Atom Learning, useful? When to start?

[Coconut2010]

I have been recommended to subscribe to Atom Learning for my 10yo DD who will be sitting 11+ exams for independent schools. Some pre tests shall be happening in October/November.
Would you recommend it? How does it compare to Bofa (which I used in the past for my other DCs).
When would you recommend me starting the subscription? Isn’t now a bit too early? I was thinking about starting in September but I don’t want to leave it too late.
Thank you!

Ok thanks very much for the warning!!!

I’ve seen that too regarding peak prep and was also messaged directly and encouraged to try their free trial. Given where we are at for this year and all the other uncertainties I would go with atom or bofa as they are both used by prep schools locally.

I am doing exactly that- thank you all!

Atom is awful in my viewl. I wouldn’t recommend it. Starts off well until you start having technical issues and I find the agents are really young and inexperienced. Sometimes areas don’t calibrate properly. It is clunky and somethings just don’t make sense and find my child often questions the process and methods as they don’t make it child friendly enough in helping them understand the scoring algorithm.

Why do they also have such a tiny screen of the tutor talking in their live lessons?

They don’t respond to emails in a timely manner if at all and they don’t call you back when they schedule. I have found myself chasing constantly and whilst you can reach them on chat, they are often evasive and robotic in response with little customer service skills and you just get more frustrated and no resolution with the bigger picture. They also seem to have no senior management team or else they do their best to stop anyone from making a complaint.

I would say they totally take advantage of parents anxiety and if you join at a late stage, they know you won’t just cancel the contract if your child has started to use it.

A horrible experience.

I agree Atom has its flaws, including some wrongly formulated questions in maths and the fact they include the Y6 curriculum in Iseb pretest mocks. However on balance it's been useful for us, teaching DD to work within the allocated time, work on a screen, expose her to a variety of more challenging questions and not to panic. However, we obviously haven't been solely relying on Atom and most of the work has been done on paper.
The thing is the other well known 11+ online platform Bofa is way too easy and can give DC a false sense of security so I felt we didn't have much choice but use Atom (we bought a set of papers just to try but it was a complete waste of money as she didn't learn anything new).

For those who would like to try atom learning here is a referral code worth £30

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My daughter used it for about 6 months and got through Henrietta Barnett round 1 and has a guaranteed place at Latymer. She didn't have any other tutoring except 4 sessions in English. So I'd recommend it, but my daughter was quite self motivated. She used it about 4 times a week plus watched some of the live streams and pre recorded lessons, so I think we got our money's worth but it is expensive. Mind you all of this 11+ stuff is. The books cost a fortune as do the downloadable paper tests.