I was quite ambivalent about WGGS because of the Head's speech too, if that makes you feel better - i think she's trying to put off non-academic girls who would get in on distance by stressing all the hard work once there, and in a sense she's right, a non-academic girl might well be happier elsewhere. But for academic girls, the teaching is absolutely fantastic and really stimulating (in non-academic subjects too - the sport, art, music etc are all brilliantly taught too - i've been v v impressed). In the event, I let my dd decide where to put first when applying and she put WGGS as she wanted to go somewhere where it would be 'hard' (she was bored of work that was too easy at a fairly bog-standard, unambitious primary), and liked the school's traditions, history and friendliness. Plus she wanted single-sex.
Anyway, as I said, before she started I was ambivalent about the school as i was worried it wouldn't be nurturing enough and the head too dominating and pushy. But 6 months on I can say all those worries have evaporated - it is very nurturing, the head knows all the year 7 girls already, and contrary to her slightly steely exterior is very warm yet efficient - I'm extremely impressed with her management of the school and the general atmosphere eg zero tolerance for bullying hence there is none.
We came from the inner area, by the way, which makes it slightly easier to get in.
Re the VR, and doing papers generally, i found doing papers against her ie competing to beat me, worked wonders for my dd's concentration. She also had real issues with carefulness at maths ie lots of careless errors so I actually ended up bribing her ie cash if she could get above 90%, then gradually raising the bar - this worked when nothing else did! Re techniques, I found the videos on the chukra (11+.co.uk) site really good at explaining the methods simply. But if it's not broke don't fix it - i agree the susan Daughtrey methods are quite long-winded and not nec if your dd can do it anyway. With VR, the real issue is speed - doing 100 qus in 45 mins is tough. Plus having a good vocab - if your dd reads widely, that should help.
FiveHoursSleep - i am sure if you have a good tutor that can be as good as a good parent; just be aware that not all tutors are that good and don't rely on the tutor cariing like you do. Do test your dd yourself to check the tutor is teaching her the right stuff. I'd do a practice timed test with your dd and mark it to see where she is now - obviously you've got months to go so you don't need to stress. But it should highlight which areas she needs to work on. In my dd's case, she was scoring hgh 80's/90's in VR from the beginning, so only really needed fine-tuning. But in maths she got 60% in the first test I did with her in May of year 5 - I panicked and realised, going through the paper with her, that about half of those errors were careless ones which could be removed by obvious things like laying out her work neatly, checking things etc, and half were areas they'd just not covered in class yet so she couldn't attempt (and hence I taught her the whole year 6 maths curriculum by July of that year; not that hard actually). Only abou 2 qus off any one paper were actually 'hard'; allowing for 1 or 2 errors, a score of 90% plus was actually perfectly achievable and my dd was getting that in practice papers by Oct.