Is your 11 plus tuition working? How to know what stuck

You are paying for 11 plus tuition. The lessons happen, the homework comes back, your child seems to follow it. And underneath there is a question that never quite gets answered:

Is it working?

Not "is the tutor good" — that is a different question, and the answer is usually yes. The question is narrower and much harder: of everything that has been taught since September, how much is still there?

Almost nobody can answer it. Not because anyone has been careless, but because of how the whole arrangement is built.

Two children, one lesson, two different outcomes

A tutor spends an hour on decimals. Both children in mind here were paying attention and both understood it.

One leaves completely secure on ordering decimals and quietly confused by multiplying them.

The other understands both perfectly on the day — and six weeks later has lost one of them.

Neither of those is a failure of teaching. It is simply what learning does. No two children take the same thing from the same hour, and what they keep afterwards diverges even further.

The problem is not the lesson. The problem is that nobody finds out.

Four reasons your tutor cannot be the one who checks

This is the part worth understanding properly, because the obvious answer — "surely the tutor should go back over it?" — runs into four separate walls.

They have a curriculum to get through. There is a fixed amount of material and a fixed number of weeks. An hour spent revisiting October is an hour not spent on what comes next.

Re-teaching a whole topic to find two small gaps is enormously inefficient. Most of what they would cover is already secure. They would be paying for an hour to locate ten minutes of problem.

Your child resists it. "We've already done this." A child who believes a topic is finished does not bring much to a repeat of it, and the tutor gets a worse hour than the first one.

And you notice. If a topic keeps reappearing, it is reasonable to wonder why you are paying twice for the same thing. That is not an unfair thought — it is the correct one.

Then there is the fifth problem, which defeats even a tutor who ignores all four. Going back over the topic does not automatically reveal the gap. To find out that a child can order decimals but not multiply them, you have to test those separately — and know in advance which specific things to test.

That is not a teaching job. It is a measuring job, and it needs a different tool.

What "checking" actually has to do

A single question is not a check. If a child gets it right, they may have known it, guessed it, or half-remembered it. If they get it wrong, they may not know it — or they may have misread it, or rushed it.

One wrong answer is an incident. The same wrong answer three times is a habit — and only the second one tells you what to do.

So every skill on a topic paper here is asked more than once, each time in a different form — the same maths in different clothes. Which of them goes wrong is the finding, and it tells apart three children who score exactly the same:

• One cannot do it yet. That is a teaching job.
• One can do the maths but cannot spot when it is needed. A reading job, and a completely different lesson.
• One knows it and is rushing. A third thing again.

Those three children look identical on a score. They need three different hours of tuition.

What the tutor gets

One page, for one topic. What is secure, what has gone, and the specific mistake behind each thing that went.

Now the lesson starts at the problem. No warm-up over material that is fine, no fishing for what might be wrong, no re-teaching an entire topic on the off-chance. The tutor does the thing they are actually good at — teaching — on the thing that actually needs it.

That is the whole point of it, and it is worth saying plainly: this does not replace a tutor. It makes the hour you are already paying for land somewhere useful.

And then, later, we ask again

Finding a gap is half of it. The other half is whether the fix held.

A skill that has gone right comes back for a quiet check after a week. If it holds, a month. Then three months. Then six. The gap widens each time it survives, because something that has held for three months does not need asking about every fortnight.

This is the half almost nobody does. A topic gets taught, gets tested once, gets marked as done — and eight weeks later it has quietly gone, with nothing in the system designed to notice. It surfaces in a mock in the summer, and by then it looks like a new problem rather than an old one that was never really fixed.

Yes, your child has to sit something

There is no way round this, and we would rather say so than pretend.

To tell you exactly what your child knows and does not know, we need evidence. We are not mind readers, and a product that claimed to find gaps without properly testing for them would be guessing — you should not trust that answer, and neither would we.

What we have done instead is make it bearable. It is one paper on one topic, sat on screen, and it comes in three shorter parts so it does not have to be done in one exhausting sitting. It marks itself the moment your child presses Finish. There is nothing to print and nothing for you to mark.

If you are teaching it yourself

Everything above still applies, and rather more sharply. You are doing both jobs — the teaching and the checking — and the checking one is genuinely hard to do on your own child, because you were there when they understood it. That memory is exactly what makes the gap invisible.

The page that would go to a tutor comes to you instead.

Where to start

You teach it. We find what didn't stick. Together, you fix it.

The first paper is free, there is no deadline on it, and no card is needed. If it tells you nothing you did not already know, you have lost an hour of a Saturday. If it tells you something, you have found it in October rather than in June.