How much does 11+ tutoring cost in 2026? Honest breakdown

11+ prep doesn't have a single price tag. A full home-prep alternative (workbooks plus mocks) typically runs £320 to £550 across a year, with a workbook-only stack at the lower end. A structured online platform sits at roughly £135 to £270. A small group tutor adds £540 to £1,350. Full 1:1 weekly tutoring lands at a standard programme of around £2,475, with realistic all-in costs of £2,700 to £4,500 and extended or highly competitive prep running £4,500 to £7,200. The right option depends on your child, your time, and how competitive the schools you're aiming for are.

This guide breaks down each option, what it really buys you, and where each one tends to fall down. The goal is to help you decide, not to push you towards the most expensive route. A lot of families spend more than they need to because they treat tutoring as the default when it isn't always the right fit.

Plenty of children get into grammar and selective independent schools each year on parent-led prep without a private tutor. That's worth saying clearly because most paid tutoring services don't say it. A capable Year 5 child with a structured online platform, a stack of workbooks, and a parent who can sit with them for 30 minutes a few evenings a week can reach a competitive 11+ score.

A tutor earns their fee when one of three things is true. First: Your child has a specific gap (verbal reasoning is unfamiliar, comprehension is wobbly, maths fluency isn't where it needs to be) that benefits from a trained adult working through it methodically. Second: You don't have the bandwidth to be the structuring adult yourself, and you'd rather pay someone to be that for you. Third: You're targeting a school where the cut-off is high enough that small marginal gains matter, and you've judged that a tutor will deliver those gains.

If none of those apply, you're often better off putting the £2,250 to £4,500 you'd spend on a tutor into a strong online platform plus your own time. The catch is being honest about whether you'll put the time in. Tutors deliver consistency more than content, and a tutor showing up every Tuesday is more reliable than a parent planning to do an hour on Wednesday.

A workbook-led home prep alternative typically runs £320 to £550 over the year once you cover the four core areas (English comprehension, maths, verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning) plus past papers, with the lower end of that band being workbooks only and the upper end adding mocks and past-paper packs.

A typical Year 5 workbook stack:

CGP 11+ workbooks: £6 to £8 each, around 10 to 12 books needed for full coverage. Around £80 across the year.

Bond 11+ assessment papers: £6 to £8 each, useful for timed practice. £40 to £60.

Schofield & Sims maths: £5 to £8 per book, useful for foundation work. £25 to £40.

Past papers from your board (GL, CSSE, etc.): £20 to £60 depending on how many years you buy.

Mock exam pack: £30 to £80 if you book one or two independent mocks.

Workbooks fall down when a child gets stuck on a question type and has no one to explain it. They also rely on you to keep momentum across 9 to 12 months, which is harder than it sounds. They work best when paired with at least a basic online platform that can demonstrate the trickier question types.

Most 11+ online platforms sit at roughly £10 to £25 a month (Atom Home, CGP Online, Bofa and similar), which works out at about £120 to £300 across a year. For that, you get adaptive practice across the four subject areas, instant marking, video explanations of wrong answers, and progress tracking that tells you what your child is weak on without you having to mark every paper yourself.

The practical advantage over workbooks is feedback speed. A child gets a question wrong, sees a quick explanation, and tries another similar question while the gap is fresh. Workbooks make you wait until you've marked the page, which is usually hours later when the child isn't thinking about it anymore.

The advantage over a tutor is volume. A tutor session might cover 15 to 20 questions in an hour. A focused 30-minute platform session covers 40 to 60. Across a year, that's thousands of practice questions instead of hundreds. Volume of exposure matters in 11+ because question types are formulaic: The more variants a child has seen, the more reliably they recognise the pattern in the exam.

Spending £2,250 to £4,500 on 1:1 tutoring across a year is a serious commitment, and it deserves a serious test of whether it's the right call. (At top London specialist rates of £68-90+/hr, weekly tutoring across the run-up year can run to £5,400 or more, so the upper end of the range is open-ended.) A tutor adds value above and beyond what a platform plus parent time can do in a few specific cases.

Diagnostic intervention: A trained 11+ tutor can sit with a child for 20 minutes and identify exactly why they're getting cloze tests wrong (vocabulary gap? Skipping context? Misreading the question stem?). That kind of root-cause diagnosis is hard for a parent without subject expertise and a platform can't do it.

Exam technique under pressure: Mock papers are useful for timing practice but they don't teach the child how to handle a freezing moment in a real test. A good tutor walks through how to skip a hard question without panicking, how to pace across a section, how to use the last 2 minutes for checking. That coaching is worth real money for the schools where every mark matters.

Accountability for parents who can't be there: For some families, the realistic options are 'pay a tutor £40 an hour' or 'not get the practice done'. £40 an hour to make sure the work happens at all is rational, even if a cheaper option exists in theory.

Where tutoring doesn't earn the fee: A child who's already scoring 115+ consistently on mock papers, has covered all four areas comfortably, and just needs more practice volume. At that point you're paying tutor rates for what a £20-a-month platform does better.

For most families, the sensible middle path is platform plus workbooks, optionally with one or two targeted tutor diagnostic sessions. Roughly £270 to £640 for the year, depending on the mocks and any tutor time you add.

A workable lower-end structure: Set up a £15-a-month platform for daily practice (£180 across the year), and add a workbook stack for £150 to keep variety high. Total around £330. Towards the upper end of the band, add one or two diagnostic tutor sessions (£60-£120) and a couple of independent mock exams (£80-£150). Total around £600 to £700.

That covers what you need without paying a tutor for hours a platform handles better. It works for the majority of children targeting grammar or mid-tier independent schools, and it's a fraction of the cost of weekly 1:1 sessions across a full year.