has anyone gained a space at a selectiive school without a tutor?

[ananga]

Hi everyone,
I woke up rather stressed yesterday morning when I started to question my choices as a parent in refusing to tutor my children for the 11+. I firmly believe tutors are invaluable when a child is struggling in a subject and their expertise can help them gain stability in an area they are weak. However, I have always wanted my children to have a natural passion for learning without the aid of a tutor. I want them to learn because they want to not because I am forcing them to. Coming for a community where tutoring is the norm I have always tried to be strong to resist it.

However, the other day I realised that all the parents I knew were specifically tutoring their children for 11+. I have spent time researching the same and a lot of evidence suggests that tutored kids do perform better. My concern is where does it stop? Children are being tutored throughout Secondary Schools too.

I know Grammar schools may require tutoring, however I have always hoped there would be more chance with the indies as many do non verbal and verbal reasoning. (I know these can be prepped for too) But recently I feel that may not happen either as in the end it is the exam that matters.

So please would any one mind sharing if they have achieved places at selective boys schools without the aid of a tutor?

Thank you

Private boarding prep may be a factor here thered
That’s a lot more expensive than tutoring

Yes it's possible but you can't take a completely hands off approach either.

You need to understand what they are being tested on. Is it verbal and nonverbal reasoning or English and maths papers? In my experience selectives usually go for VR and NVR and grammars go for the latter.

You can purchase practice books for VR and NVR from Amazon etc your primary school should be able to guide you as to which ones. For the grammar tests you would need to get hold of a sample test paper/s so you can familiarise your child to the style and technique required to achieve a qualifying pass.

My beef with this whole process is not personal ethics of whether one should employ a tutor but simply that not all parents can afford one or have the language skills or personal resources to help their child navigate this process. Child could be a viable candidate but doesn't have the same access for the reasons mentioned above. It's those children I feel really bad for.

DD got into a London grammar with no tutoring and only about 12 hours at home, just got in via waiting list. Once there academically she did very well coming top of year in a few subjects but she hated it, all work and no social life and got very depressed. We moved her to a comprehensive, academically its not great, especially as they refused to use grammar data and claimed sats lost and put her in some middle sets but much happier.

😂 Yes mrskeats.. It was!!!
But as the sch had its own senior dept and the kids did 13+ they were absolutely disinterested in helping dd for 11+

I passed with no tutor. My mum just bought me some practice papers and timed me. This was 20 odd years ago but if the concept of the exams is the same, it's not really something that's easily tutored, it's how logically you think and process information.

Agree with a comment above, timing is important but you get the hang of this after a few practice papers. I accidentally missed the back page off one of my real exams (I had 2) and still managed to scrape a pass.

With DD1 I used Bond books for a few months, however that was over 20 years ago and I don't think anyone used a tutor then or if they did they kept quiet about it. I used a tutor for DD2 (now 23) as I was working, looking after elder,y parents and didn't have the time or energy to make her do extra work at home. Tutors were seen as not unusual then. It seems now practically every child at the dd's old primary who intends to take the Kent test is tutored for at least a year beforehand.

I think the independent exams are different to the state 11 plus. We’re in Birmingham and went for both. Dd was at a failing primary but had always been bright and good at taking tests. We were not very clued up, did a few weeks of light prep for the state 11 plus and she got just enough for 2 schools. We realised she could have been better prepared in terms of vocab, mental maths and timing/exam technique.

She took the exam for the selective independent 4 months later. As she had a good enough score for the grammars we weren’t too bothered and didn’t get round to doing any prep at all, but the exam was like what she did at school - creative writing, maths, comprehension and no time pressure. The VR paper was apparently just used in borderline cases. She did well enough to get a bursary.

Our ds was different in ability - good at mental maths, a slow reader and not good at inference so comprehension not good, quite literal so creative writing a problem too! My instinct was he might squeeze into a grammar if we prepared him, due to his maths - which he did (we did about 4months work with him).

I didn’t think he’d get into the independent school due to his writing - we did some intensive work with him just to give him the best chance but my instinct was right!

I think they both ended up at places which reflected their true ability. All dd’s friends at the independent school were tutored but they would probably have got in without it!

I agree with crazycrofter. My DDs took a couple of entrance tests at private schools as a backup although years apart. They were offered places and academic scholorships. The girls said the maths in particular was a much easier paper than the 11plus. I assume in an 11plus area private schools are in competition with grammars for bright children.

Yes sue that happens in my area
13 plus also varies in difficulty wildly.

angana - which school(s) are you thinking of? Amount of selection varies a lot.
We tutored for the 11+ (state grammar) with just books from Amazon and DS got a good mark. He did sit a couple of practice papers with a tutoring school just to get the feel of things.
I'm currently tutoring for the 13+ exam for Merchant Taylors without a tutor, BUT we've only got to sit Maths, VR, English and Science. There's no way I could prep him for all the others that the prep school boys sit.

Yes, none of my three had a tutor, and all got into a selective school, 2 at 11+, one at 9+ (youngest was one of 12 who got in out of 80 applicants).

They did a few past papers so they weren't completely unprepared.

Bucks is an 11 plus area but most independent schools don’t really compete. They will take a few delicate snowflakes but the vast majority of bright children are in the Grammars. A few will board out of county or go to the one leading academic girls school in High Wycombe. Very few though. It’s expensive!

My DD took the Kent and Bexley 11+ exams in 2012. She did not even come close to passing. She did not have a tutor but she did go to 11+ classes after school (taught by one of the teachers). I also did lots of practice questions with her over the course of a year.

She went to a comprehensive.

In 2018, she took 10 GCSEs and got 8 or 9 in all of them. She is now in the same comprehensive studying 4 A Levels.

So, yes I do think it is difficult to pass the 11+ without a tutor, even if you are most definitely grammar school material. (And DD was not a late developer - she was the highest scoring in her year group in many of the CAPP tests taken at the very start of y7). However, you can still do fantastically well at school even if you are very bright and not in a grammar school.

I did but it was hundreds of years ago when competition for places was much less. It was well before the Comprehensives in the days when every local authority had Grammar Schools and if you were bright you passed.

One of my kids didn't pass because I was naive enough to think that like me she could do it on brain power alone. They don't teach 11plus on the national curriculum and without tutoring or some kind of extra preparation will not be able to answer some questions - especially the maths ones. And NVR papers are in a league of their own . Being familiar with the papers will help so at the very least get some of those.

Secondary schools round here are outstanding too so it wasn't a massive issue for us but if the alternative schools are poor then it is wise to prepare.

If it really really matters to your DC then I would throw everything at it. If like mine and your DC is clever and doesn't pass - don't be too disheartened. The smart ones will get where they want to be in life regardless. Just a different path.

Good luck to her and I'm very glad that my days of worrying about school places are over

DD2 did, she decided a few days before the cut off that she would do the test, looked through a couple of old papers (she did not sit a timed test) and got a place. Her primary school do not tutor or help the students in anyway.

Our selective have now changed the tests they do and the way they do them to try and limit how much prep could be done beforehand, a few of those expecting places this year have not been offered one.

I think it slightly depends on which selective school. If it's a grammar in a grammar area eg Kent where I believe they take the top 25% by ability it might be fine without tutoring. If it's an ultra competitive grammar on the London periphery/ commute eg a Sutton grammar, dame Alice Owens/ Henrietta Barnett then not tutoring probably means your DC's chances are minuscule. My DS got into a superselective without professional tutoring but ( big but) a kind teacher friend prepared him along with her daughter, with weekly 1 hour maths sessions starting 18 months before the exam. There were topics on the paper which are not even covered in year 6. After he started he realised nearly all his classmates were professionally tutored, and others went to a prep school which boasts if its success rate in getting boys into the local grammars. It's an arms race sadly.

I went to one of the Buckinghamshire grammars and back then virtually no-one had any tutoring at all, or if they did then they kept it very quiet. It was very much expected that if the pupil was of the correct academic fit for the school then they would pass the 11+ (or 12+, as it was then).

Things have changed massively in the intervening years though and I get the impression that however bright a child is these days, they are put at an immediate disadvantage if they haven't been tutored as they'll be pitted against so many others who have. We moved away from Bucks a few years ago but have many friends there still and passing the 11+ seems (understandably) to be something of a local obsession. The most popular local 11+ tutor was fully booked, with a waiting list, for DS2's year group when they were still in nursery. Yes really.

A lot of these success stories have parents teaching content or exam technique at home. Isn't that the same as tutoring?

It really depends on where you are, the application to success ratio and if you've applied to schools that your child has a realistic chance of getting into. If you live in an area with lots of selective then the kids will be taking multiple exams so the odds are not as bad as they seem as the school you want might be the second+ choice for somebody else.

You can have a passion for learning with or without a tutor. The two things aren’t linked.

MY 2 DCs went to the local state primary, we applied for a selective school, and made the decision that we would not get a tutor; we felt that they had to sink or swim on their own merits. After all, they would not have the benefit of a tutor once they were in the school.

Both passed for selective schools without tutoring BUT they did practice papers at home, I think it would be unfair to expect them to sit down to a test like that with no prep at all.
Good luck

I think most people are talking about grammars whereas the OP is talking about independents. In our experience the grammar test needed prep because of the unfamiliar question types, time pressure etc. The independent exam was just like what they did in school and dd got in with no prep. You would need to check the independents you’re interested in but this was a highly selective, best in the region type school.

As has been said, preparation is needed but paid for tutoring isn't the only way to achieve that preparation.

Lots of parents home-help their kids - they research the exam, buy books of ora rice materials - this can range from limited input apart from buying the stuff, to very intensive parental input which is far in excess of what a tutor would supply and far more dedicated, because the parental incentive is stronger than the tutor incentive.

Passing an 11+ having never seen a paper before or had any practice of timing or anything to do with it is unlikely but not totally impossible. These days, with very few 11+ being the Kent where the whole county takes the exam by default and it's therefore an opt-in thing, means parents have chosen to put their child in and therefore they have engaged with the idea of the exam and those who do this and then do zero preparation of any kind are extremely small. Children taking the exams with zero preparation will be disadvantaged as they are against all those who have had been prepared. This applies to both state and independent school exams.

In some of the highly super-selective areas where there are close to 20 applicants per place, being clever alone isn't going to get you in, but a LOT of preparation can get you over the line. It will be very rare for kids to get into these schools without any preparation or even with very limited preparation. Such schools attract able kids to take the exam and in order to beat huge numbers of other able kids, you need to not only be clever but also very good at working in tight time conditions and extremely accurate because a lot of the marks and very bunched and tiny errors can make the difference between a place or not - it is those who have been very very well prepared who have both the ability but also the timing and accuracy due to lots of practice. Many of those kids use tutors who specialise in those super selectives, but again, dedicated parents can do the job too. As others have said, not all parents have the interest to do the preparation, or the time, or the ability to do it or the confidence that they can do it well. For these reasons they might hire a tutor or have a tutor alongside doing home-prep too.

Quite how much prep of either the Tutor or home delivered stuff is required is very debatable. Schools themselves openly discourage tutoring or preparation but know it is rife and with the competition being stiff it's not surprising really and with growing competition and anxiety from parents, the trend looks like the amounts of preparation people undertake will only grow. That doesn't mean that a prepared child who hasn't been hyper-prepared can't do it.

A different age group but my DS got into both highly selective schools we applied for at 7+ without tutoring although plenty of others probably were . I did do a few Bond assessment papers with him in preparation and we learned the times tables he hadn’t yet done at school . Now he’s in the first year at the senior school y 9 and the past 6 + y there would have been very hard work if you’d need a tutor to get in. Being an academic sporty school it’s been a good fit for him so I’m happy with our choice back then to move at a young age bypassing the scramble at 11 and also 13 since they all went straight through to the seniors after the old transfer exam system changed . Now we’ve decided to keep DD where she is until 11 since for girls the private system is a bit different and she’s happy settled and doing well where she is at my DS old school. Hopefully doing the right thing . At 11 from her school most kids go on to very good next schools anyway .