seriously.

I am a big believer in, you know, rigorous education and tutoring is really good for stretching kids and all that. And even I think that the stuff being discussed here is just really sad and ridiculous.

And yes, the examples of children being coached into producing "creative" writing stuffed with tick-box similes and cliches really were just awful.

As a parent, I also think the creative writing bit in 7+8+ exams should scrapped. Why do they want to see a 6 or 7 yo boy to fill up a full A4 paper in 25 minute? this is the part requires most coaching and the teachers marking the paper are never creative! they do not appreciate the "crazy" ideas a young boy might have. They only mechanically check for the writing devices and give points accordingly.

I tutor for 7+ and 8+ in London and would love to see more variety in the writing tasks. I don't think creative writing should be scrapped completely but I would like to see schools assessing students' wider writing ability. Creative writing can indeed (though should not) become formulaic in prepping for these exams. Creativity, vocabulary, grammar, spelling and use of interesting sentence structure can all be assessed using a variety of writing tasks. I have always presumed that the reason it is always done through a story writing task is to make it easier to mark and compare.

Sorry Kokeshi123 when you say ‘sad and ridiculous’ you mean the schools who design the tests or the parents who seek to have their children pass the tests?

I’m still here, still following the thread with increasing disbelief.

Plaid ha ha. Good point but hey, for an overseas parent with questionabke English whose son must get into Colet Court at any price sending your child into exams to spit out sentences with grammatical inaccuracies the expensive tutor has taught is the way to go. Shame on London’s elite academic institutions for their downright laziness when it comes to spotting talent.

Hhks I do agree with your last post. The most sensible thing you’ve written in this thread. Bravo!

One thing I definitely noticed about education in the UK is the disproportionate emphasis on English vs maths/sciences etc. My kids are still young so I have no idea what happens in senior school but it’s very different from my own education. It’s absolutely preposterous that so much emphasis is placed on description and literary aids vs developing a good plot line and coming up with interesting ideas. for a child this writing style isn’t intuitive and natural - but that’s how the game is played to pass assessments - now I just hope that once there the schools will take a more holistic approach to teaching creative writing .

Schoolmadness I agree completely and actually the forward looking schools like St Paul’s don’t put much emphasis on writing. Sure, the exam had a composition element but the entrance exam is more about maths and reasoning. Comprehension is multiple choice because it’s about testing comprehension, ie understanding of text rather than answering in full sentences which can really tire out young children. Latymer also have minimum writing for the same reason.

Let’s face it being able to do creative writing using previously learnt sentences doesn’t really say anything about a child’s intellect. Maths and reasoning is more instructive - you either have the brain for it or you don’t. If you look at the subjects children study in later years it’s all underpinned by mathematical concepts and analytical thinking. Creative writing soon becomes irrelevant. I do think schools like WU are too stuck in the past with this and need to look at better ways of assessing boys.

User8700 “questionabke” ? I think you need some English tuition too...sorry couldn’t resist that.

Not just WU though. The girls schools are obsessed with creative writing. CLSG and NLC make it into a huge deal. I know so ,any very bright girls not get offers on the basis that their writing wasn’t adequately advanced. It is no wonder that fewer girls do maths and sciences A Level than boys. All this needs to change. Heads, I hope you are listening to parents.

"Sorry Kokeshi123 when you say ‘sad and ridiculous’ you mean the schools who design the tests or the parents who seek to have their children pass the tests?"

Well, a bit of both, if I am honest.

I "get" that as parents, we are all anxious about our children getting the best possible education, and that ambition is natural, and I understand that there can be people who live in areas where state schools are terrible and they have no option of moving and so on. I know that the cramming is probably motivated by love and all that.

I do have to raise my eyebrows at some of the feverish stuff about "OMG, we are living in an age of GLOBALIZATION, meaning that our children will be destined to work in a fast food restaurant for the rest of their lives unless they get into the top 0.05% of prep schools." I mean, I and most of my friends went to good RG universities following (in most cases) state schools, and even the few who went private were at much more ordinary private schools, not London supercream ones. The sheer terror of some of the parents at not getting into these places is a bit strange to me, unless they are stuck in areas where the other options are genuinely really poor.

I also "get" why the schools do this. I suspect there is a lot of lip service about spotting genuinely Einstein-like maverick talent, but this is a business at the end of the day. It is in their interest to try and sieve out the kids with the most on-the-ball parents who can be relied on to make sure that their kids succeed academically.

As others have said, the situation seems to have become more intense over the past 10 years, as London has become such an overheated place in general.

I found many people like to take view to extremes. When we talk about tutoring, people will be jumping up and down blaming parents over tutoring their children and taking away their childhood completely, and children will self-harm and maybe will depress or suicide later in life. But those are the only extreme cases, most (in fact all)parents I met are normal, and tutor the children moderately. I don't see anything wrong giving the kids some extra kick before an important exam.

And just because you can still do well with all different paths in life, it doesn't mean the children are not allowed to try for the top schools. many parents register for 6 or 8 schools, not just the top ones. and I have never seen anyone disowning their children for not getting into St Pauls.

The school exams are designed to test preparation rather than natural talent. so if you want to play this game, please prepare.

User44444, according to your review, your son did great in WU creative writing, but was till not good enough put him into the top 22. and because SPJ maths and reasons papers were so difficult, and he was not even waitlisted. does that tell he is not a strong maths or reasoning person maybe? you should have received detailed score on his performance during SPJ interview, and should have understood what his weakness is.

The idea that your child’s future is gravely jeaopardised if he doesn’t get into St. Paul’s is no more absurd that assuming that a child that is prepped and does get in will end up a neurotic, self harming, anorexic, ocd, suicidal shell of a human being.
I also find it interesting how some “users” on here cannot seem to make a point without spouting unhelpful, judgemental, nationalistic and offensive garbage - while others are just sharing their experience without passing judgement on those who choose to parent differently .

Sure, not the end of the world if you don’t get your son into one of the top 3 schools but invariably the parents who say this, often to be kind, are the ones who played the game better and got what they wanted. Might not be so generous if things hadn’t worked out for their own children.

Hhks I’m still trying to figure out what went wrong. Before the exams i felt pretty confident with maths, it comes naturally to my son and at his current prep he would often be given different work to extend him. English was always his weaker subject. I assumed he would get WUS and SPJ whom I thought valued maths. Feedback from SPJ said he was in top 30 of applicants for maths and reasoning. 85% for maths no specific score given for reasoning and his English was “absolutely fine”. I read from that he had done well enough on the written papers but not necessarily a guarantee shoo in. WUS said he impressed with creative writing but no further feedback. Kings has given no feedback at all. Performance at these exams is all relative at the end of the day. I think even though English is not his strong subject he did well in the creative writing part at WU because it was slightly different, not a story others had been tutored for and therefore more of an even playing field. He found the maths exams at WU and Kings a lot easier than SPJ so I would conclude he must have scored in the 90s there but probably so did most other boys!

I agree with Kokeshi. Perhaps I’m jaded but I haven’t left this experience having confidence that the selection process at any of these schools has much to do with a child’s ability. Pushy parents, not their offspring, won.