21st October 2015 3:00
By Blue Tutors
A poll of 7,000 parents in Birmingham has revealed that more than 60% of them had employed private tutors to help their children with grammar school entrance exams which take place this term. The poll found that some parents have spent up to £5,000 on private tuition in order to ensure that their children perform well in their 11+ exams and gain entry to grammar schools. Spending up to £50 per hour, parents are having tutors work with their children in order to boost their chances of securing a place at one of Birmingham’s 8 grammar schools. With just 1,200 grammar school places available for 2016, the competition is a fierce as it has ever been.
However, Birmingham grammar schools have expressed their disappointment at the number of parents hiring tutors for entrance exams. Birmingham’s Schools of King Edward VI chain of grammars issued advice earlier in the year to say that they do not support tutoring, and urged parents to help their children work on reading at home instead. A spokesperson for King Edward VI said that children should ‘read, read and read some more’, adding that tutoring was expensive, unnecessary and unhelpful. The King Edward chain advised parents to contact head teachers and discuss the individual needs of their students rather than resorting to expensive tutoring for exams which may not be effective.
In a bid to crack down on private tutoring for entrance exams, grammar schools in Birmingham are following schools in other parts of the country in using a ‘tutor proof’ entrance exam. Devised by the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring at Durham University, the new 11+ test is designed to rely less on verbal reasoning than previous exams, and match the primary school curriculum more closely. The content of the exam also changes frequently in order to make preparation more difficult. The CEM said that whilst no test could be completely tutor-proof, it would help students from disadvantaged backgrounds be more on a level with their peers. However, despite clear guidelines from grammar schools and the new ‘tutor-proof’ test, private tuition for 11+ exams continues to be extremely popular amongst parents.