Have your children got into Grammar school without tutoring?

[Seasider]

Hi
Live in Dorset and would like son to go to Poole Grammar, but wider question is, as above, has anyone had a child get into Grammar without paying for a private tutor?

Interesting distinction. I live in south london so the selectives in the outlying boroughs (and graveney - part selective - in Wandsworth) I think are within the term "super selective" as they allow anyone to apply. (I hadn't hear that expression before).

Does it not work that way in your area. How do catchments work there? Is it they set a pass mark and then within those that pass the nearest to school get in? Or what?

Both of my sons passed without any paid tutoring - we practised at home using the Bond papers from WH Smith and they did some online practice at chuckra.co.uk (has free online tests).

Practising at home is important, because it's not just about being able to answer the questions. It's also an exercise in speed, and in pacing - being able to keep one eye on the clock to make sure you can finish on time, and learning not to spend too long on a question if it's very difficult and so on.

Our school is also a super-selective with no catchment area and boys travel from up to an hour away to come here. But our local comps are also excellent.

Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

In our area, which sounds simelar, if not the same to Custard's, whoever gets the highest 100 scores, gets the place. Where a child lives has no affect at all on whether they are offered a place. Lots of children score well above the pass mark and still not get offered a place because other children have scored higher.

Also, our grammar school is the only one in the area. We do not have any secondary moderns here, all the other schools are comprehensives.

The grammar school has accepted children from 64 different primary schools this year. Those primary (and prep) schools cover a huge area, so it is not correct to say that the grammar school has deprived any comprehensive school of bright students. The highest number of students that came from any one feeder school is four, and only two schools out of the 64 had that many. Most had one or two.

Someone mentioned that private school pupils are at an advantage with 11+ - not always so. I sent my two sons to prep school because the primaries were not very good at basic education, I always planned they would move over to state schools at 11. The prep school prepared them for common entrance, which is very different, and I had to get a tutor in on top of paying school fees, for the 11+.You need loads of practice as well as inate intelligence as you need to be able to answer at speed to get a good score. DS1 got ( from what I've heard) a very good mark at 11+ ( and got his GS place) but he couldn't work quick enough to answer all the questions and simply guessed the last few in the hope of picking up a few crucial extra points.

Hampshire is all comp - and we have some FAB schools

So what is a school that is not a "super selective" (allowing all the top scorers in). How do they work, and what areas are they in (not London!)?

Seasider, my DD1 got into grammar (selective, only top number that passed got in) without any formal tutoring but with a couple of months hard graft with Mum and Dad at home and heavy use of the 11plus (formally chukra) website which is excellant and free. To be honest, she only just made the cut off to get a place but once there has thrived and doing well while several children that were heavily tutored are now struggling.
If you are going to help from home you do need to have a pretty good understanding of both the question types and the tips to help speed up the questions as the exam papers are deliberately quite stressful in terms of timing. You also need to have a tough skin as you will be the cruellest parent and hardest task master ever. Good luck, I have DD2 mock exam in a couple of weeks.

I'm not too sure about non super selectives, but one of the areas fairly near us is an 11+ area. I really don't know the finer details, but students that live out of catchment aren't accepted to take the test, and if you pass the 11+ you will be offered a place at a grammar school within that LEA, even if it's not the one that is your first choice.

Passing the 11+ partly depends on primary headteachers recommendations, which seems like a good way to get a picture of a child's true ability, rather than how they perform on one very stressful day.

But the downside to that is that there will be schools in the area that will underperform compared to the grammars, so it is devisive and that can't be right when children move to secondary school at 11/12 years old.

Thanks everyone for the helpful comments.

Clareyst
Thanks for your tips, am getting adept at the timings and will check out that 11+ website.

Madame Cholet was my fav womble too! And good luck with your daughter's mock.

Will be glad when the exam is over! Don't tell me the waiting is worse...

I don't know anyone - and that includes bright children at good independent preps - who hasnt had tutoring to get a place at grammar school!

I don't know anyone - and that includes bright children at good independent preps - who hasnt had tutoring to get a place at grammar school!

Higgle,

I think it depends on the area you are in. In our area a lot of Indies are using the 11+ pass rates as a sellingpoint.

My DS is in a grammar school; the local grammar schools take less than 10% of each year group. He did not have a tutor. He did learn the verbal reasoning types at home and I made sure he knew all the Maths required.

You can only get a child through the test, either by working at home or by paying a tutor, if they have a reasonable level of ability to begin with. For many of the question types you need a wide vocabulary; that has to built up over the child's life, so you can't teach it in the run up to the test. So teaching at home is more about methods and building up speed.

People on MN will always bring out this myth that the relatively less academic child only got into grammar school because they were tutored and will struggle once they are there. Grammar schools usually have some setting and the teachers, like all teachers, know how to cater for a range of abilities; it is just a different range of abilities than would exist in a Comprehensive school.

You can look at the Sutton Trust for the research into outcomes; it is very accessible and not too academic in tone. The research claims that the most academic children at 11 do not benefit from attending a grammar school by GCSE results unless they are from a low income family; they would achieve the same GCSE results in a Comprehensive. The children who do benefit from grammar schools are children from low income families and children who are in the lower ability range within the grammar intake when they join the school. At GCSE, these children significantly outperform Comprehensive school children who had a similar ability level at 11.

In other words, if you are from a low income family or your child is bright but not the brightest, they will benefit more than other children from attending a grammar school, and you should prepare your child for the test. Look at the 11 plus forum for advice on how to do it.

That's very interesting Milly! I will have a look at that.

But, it's not all about GCSE results as there are other benefits to some grammar schools. It's about happiness, being with likeminded people, not being labeled as one of the 'geeks', the right type of extra curricular activities on offer, the difference in pastoral care and support, and I'm sure some other things.

The hardest thing is to decide whether your DC really should be at GS. If you live in one of the few GS / SM areas (Cheshire, Kent, Plymouth (I think)) it's relatively easy, because the comps are generally quite poor by comparison; but if you have are in one of those areas with a single isolated GS with no defined catchment (such as Penrith or maybe OP's Poole), it is much harder, because there are often very good comps also available (I think that a Reaganomic trickle down effect applies, where the existence of an elite GS ("super-selective" seems to be the MN term) acts to raise the standards of the local primaries and therefore of the local comps).

Setting aside your own social status / aspirations, question to answer is: will DC be happier as over-tutored struggler at GS, or as bright cruiser at decent comp? Guide to answering this question is: if you're happy with DC's primary, use Bond papers etc to make sure he / she is familiar with questions, then be happy with result. If you're not happy with primary, then try to fill the gaps yourself (best) or with tutor. But try to be objective: this is about DC's happiness, not yours.

Useful illustration: there were 11 in DS1's Year 6 class, and 5 went to GS; 5 have now gone on to Russell Unis, but they are not the same 5; and the one who has gone to Cambridge did not go to GS. As parents, we all think we got it right.

My dd got in with just my tutoring - but whether a child can pass with no external help (paid tutor or parental help) at all depends on the exams. In my dd's case, the maths paper sat near the start of year 6 contained all the year 6 maths - she simply hadn't covered loads of the curriculum so wouldn't have been able to work out a permeter, say, if she'd never heard of perimeters before. So we covered a year's worth of maths in about 3 months. That was the main thing. Plus she did some practice papers with me.

Of her group of 4 friends who tried for grammar school, the 2 who had exclusively paid tutors both failed. My dd, and her friend who had parental assistance as well as a tutor, both passed. In my (v limited) experience, therefore, tutors aren't as good as a motivated parent - they just don't care as much and I would guess are rather less efficient (as well as more expensive) because they don't know your dc as well as you do, so can't pitch it as accurately as you can.

You certainly don't 'need' a tutor in terms of difficulty, though - don't forget this stuff is only aimed at 11 year olds so it's not terribly hard. It's a myth that tutors have access to some secret supply of knowledge - they have the same books/papers you can buy off Amazon, WHSmith etc. :)

Jinx - the independents round here are all age 3 - 13 (nursery/pre-prep/prep) so they really don't like 11+ as they say goodbye to some of the brightest children at 11, thus reducing fee income and reducing the numbers that get scholarships into public schools at 13 ( which they need to sell the school tonew parents). I was made to feel it was tantamount to child abuse to take mine out at 11 - though both of them got better GCSE passes at Grammar school than their old class mates who went to the nearest public school.

Do you know any older kids at the grammar school who could help your child? My DS is helping a friend's child with some practice papers.

But don't worry too much about the maths. The reason the entire Y6 syllabus is in is purely so that all children have a fair chance of passing since different schools teach the topics in a different order. They aren't expected to know all the topics and the pass mark reflects that.

DD took and passed the test (didn't go).
We didn't pay a tutor, but we did help her at home with NVR. And believe me this was imperative. She went from really really not having a clue how to approach it, to aceing the damn things. They run to a theme, have to be done in the time allotted, so practise is the key.

I have also found that my dcs love no longer being known as the "clever" kids. And doing well isn't sneered at. I am not, of course, saying there aren't plenty of schools where this is also the case, just that it is a pleasant bonus in their case.

Higgle - Interesting, that is very different from here in Bexley. In our area a lot of parents who are sending their DC to primary Indies do so because they are keen to move on to GS rather than Secondary Indies. The Secondary Indies here are largely a backup for those who do not pass the 11+ and do not want to go to the local comprehensive, which is probable what we would have done had we not passed.

We went to a state primary but I had to plug a lot of holes in my DC's education from the very beginning, also when it came down to the eleven plus we did practice papers at home but we didn't really have to learn a lot of new stuff because we kept on top of things throughout primary school.

Brickingit, you are so right! I am having this dilemma over ds2. With DS1 it was easy, there was absolutely no doubt that he would be better off at GS. With ds2, I think he may well be better off at the comp. He is nearly as intelligent as his brother and I think he would stand a good chance at getting in. But he would benefit a lot I think from the broader curriculum offered at the comp, as the GS subjects are all very traditional and they offer a much bigger choice at the comp, especially when it comes to GCSE options.

There are a few other considerations too, I won't go into one too much, but if he goes to the comp I will feel bad that he won't have the same opportunities for foreign trips and things like that, and he won't develop the same 'old boys network'!

I think we have pretty much decided he will be better off at the comp for many reasons, but it's still very hard!

We tutored DS1 even though he is very bright, because if he hadn;t seen lots of those papers, he would have been totally fased on the day. She also did some extra maths with him cos he was bored at school and he enjoyed it.

Both my friend's DSs passed with no tutoring, one dropped only one mark