Tutored to get into selective school

[Kenlee]

I am just wondering what happens to the kids that are over tutored for admission to a super selective. Then find that the bright kids can do it so easily. Whereas they struggle and fall behind.

Do they get tutored even more or move to a new school. I know some people will say school academic results are the most important and the kids should suck it up for their future. Although I still have this romantic notion that school should be fun and where especially in secondary meet life long friends. I think if your being over tutored then you may miss this opportunity...

Sorry I think my previous comments were not clear.

I was referring to superselective independent schools not grammar schools.

Headmasters report and interview are important.

Independent schools aren't academically superselective since they don't take people based on nothing but the entrance exam result.

One of the interesting points about ALL tutored pupils is that unless they are naturally organised and bright, when they head off to Uni and have nobody reminding them to do their homework,
THAT is when the comp kids who always had to knuckle down amid distractions sail past them results wise

Another stereotype... Poor tutored kids struggling in life :) I think people should get on with tutoring their kids if they want them to get into super selectives, instead of wasting time by posting on mumsnet.

Oh the glib stereotypes on here - the 'over-tutored' that gets in and then struggles - utter rubbish - they will only get in if they are capable of the work at that level, and where they are there, they have good teaching, hardworking peers and work hard themselves, they are fine. Far less likely to achieve well as these 'naturally bright' kids that proliferate on MN - innate talent is no use without hard work - has been proved by numerous studies. if a child has good teaching and is in a class of children who are not disruptive, getting A/A GCSEs is not difficult, and they still have plenty f free time for leisure.
The other stereotype is that 'comp' kid is better suited to independent working at university than a child in an indie. Again this is utter rubbish, there is far more spoon-feeding going on in comps desperate for league table success than in indies where independent self-motivation is expected. At the school I teach in, the Year 10's 'controlled assessment' was virtually written for them, the rules were 'bent; in the exam conditions they worked under. In the independent my Dc go to, rules rigorously applied, Dc do the work themselves and exam conditions properly honoured.

My DS went to a highly selective independent, he certainly wasn't tutored and didn't seem to have any extra homework from his (non-selective) prep school. We didn't give him any papers to get in. I have no idea if he was top of his classes at school, it wasn't something I ever asked him. He got straight A's and A*'s at GCSE and A levels and is now happily succeeding at uni without anyone on his back to keep him doing his 'homework'. It is possible to get in without tutoring.

There are several superselective independent schools (not many but 10-20 or so) - Westminster, St Pauls Boys and Girls, Magdalen, Wycombe Abbey, NLCS etc.

I think tutoring for these is relatively unproductive because the CAT scores or the CEM equivalent are most important.

They do not have the vast numbers of applications for grammar schools because the headmasters of the feeder prep schools dissuade parents in droves if they think there child would thrive better elsewhere. The children who get into them are often quite exceptional with results outperforming less selective schools. The majority of independent schools are not selective I agree, but there are major exceptions. In London, the ratios can be really quite high.

They aren't suoerselective by definition. They key determinant of going to them is ability to pay. Academic ability is secondary. And there are kids in all those schools who wouldn't be there if they were free.

Metebilis
marginally O/T but DH laughed out loud when I read him your comment about the event horizon of books
(he bought 200 books from the library and bought the book case on the way home ...)

We actually passed the book event horizon a long time ago here. :( I am typing this perched on a big pile of books (practically). On the plus side, we don't need carpet. ;)

I was tutored for the entrance exam for a selective girls school. Can't say which one for fear of outing myself, but it was a regional single sex school which usually ranks fairly high in the results tables. My parents had 2 reasons for tutoring I think: firstly because I'd missed a fair amount of school due to illness; and secondly because neither of them were privately educated and I think they wanted some external validation that it was worth putting me through the exam.

I have quite fond memories of my tutor, who was a lovely retired teacher. I don't think I had many sessions with him, maybe 8, and it certainly didn't feel like cramming. Mostly I remember doing past papers and then he would pick up on things I didn't know. My clearest memory was that he had to teach me long division which I initially thought I must have missed at school when I was ill, but later discovered that no-one in my class knew how to do it, which is pretty poor at 10/11.

I distinctly recall that my class teacher was very dismissive of me sitting the entrance exam and told my parents that it was better to be at the top of X school (the comprehensive that my primary fed to) than the bottom of Y school. My mum didn't actually tell me this until I got my GCSE results at the independent school and was in the top 5% of my year (she may have felt a tiny bit smug).

Quite a few of the girls that I was at school with had been in private education before 11, either at the same school or at a local prep school, but it wasn't the norm and I suspect that a lot of other kids had had some form of tutoring. However I can only think of a few girls who really seemed to struggle as they got older, to the point where you did wonder whether they had been crammed for the entrance exam. And they did seem to be some of
the ones who had very wealthy parents (I was on an assisted place, sacrifices were made for me to have even limited tutoring).

I certainly didn't feel that I struggled at school, I had no external tutoring after I passed the entrance exam and was in the top set for every streamed subject apart from maths. I mostly enjoyed school and made some lifelong friends (I had lunch with one last week). The only thing that made me feel inferior was that my parents were pretty skint compared to a lot of the kids there, I never felt that academically I couldn't cut it.

There was a thread a few weeks ago where a poster said they tutored university students. And the link above is an extreme example of that.