Alternatives to a Professional Tutor
You do not necessarily have to hire a professional tutor – an older secondary school or college student is an option that can be successful as well. A student cannot replace a qualified teacher or experienced tutor, but they are likely to be a much cheaper option, and your child may enjoy working with another young person rather than an adult. In some cases children have been successfully tutored for the 11+ by an older brother or sister.
If you decide to employ a student to help your child, then a good introduction to getting the best of out of them would be to use our 11+ preparation advice for DIY/home tutoring. That will help you to plan how best to use the student’s time.
You will need to provide appropriate practice materials for the student to use and you can find out what those should be from our 11 Plus Schools section. You will also need to have the time to supervise the tutoring sessions to some degree. The student should be able to help your child with English and maths from their own experience, so do check their ability in both areas.
If the 11+ test includes Verbal Reasoning you will need to ensure that you provide the student with guidance on good techniques for answering the questions. If the Verbal Reasoning test is the most common one, set by National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), with either 15 or 21 question types, a good investment is a copy of the IPS 11 plus Verbal Reasoning Method and Technique Guide for Parents and Pupils. If the test is not set by NFER there are a number of useful “how to” guides to verbal reasoning from other publishers available in our bookshop.
There are no equivalent guides to Non-Verbal Reasoning, but individual workbooks usually contain tips and strategies for solving Non-Verbal Reasoning questions.
