5th April 2019 9:00
By Blue Tutors
11+ tuition and Common Entrance tuition are the requests where, more than with other levels, parents ask for a tutor with lots of experience. Obviously experience is always a good thing, not that an experienced tutor is necessarily better than someone less experienced, but a good tutor is always likely to be better when they become more experienced. However, why is it important for an 11+ tutor to be more experienced than another?
We think that parents see 11+ and Common Entrance exams as exams where technique is all important, and a knowledge of what a specific school is looking for. Indeed we’re often asked not just for a tutor with experience of Common Entrance exams in general, but with experience of the exam for the exact school for which their child is applying.
It has been discussed before that in an ideal world exams should test understanding only, and not a student’s ability to learn the technique to do well. The strange thing is, this is probably easier with exams like the 11+ compared to GCSEs or A Levels because the younger we are the more our exams are focussed on testing basic understanding.
The most important consideration when finding an 11+ tutor or a Common Entrance tutor should be how good the tutor is at teaching. Children who do well in these exams are those who understand the ideas the best, and who are well prepared for an exam situation because obviously many students won’t have had such a formal exam before.
We obviously understand parents’ anxiety about finding the best tutor for an entrance exam, because success and failure can have such a big impact on a child’s future. However, the goal should be to help your child with understanding basic verbal and non-verbal reasoning; confident intelligent students always do well in entrance exams.