No prep for 7+ entrance exams - successful?

[CrownMe]

Has anyone's child been offered a 7+ place at a top school without having prepared for assessment tests / entrance exams? This school emphasises it is looking for raw talent and actually discourages tutoring and preparation.

I’m not sure which school you mean in particular but in my experience they all say exactly that! Some feel they have better ways of trying to distinguish tutored skill from innate (if you can?). We’ve done 7+ twice. My DD was tutored for 5 months (once a week in a group) as she wasn’t at a school which did any of this. We only tried for one school and she got in. For my DD we ditched a tutor after a couple of sessions as he didn’t like it and neither did we. So he probably did a couple of the tests from the CGP books and then we just closed our eyes and crossed our fingers! He only sat one school as well (not as competitive as KCS/Westminster but next down) and got in as well.
I do know a lot of the children who entered both exams were highly tutored though….others didn’t do anything and had a go and some of them got in as well.

As someone ones said, not tutoring….especially for the top schools is like taking a knife to a gunfight.

i think of the 22 children that are accepted from 400 applicants at WUS, all of them would be tutored and heavily.

i think the next level schools, you probably don’t need tutoring, just lots of practice etc….

At our pre-prep (not a hot house):

Not tutored, got into top schools (yes, including WUS)
Tutored, got into top schools
Tutored, didn't get into top schools
Not tutored, didn't get into top schools

@user246911 i agree non-tutored can get in….but also many won’t admit to tutoring.

@user246911 children who attend a pre-prep though are by definition prepared, even if it is not a hot house. Unprepared would be at a gentle non-selective prep or state school. Children definitely get in without tutoring but they would always be "prepared" by someone, be it the pre-prep or the parent or a tutor or all of these.

There is the technicality of the test to consider and for that, a tutor or at least a few mock tests are useful. How are you meant to answer a certain type of question? Are there certain words that give you more points and so on.

DS, not tutored, prepped the week before WUS exam at the beginning of this year (an English paper day, downloaded for free online, some maths on Atom) and was offered a place so it’s possible. We didn’t actually make up our minds to send him to do the test until the end of December, but weirdly once he’d done the two assessments days and an offer came, the fact that we hadn’t tutored actually put my mind at rest - now I know it’s the right school for him, in that I think he’ll be fine there, academically. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend our route, but wanted to point out that it’s possible. Also - WUS invites boys in to spend time at the school at the second round stage, and I really don’t know how tutoring would help with some of the exercises they did.

Thank you, all! We've applied for WUS. It sounds like it's safest to prepare.

Sorry I realise it makes me sound like I’m saying don’t prepare. I definitely agree with the others that everyone else will have prepared (or nearly all) so you’d be at a huge disadvantage. Totally agree there will be a range of those tutored and not who get in and don’t. But most at Westminster will have been, as most were when we tried for our school x

@Caps0218 We have had that, of course, but at least one to each top school I am certain it was school and parent input only.

@ncsurrey22 Definitely, I am not saying that parents should just drop their sons off at the assessment. But I don't like people suggesting that only heavily tutored boys can get in, because it puts pressure (and huge costs) on the parents and ultimately it's the boys who suffer when they should really be playing.

@CrownMe Good luck!

Surely this depends on

1. How clever you son is naturally
2. If the school he is currently in will be covering the material that he'll be tested on

Depending on the above different people will want or need to take different approaches to preparing for the examinations.

I think heavy tutoring in all instances though is a terrible idea.

All schools operating a 7+ assessment to get in will emphasise that tutoring is not necessary. Don’t believe it.

Beware anecdotal advice about such and such a boy getting in without tutoring. Unless you know them or parents very well in real life. Or it’s you. In general I find parents don’t usually admit to what they have done to prepare their children.

100% agree……there may be the odd occurrence where a un-tutored boy gets in to one of the top 3 schools…..but the majority tutor….funny how so many of the “famous” tutors get booked up a year before the exams.
why on earth would people admit it, getting in to these schools is highly competitive….so you want to give your DS an advantage and hence don’t want others to tutor, so you will say you are not and there is no need and schools will find out who is tutored and won’t take them on etc….
Look at Hampstead-Hills results for 2023……the best they ever had….why….for the first time, against the Heads wishes, many parents tutored.

@ChelseaLDN I am not in competition with the OP and my child is an anecdote, so I must be lying.

It's really easy to work out if the parents are lying at this age - just ask the child! Wouldn't it be nice if the schools applied slightly different thresholds for different children without telling the parents (prep tutored vs prep untutored vs state tutored vs state untutored) and killed the tutoring industry in a year. Win for parents, win for schools, most importantly win for the children. But that's a different thread I guess.

Maybe you are lying, maybe you aren’t - the point is that it’s better to speak to people you know, in real life, or people you can trust and get some first hand accounts from someone who has been through it.

We are at WUS and a number of peers had similar stories in their application process (non traditional route, little prep etc.) and years later are doing very well.

It's helpful when people talk about this rather than the Sloane rangers in cafés pushing the serial tutoring narrative.

My good friend‘s son sat the WUS 7+ without any tutoring last year. They did some practice papers the week before so that he understood the format, but that was all. He passed. But he is extremely gifted. These are the kids that WUS want and are the ones that will do really well there without feeling huge pressure to keep up.

This is the challenge. Most people don't have anyone they can ask in real life and this makes mumsnet help.

We did as we were local and even from people you trust you get told nonsense.

People get in with tutoring and tell a survivorship bias story. We can't really argue non tutored is anecdotal as most of the hundreds applying are tutored. So most will swear by tutoring.

For us, the best advice was from parents who didn't use tutors or who didn't know process but cared about attainment.

Tutoring was a tool of the outsourcing nanny crew.

We know families who don't apply as they don't have a tutor and it makes me so sad.

Come 2026 that pressure will be a whole different ball game for 7+ and 11+.

Yes, i can call these personal, opinion, no proof stories as anecdotal...because they are. I don't know you from Adam - so why would I apply any of your situation/circumstances to my own? Because you didn't tutor your son, then I should believe that I don't need to tutor mine?

There are so many more details that are not shared, and cannot possibly be verified. What is that persons definition of tutoring? You say they got in without tutoring - do you mean without professional tutoring, but the mother was doing 4 hours every night? What is that persons differentiation between a little and a lot of preparation? Is a little prep just 4hrs a day during Oct half term, or is it 6 hours every Sunday afternoon for a year?

Point being - be wary of people sharing their stories here and using that as evidence to inform your decision. Lots of people seem very forthcoming with their stories of getting in without tutoring, very few people willing to share what preparation/tutoring they actually did to get in. Unsurprisingly...

My advice is to speak with real life people. if not friends and people you trust who have gone through the process, then your school's head, your sons teacher, a third party educator (teaching assistant, learning enrichment coordinator) Show them sample exam papers for the school you want to apply, look at where your son's school work is and see whether you think your son will be able to manage the exam. And then, use your best judgement to decide what you are or are not willing to do to prepare him to get in.

Why do you say that?

Also to add - this is not GCSEs or A-levels where you need a tutor to teach complicated concepts, for 7+ us parents can teach the kids, for example column adding etc….
the tutor that helps is the one that knows what is required to get in to a particular school….exam format, types of questions….methods….knowledge of the assessments…..etc…

Sorry, I meant WUS and Westminster going co-ed in 2026.

My gut tells me it will be a lot harder to get into from 2026, boys will be up against the smartest girls in London and smart children whose parents prefer co-ed and currently only try out for Highgate or Latymer will make a bee line for the school, given its status.

I agree that a lot of educational advice on here needs to be taken with a massive pinch of souls – you never quite know the agenda of the person offering it. However, I can’t also particularly see the point in saying your child wasn’t tutored if they were to bunch of strangers on the Internet. What would that achieve? Are you trying to make them be impressed by your child’s genius? They don’t know you

FWIW, I had two DC do 7+ – not for Westminster, which is where I went myself – but for another similar school. They were at a state primary, one had a handful of tutoring sessions - maybe five and have no idea what they did or if it helped, dc was always totally unforthcoming they got in.

i didn’t bother with tutoring for the other one as they were at a much higher level at the same age so I reckoned if their sibling had made it they’d be fine. People are always suspicious when I’ve say that I don’t think crazy tutoring is necessary and think I am hiding something from them but imo most totori g is a rip off. You can’t ever know if your childhood would’ve not got in if they hadn’t been tutored – they might have done just as well without the extra pressure.

Sorry didn't read the whole thread, but to answer your question yes you do need to prepare for the specific exam format, its up to you how you do this: its either you attend pre-prep and they prep during class time and also load you with lots of homework and you do this at home or you hire a tutor and they direct you what to do/how to do or you do it entirely yourself.

You can prepare yourself without a tutor if you have a fairly academic kid who listens, can sit still and you have the right approach, knows how to explain certain (boring) concepts in math and English to 5/6 years old kids in their language so they won't get bored after 5 minutes.

no matter how bright a kid is they can't turn up at the exam without doing some sort of prep.

.