Tutoring for the 11-Plus: Is It Necessary and What Does It Cost?

11-plus tutoring costs most families between £40 and £80 an hour, which works out at roughly £2,750 for a year of weekly sessions and £3,000 to £5,000 for a full programme in a high-demand selective area. Whether it is money well spent depends almost entirely on one question that nobody asks early enough: what is the tutor doing that you could not?

This page sets out what tutoring actually costs, what you get for it, the free official material almost nobody opens, and the points at which paying more stops buying anything.

What it costs

There is no fixed market rate. Tutoring is unregulated, prices are set locally, and the gap between the cheapest and dearest tutor in the same town is often two to one. The pattern that does hold is regional: rates track how competitive the local selective system is.

Turn that into a year. One session a week from the start of Year 5 to the test in early Year 6 is roughly 50 sessions once holidays are taken out. At a mid-range hourly rate that is about £2,750. In London and the grammar-heavy commuter belt, £3,000 to £4,500 is the ordinary range for the same thing, and families who add a second weekly session or an intensive summer course go well past it.

Three cheaper routes exist and are worth pricing properly before you commit:

• Small group tuition. Typically a third to a half of the one to one rate per child. Most of an 11-plus session is timed practice and then going through the mistakes, which works perfectly well with four or five children in the room.
• Online one to one. Usually cheaper than in-person in expensive areas, because you are no longer paying for a tutor's travel time or a local monopoly. It also widens the pool beyond whoever happens to live nearby.
• Parent-led with published papers. A structured set of practice books, a stack of past papers and a timer comes to a few hundred pounds in total, in the region of £350 to £600 for a full programme. That is the true baseline every tutoring quote should be compared against.

How common is tutoring, really?

Common enough that the "everyone else is doing it" pressure is not imagined, but not universal. The Sutton Trust's Private Tutoring 2026 research found that 29% of secondary school pupils in England and Wales have had private tutoring at some point, up from 18% two decades ago. The geography is stark: 45% in London against 27% in the rest of England. And it splits by income, with 30% of pupils from better-off households tutored against 23% of disadvantaged pupils.

Two things follow. If you are in London or a grammar county, a good share of the children sitting alongside yours will have had paid help, and that is a fair thing to factor in. If you are not, the local norm is very different and the pressure you are feeling may be coming from a forum rather than from your own catchment.

What a tutor actually gives you

Almost nothing a tutor teaches is beyond a competent parent with the right books. What you are really buying is four things:

• Structure. A sequenced plan across twelve months so nothing is left until August.
• Marking and diagnosis. Not just a score, but which question types are failing and why. This is the part parents most often get wrong, because it is easy to mark a paper and hard to see the pattern in the errors.
• Accountability. A weekly appointment somebody else is running removes the negotiation from your kitchen table.
• Format knowledge. Someone who has seen the specific test your target schools use, and knows where children lose marks on it.

If you can supply the first three yourself, you are paying a specialist rate for something you already own. If you cannot, that is a completely legitimate reason to hire one, and it is a better reason than anxiety.

The free material most families never open

Before spending anything, use what the test setters publish. Kent County Council puts out a Kent Test familiarisation booklet as a free PDF and links to free familiarisation materials from GL Assessment. Kent also states plainly what the papers contain: an English and maths paper of one hour, a reasoning paper of about an hour covering verbal and non-verbal reasoning, and a 40 minute writing exercise which is not marked but may be used by a headteacher panel.

That last detail is the sort of thing families pay tutors to tell them, and it is on the council's own website. Most selective areas publish something equivalent. Read your own area's version before you buy a single practice book, because it tells you what to prepare for and, just as usefully, what not to.

Choosing a tutor without getting stung

Tutoring in the UK is unregulated. There is no licence, no compulsory qualification and no register you can check, so every check is yours to make.

• Ask to see a current enhanced DBS certificate and look at the date on it. Do not accept "I have one".
• Ask which test format they prepare for, by name, and check it against your target schools' admissions policies. Preparing for the wrong provider is the most expensive mistake available.
• Ask for two contactable parent references from families who applied to the same schools you are targeting.
• Ask how they report progress. A tutor who marks papers but never shows you the marked work is selling reassurance, not teaching.
• Get the cancellation and payment terms in writing before the first session, including what happens over school holidays.

Walk away from anyone guaranteeing a pass, anyone claiming inside knowledge of the actual paper, and anyone who will only sell a full year up front. Ask about qualifications by all means, but weigh recent, specific 11-plus experience above a general teaching background: the test is a narrow thing and familiarity with it matters more than a broader CV.

When tutoring is worth it, and when it is not

Worth considering: a specific identified weakness, particularly non-verbal reasoning, which many primary schools never touch; an unfamiliar or bespoke test format; a home dynamic where practice has turned into a weekly argument; a child joining the process late and needing a compressed plan.

Probably not worth it: a child already scoring comfortably above the threshold on timed papers; a family that can supply structure and honest marking; a target school whose entry standard is realistically out of reach, where more tutoring buys disappointment rather than a place.

Set a stopping rule at the start. If the child is consistently over the threshold under proper timed conditions, reduce or stop. If the sessions have become the main source of stress in the house, stop. Continuing to pay because stopping feels like giving up is the most common way families end up spending £5,000 on the 11-plus.

Fitting it into the year

Tutoring only helps if it starts at the right point in the cycle, and the cycle is fixed by registration and test dates rather than by when you feel ready. Our guide to when to start 11-plus preparation sets out what belongs in each school year and the deadlines that cannot move. For the wider process, the Schools Insight homepage is the place to check catchments, admissions criteria and school data before you commit money to any of it.

Frequently asked questions

How much does an 11-plus tutor cost?

One to one 11-plus tutoring generally runs between £40 and £80 an hour in the UK, with London and the South East at the top of that range and areas such as Birmingham, Trafford and Lincolnshire nearer the bottom. At one session a week for around a year, roughly 50 sessions, that is about £2,750 at a mid-range rate, and £3,000 to £5,000 is common for a full programme in a high-demand area.

Do you need a tutor to pass the 11-plus?

No. A tutor buys structure, marking and accountability rather than knowledge a parent cannot supply, and plenty of children qualify on parent-led preparation using published practice papers. A tutor earns its money where there is a specific weak area, where home practice has become a fight, or where the target school uses a format nobody in the house understands.

Is group tuition as good as one to one?

For most children it is good enough and costs a fraction as much, because the bulk of an 11-plus session is timed practice and then going over the mistakes, which works fine in a small group. One to one earns its premium where a child has a specific gap, needs the pace slowed down, or has anxiety that a group setting makes worse.

Are 11-plus tutors regulated?

No. Private tutoring in the UK is unregulated: there is no licence, no compulsory qualification and no register. That makes the checks yours to do. Ask for a current enhanced DBS certificate and see it, ask for two contactable parent references from the same target school, and ask which specific test format they prepare for.

What can we use instead of a tutor?

Start with the free official material. Kent County Council publishes a Kent Test familiarisation booklet as a free PDF and links to free familiarisation materials from GL Assessment, and most selective areas publish something equivalent. Beyond that, a set of published practice papers, a timer and a parent who marks them properly covers most of what a tutor does, at a total cost of a few hundred pounds.

When should we stop tutoring?

Stop when the child is consistently scoring above the threshold on timed papers under proper conditions, when the sessions have become the main source of stress in the house, or when the target school is not realistic and everyone is avoiding saying so. Paying for another term to feel reassured is a common and expensive mistake.