Advice on home tutoring for 11+

[sheep73]

DS is in year 5. We have 1 grammar school near us and he has decided he would like to try for it. For various reasons a tutor is not going to work for him but he does need some stretching and speeding up if he is to get in!

Anyone with experience of tutoring their own child for 11+ please?

He is reasonably bright - good at maths and good at reading so if he got in I don't think he would struggle at all. He is naturally competitive so we think it would be a good learning environment for him.

His school is not really pushing him and he has done no NVR or VR.

Any hints / tips / pitfalls? How to pace ourselves? We are not mega tiger parents so not looking to spend 2 hours a day - more like 1-2 hours per week during term time and 2-3 hours per week in the holidays. He has a very long school day so trying to shoehorn it into the school day would be difficult.

Many thanks in advance.

I would start by gathering info about the school near you and understand their process and exam format. An example here: www.elevenplusexams.co.uk/schools/regions/berkshire-11-plus/slough.
You can get free papers in that format and see how your DC gets on. Bond and CGP have free resources to try on their website.

By the way it's doable at home although I did use a tutor once a week for some areas. The 10 mins tests are a good way to start.

As the previous poster said, you need to gather intel on the schools you are targeting. Then if you're willing to spend some money, I would get an Atom subscription and buy example papers from Exam Paper plus. If there are any mock exams taking place in your area, I would register DC to sit them and check and adjust based of how they're getting on. I think it's totally doable but you need to be disciplined. Good luck!

If you check out which board, there are tutorial on YouTube which go through each type of question in the test.

I also did wider things with them, sudoku, crosswords, Wordl etc.

You might not be tiger parents, but you shouldn't forget that others are - and your son will be competing against those other kids to get a place (I'm assuming it's quite competitive to get a place). I definitely under-estimated how much other parents prepared. I think it's possible to home tutor - but as PP said, you'd need to be disciplined.

My personal suggestion is that for each subject, you devise a specific curriculum to get them through all the content, as all the 11+ papers (no matter which school) really just test what is in the curriculum.

If you don't want a tutor, why not try learning platforms?

1. Atom Learning - atomlearning.co.uk/

They're good and cover Maths,VR,NVR, English, but don't necessarily have every single topic

1. New Gen Learners - newgenlearners.com/

They're good and cover every single topic but for Maths only. (They're a Maths platform)

There's also exampapersplus as mentioned above, but that more for papers only, whereas the first two platforms I mentioned teach and test you (and they both have papers, worksheets etc)

We did 4 months of weekly maths tutoring (because maths is his weakest subject and because he'd missed end of year 5 due to Covid lockdown) but it was just curriculum learning / practising not 11+ focused. Otherwise 3 practise papers and a book of 10 minutes NVR tests to get familiar with how they work (left him to that after explaining a couple of them, and he did a good number of them but no way the whole book). He's doing well at grammar but not super bright, below average for.maths (but not bottom set) and probably top half of the class for other subjects. He loved reading but didn't read many of the "recommended" books/classics that you're told to make them read.

I genuinely believe the official line that familiarity with the tests through some practise makes a difference and intense tutoring only improves results a small amount more. (Although noting we are not in an area with the super selective grammars, and our area aims to provide "non tutorable tests"). I also believe being relaxed and excited to do the test because they've had no pressure or importance placed upon it will stand them in better stead on the day.

We didn't tutor my son at all. We signed up to an online platform called BOFA which was about £7 a month, iirc, and he did online tests in verbal and non-verbal reasoning, English and maths. It sort of gamified it so he quite enjoyed competing against the clock. The explanations were good and it also did targeted tests in your weaker areas. Good luck!

We trialled Atom and Bofa and preferred Atom. If you use this code you can get a 5 day free trial and then £30 off your first month. 8XHi72y0

Anyone please feel free to use it! For transparency sharing the code does give me a credit but we are at the end of 11 plus now so have no need for it and have already cancelled our subscription.

Our son is also y5 and has been doing an hour with a tutor since Easter. She has recommended Atom too so we plan to use it to supplement the tutoring.

The key, I think, is to be prepared but not highly tutored. It’s extremely important that you look at the format of the specific individual exam and get ready for it.

My DD is sitting for one grammar school and two independents. One is set by GL, is a paper test but with a multiple choice answer sheet. It’s fast paced with a lot of questions to get through so speed is important.

Another is the ISEB online test which is adaptable so gets harder the more questions you get right and once you have answered a question you can’t go back to it. Whilst speed is also important here, accuracy and getting the right answer affects the score outcome more (as harder questions earn more points).

The final one is set by the school and is traditional pen and paper where you can pick up marks for workings as well as the correct answers. The other exams nobody sees your workings.

They all cover pretty much the same verbal and non verbal reasoning though. The CGP books are good for the traditional paper exam tests. We have an Atom subscription to prepare for the online exam.

I think little and often is the best way to prepare. We used the 10 minute tests books. After school we would do rotations of one per night and at a weekend do all the subjects. It’s very easy to spread them out and not feel like it’s all consuming.

In the summer holidays we just did half an hour a day. Honestly, I feel like she is “peaking” at just the right time (we started in Y5). She is calm, has good exam technique and is really quite chilled about it all. Her heavily tutored friends seem quite stressed out and even burnt out.

We are the only people in our class who haven’t hired a tutor. I must admit there have been times I have panicked over this in that I am putting her at a disadvantage, but then I give myself a shake and remind myself that she is a very bright girl and if she doesn’t pass then it’s not the right place for her.

Dibble, you sound like you’re in a really good place. We did something similar - about an hour a week in Y5, with a bit more in the summer holidays and the few weeks before exams in the autumn term.

I think the key for us was working out what she hadn’t been / wouldn’t be taught in time from the KS2 maths curriculum (using past papers to see what they asked) and teaching that. Only then did we move on to how to approach VR/NVR, and then finally on to exam technique, which is where Atom and past papers and the various practice books are useful. And after that it was worth doing a mock test, to get some experience of sitting in a big hall with lots of others and doing an exam.