AITUTORS.ME · THE 11+
The 11+, and what actually raises a score
The research is unusually clear: practice papers alone barely move scores, while reviewing mistakes, test-taking skills and lower anxiety do. We built the tutoring around that evidence.
TWO MINUTES OF ORIENTATION
What the exam actually is
Regional, and it moves
There are 163 state grammar schools in England, clustered in a handful of areas — Kent, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Birmingham, Lincolnshire and others — and each area runs its own test with its own provider and its own rules. Independent senior schools set their own entry separately. Formats and arrangements change from year to year, which is why this page gives you no dates.
Sat at the start of Year 6, cold
Grammar-school tests are sat in September of Year 6 — the first weeks of the school year, before most of Year 6 has been taught. Independent-school assessments follow through the autumn and winter. Preparation, if it happens, is a Year 5 activity.
Registration is the deadline families miss
You must register your child for the test months before it is sat — typically in the late spring or early summer of Year 5, with a short window. A missed registration cannot be appealed.
The school application is a separate deadline
The local-authority Common Application Form — where you actually name the schools — has its own deadline in the autumn of Year 6, separate from the test itself. Two deadlines, two systems.
THE CITABLE PART
What actually raises scores
Hao, Baird, El Masri & Double (2025), Review of Educational Research — a meta-analysis of 28 studies of test preparation.
This inverts the standard advice. The default 11+ regime is a stack of past papers, and papers alone are the one intervention that does not reliably move scores. What moves them is structured work on content, explicit instruction in how to take a test, and a calmer child. Practitioners name the same failure from the other direction: endless papers without reviewing the mistakes.
One more finding worth the fee it saves you: gains from simply re-sitting reasoning tests plateau after about three sittings (Scharfen et al., 2018). After that, more papers buy familiarity your child already has.
THE METHOD WE BUILT FROM IT
The review loop
Bring the mistakes
Your child sits a paper or a mock anywhere — school, a tutor centre, the kitchen table. What comes to the tutor is not the paper but the list of what went wrong.
Name what went wrong
For each mistake, the tutor asks the child to place it before explaining anything. Five categories cover nearly everything — and naming the category is itself the diagnostic.
Work a twin, then redo yours
The tutor never hands over the answer. It walks a similar problem — same structure, different numbers — step by step, then asks the child to redo their own. The gap closes because the child closed it.
Maya gets question 7 wrong on a mock — a ratio question. Her tutor doesn’t show her the solution. It asks her which of the five it was. She rereads her working and finds it herself: she divided one side into parts and forgot the other — a method gap, not a slip. They walk a similar ratio problem together, then Maya redoes her own, and gets it. No score. No grade. One gap, found and closed by the person who needs to own it.
SAID PLAINLY
What we do, and what we do not yet do
- ✓ Maths and English, tutored Socratically
The topics the 11+ leans on hardest — ratio, sequences, worded multi-step problems, comprehension and inference — with tutors that ask before they tell. Included in PRO today.
- ✓ Paper review
The review loop above, on the mistakes from any paper or mock your child sits. We never need the paper itself.
- ✓ Timed-practice caps and an energy check
A daily practice ceiling and a wellbeing check before every session — because the anxiety effect is real marks, and over-tutoring is the failure parents themselves report most.
- ✓ Vocabulary, kept for good
Flashcards with spaced repetition, built from the words your child actually met and missed.
- ✗ Verbal Reasoning
Not built yet. We will not sell you a VR tutor that does not exist.
- ✗ Non-Verbal Reasoning
Not at all — the format is diagram-only, and we have nothing honest to offer it today.
- ✗ A Year 5–6 child profile
Not yet. Child profiles currently start at Year 7, so a strong Year 5 works on the Year 7 map — which is exactly where the hardest 11+ maths lives.
- ✗ Rankings or pass predictions
Never. We have no admissions data, and we will not invent a number that turns a ten-year-old’s evening into a verdict.
For the parts we do not do, the honest recommendation is the specialists: Bond is the only ISEB-endorsed practice platform, and Atom runs adaptive question banks across every 11+ paper, Verbal and Non-Verbal Reasoning included. We would rather send you there for those papers than pretend to cover them.
THE ODDS, HONESTLY
What you are actually entering
Approximate places per applicant, by area — from the areas’ own published figures, gathered in our research:
- Buckinghamshire≈ 1 in 3
- Kent≈ 1 in 4
- Sutton≈ 1 in 6
- Reading≈ 1 in 8
- Gloucestershire≈ 1 in 10
- Birmingham≈ 1 in 14
Meanwhile, 29% of secondary pupils in England and Wales have been tutored at some point — 45% in London — and one study found 72% of first-year grammar pupils had been tutored for the test. Your child is not competing against untutored children.
Read those two facts together and the conclusion is not “buy more hours”. It is that the hours have to be better than everyone else’s: mistakes reviewed rather than papers accumulated, a child who sleeps the night before, and a family that knows the odds going in.
ASKED PLAINLY
11+ questions, answered
Do you tutor Verbal Reasoning or Non-Verbal Reasoning?
No. Verbal Reasoning is not built yet, and we do not do Non-Verbal Reasoning at all. We tutor the maths and English the 11+ leans on, and we review the mistakes from any paper your child sits — including VR and NVR mocks. For VR and NVR practice itself, use a specialist platform such as Bond or Atom.
Is 11+ preparation included, or is it a separate product?
It is included. Maths and English tutoring, paper review and flashcards are all part of the PRO plan — there is no separate exam pack to buy.
My child doesn’t know what to ask a tutor. Does that matter?
No — the tutor asks first. Every session works through questions the tutor poses, with a ladder of hints that ends in a fully worked similar problem, never the answer to your child’s own question. Children who have never had a tutor need no technique to start.
When should we start preparing?
The practitioner consensus is Year 5, little and often — short sessions, a few hours a week at most, built on reading, vocabulary and mental-maths speed. Two evidence-based warnings: review of mistakes beats volume of papers, and gains from re-sitting reasoning tests level off after about three full sittings.
Do you use real past papers?
No. We never reproduce GL, CSSE, ISEB or school papers, and we never will. Your child brings the mistakes from papers they sit elsewhere; the tutors work structurally similar problems that we generate ourselves.
Will you tell us our child’s chances of a place?
No. We publish no rankings and predict no outcomes — we have no admissions data, and a made-up number would only add pressure. The area-by-area odds above are the honest context; the useful work is closing the gaps the mocks reveal.
Start with the part that works
Watch a tutor work through a real problem the way it would with your child — questions first, answer never — then put the review loop behind their next mock.