Why online has become the default for 11+
Three reasons. First, supply. The pool of 11+ tutors who specialise in your target school is small. A Tiffin specialist might live in Manchester. A KES Birmingham specialist might live in Bristol. Online removes the geography constraint entirely. Second, scheduling. Online slots flex easier — a 5pm Tuesday slot online doesn’t require commute time on either side. Third, materials. Tutors share PDFs, mark them in real time, save the annotations and email them after the session. The student keeps a digital folder of every paper they’ve done with the tutor’s notes attached. Hard to replicate in-person.
The downsides are real but manageable. Younger children (Year 4 or less) struggle with attention online unless the tutor is unusually engaging. Children with ADHD or strong kinaesthetic preferences often need in-person. And the parental setup matters more — a phone in the room ruins the session in a way it wouldn’t in-person where the tutor would notice and intervene.
For Year 5 and Year 6 students preparing for grammars in Buckinghamshire, Kent, Birmingham, Trafford, Sutton, Bromley, Bexley, Kingston or Wirral — and for indie schools nationwide — online is now the mainstream choice.
What strong online 11+ sessions look like
A 60-minute session, weekly or twice weekly. The tutor opens with last week’s homework — usually two papers’ worth of practice, marked. Walk through the wrong answers first. Then the new content: a topic from the maths spec or a comprehension exercise. Then 15 minutes of timed practice on that topic. The tutor watches the child work, intervenes only when they get stuck, and reviews at the end.
Between sessions, the tutor sets specific homework: usually 30–45 minutes daily for serious prep. Bond, CGP, RSL, Atom Learning and Bofa workbooks are standard. The tutor adjusts the diet to the target school — more verbal reasoning for GL papers, more comprehension for CEM, more bespoke past papers for Westminster or KCS.
Parents should ask for a weekly update — what’s been covered, what’s strong, what’s weak, what to do next week. Tutors who don’t volunteer this aren’t doing the job.
Where online 11+ goes wrong
Distraction. A child with a phone or tablet open in another tab is half-present. Phone in another room, browser tabs closed, parent checks in at the start. Tutors who don’t insist on this aren’t worth £35.
Pace mismatch. Some tutors run a one-size-fits-all programme. Your child is six weeks ahead on maths and four weeks behind on verbal reasoning, so the standard programme wastes time on both ends. Insist on a diagnostic in the first or second session and a tailored plan from session three onwards.
Material overload. Some tutors set 90 minutes of homework a day for Year 5 students. The kids burn out by Easter. The right intensity for Year 5 is 30–45 minutes daily; Year 6 it can rise to 45–60. More than that and the law of diminishing returns kicks in fast.
A family in Bromley we worked with last year prepped their daughter for Tiffin Girls online. The tutor lived in Cambridge — an ex-Tiffin maths teacher. They did 18 months at twice a week. She got in. The geography never mattered; the specific knowledge of Tiffin’s paper format did.
Pricing, choosing, getting started
Online 11+ tutors on TheTutorLink mostly charge £25–£50/hr depending on experience and target school. Filter by paper format (CEM, GL, bespoke), by target school if specific, and by experience. Read profiles carefully — the strong tutors name specific schools they prep for and recent placements. Book a free first session. Bring a recent assessment or a sample paper from the target school. Ask the tutor to identify two specific weaknesses inside fifteen minutes. Strong tutors do; weak tutors don’t. Platform fee is 5%, taken from the tutor’s side — the price on the profile is the price you pay. No subscription. Pay session by session, stop when the test is done.