Which AI models is anyone using to support 11 plus tuition?

[ToilingAway]

Currently I am teaching my DS in year 4 by solidifying core concepts and buying online test papers however I was wondering is anyone using Ai models like Anthropic, Claude, Gemini to assist their child by creating test papers and and learning aids to improve understanding.

Or any ideas how else they are using the models for older siblings to assist with their school work?

Why would you risk it? AI can hallucinate answers. A Bond or CGP preparation book will have been prepared and proof read by people who know what the hell they are doing. Use those.

AI is crap at nonverbal reasoning. There are pretty good books so use those

Exactly this

Hi @ToilingAway !

I echo earlier comments.

For Maths and certain Non-Verbal Reasoning problems - e.g. patterns on cubes - try BBC Bitesize.

For English, reading with your child is very powerful academically and intellectually. And just emotionally special!

And try a Tutor independent of your family.

Yes- all of them can do (paid pro version for better reasoning capabilities/accuracy). Need a bit of prompt engineering/data feeding for higher quality and less hallucination. I have created interactive learning/tests for DD to use occasionally but do not rely on them because I’d like less screen time. DD also figured out a way to create flashcards automatically to support learning. Not for 11+ but general learning.

An alternative way is to just use a custom-made App and pay a subscription (eg. Atom) and save the fees for AI tools.

I used ChatGPT for my son to practice the interview. He felt more comfortable interacting with the computer than with me. And took in the feedback on his answers.

it was rubbish at the tests though as most of them are visual and chat couldn’t/wouldn’t replicate. Completely pointless.

I train AI and can confirm that LLMs are typically terrible with 11 plus type questions. They are not good at the type of reasoning involved.

I would use AI as a question generator and explainer, not as the tutor. Give it one narrow topic, ask for 10 mixed questions, then mark the answers yourself against a known resource. The useful bit is instant variation and explanations; the risky bit is that it can invent wrong methods or pitch questions at the wrong level.

Omg. Please let this be a joke. You don’t want your son to actually learn anything, just spit out AI prepared answers? Is that how you approach education in general? The learning isn’t important?

DS has started to use www.Onzely.co.uk they've got a free trial like most do for 5 days and uses AI to generate questions which seem to be good so far. NVR images can be tricky through AI but getting better each week.

As above, what works really well is the explainers, and onzely has sections on maths for DS to write their workings out which get evaluated to find where the error happened, rather than just that there was one.

AI needs careful use, but I think it's going to dominate so much of DS1 - 3 life that they need to understand it from an early age.

Please don't. I tested some content on 2 platforms and some questions were great, but some were not possible to do and so many questions had incorrect answers. This was for 11+ maths! I really would not trust it.

Honestly, just stick to Atom. Or the hard copy books by Bond, etc, as PP have said

We've used ChatGPT a fair bit, but mostly for explanations rather than generating papers.
I agree with others that I wouldn't really trust it for NVR, and I'd always double check answers if it's creating questions. Where I think it's useful is when a child gets stuck and the standard explanation just isn't clicking. Sometimes hearing it explained in a different way helps.
One thing I've found quite useful recently is Ace11Plus. After a question it gives an AI explanation of the answer and where the child went wrong, which my child seems to engage with more than me trying to explain it for the third time 😅
I still think books and proper practice papers are the main thing, but AI can definitely be useful alongside them.

plz can you share link?

https://www.ace11plus.org/signup

might be worth doing the diagnostic, can show you where your child stands and how the app could help you before you sign up - www.ace11plus.org/diagnostic

He will be going to a classroom based tutor at the start of Year 5 and we already have Atom - I was wondering if I am missing out not using Ai.

"Using AI" is misunderstood in this context. You can use it for three things for education;

• Question Generation - So you get lots of questions, but you have to train and guardrail this heavily
• LLM Feedback - Based on what the answer says, provide actual feedback on the question
• Input analysis - take what the student has worked out and evaluate where the thinking is wrong.

The other elements of AI are not learning, but get mispositioned.

This is insanity. He is in year 5. Leave the poor boy alone!

'I am missing out'

these aren't your exams. your son is in year 4? Or 5? There was a thread yesterday about invasive and over pressurising mums and I can see why! Support your child in their exams, help with revision, books, whatever else. But this is insanity.

As an educator myself it can be useful to generate lots of similar questions to the prompt, but you need to know the test inside out anyway to spot where it generates something incorrect, or off topic. In terms of learning aids it gets even trickier as it doesn't have the parameters to create from without you training it for a long time and with lots of original materials to do so, and even then there will still be errors.

This is a difficult path to tread, in light of the news this week I've just written an article on this called 'Can AI replace Tutors?', which showcases the research into what AI is useful for (and not) in education overall, not just tutors - the point of the question was because of the announcement.

One of the main findings was about Sycophancy. Large language Models bend their answer to match a student's stated answer, and the bias is stronger in smaller models: up to 30% for GPT-4.1-nano versus 8% for GPT-4o (Arvin, USC, 2025).
There pros too - Steiss et al. (Learning and Instruction, 2024) scored 200 pieces of human-generated formative feedback against 200 pieces of AI-generated feedback on the same essays.
We are at a really interesting point in this early use of AI in tutoring.