The real cost of private tutoring for the 11+

Private tutoring for the 11+ tends to cost between £28 and £55 an hour for a typical tutor in most parts of the UK, with specialist 11+ tutors in London and the south east often charging £68 an hour or more. Across a full year of weekly sessions, families usually end up spending somewhere between £1,400 and £4,500 once you add workbooks, mock papers and any extra sessions in the run-up to the exam.

Tutoring is unregulated and rates vary widely, so the figures in this guide are soft market estimates rather than fixed prices. Treat them as a planning starting point and confirm with the tutors and agencies you contact. The real number depends on where you live, how experienced the tutor is, whether sessions are 1:1 or in a small group, and how long you prepare for.

Hourly rates for general primary tutors sit around £22 to £32 across the UK, but 11+ specialists tend to charge more because the exam content (verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, English comprehension, maths) sits outside the standard KS2 curriculum and needs board-specific knowledge.

A rough working guide for 2026:

Newly qualified or non-specialist tutor: £22 to £32 an hour.

Experienced 11+ tutor (5+ years, knows GL, ISEB, CSSE or your local consortium): £36 to £72 an hour, with the upper end more common in London and the south east.

High-demand specialist in London, Buckinghamshire or grammar belt areas: £55 to £90+ an hour, with the top end (£68 to £90 plus) usually attached to ex-grammar school teachers or tutors with strong public results.

Rates also depend on format. Online sessions via Zoom or similar tend to be cheaper than in-person tutoring (often by around 10 to 20 per cent, though the gap varies by tutor and platform) because the tutor saves on travel, and the catchment of available tutors widens considerably.

Where you live affects the cost more than almost any other factor. Areas with grammar school selection tend to have a stronger 11+ tutoring market, which pushes rates up because demand is higher and tutors can be choosier about clients.

A rough regional picture:

London and the south east: £55 to £72 an hour for a standard 11+ specialist, rising to £72 to £108 an hour for top-tier specialists in prep-school adjacent postcodes (Wimbledon, Barnet, Sevenoaks).

Buckinghamshire, Kent, Essex grammar belts: £40 to £63 an hour. Strong specialist market because of GL, CSSE and the Kent Test.

Birmingham, Trafford, Lincolnshire and other grammar areas: £32 to £50 an hour.

Areas with no selective state schools: £27 to £40 an hour, mostly for families targeting independent schools.

For independent schools using the ISEB Common Pre-Test, tutoring rates tend to track the local prep school market rather than the 11+ market specifically, so London and home counties prices stay high regardless of whether grammar schools exist nearby.

Small group sessions (typically 2 to 4 children) bring the cost per family down to around £14 to £27 an hour per child, which can roughly halve your bill across a year of prep. Whether that's good value depends on what your child needs.

Small groups work well when your child is broadly on track, learns happily alongside peers, and needs structured exposure to the exam style rather than specific intervention. The trade-off is that the tutor can't tailor every minute of the session to one child, so a particular weakness (cloze tests, non-verbal pattern questions, timed creative writing) might not get the focused attention it needs.

1:1 makes more sense when your child has a specific gap that needs working through, a confidence issue that group sessions might make worse, or you're aiming for a highly competitive school where small margins matter. If you're somewhere in the middle, a sensible compromise is small group for most of the year and a handful of 1:1 sessions in the final two months to target weak areas.

Most families who use a tutor start somewhere between the end of Year 4 and the start of Year 5, which means 12 to 18 months of weekly sessions before the exam in September of Year 6. A small minority start in Year 3 for ISEB Pre-Test schools that test as early as Year 6 autumn, but two years is the practical maximum because children burn out before that.

A typical 12-month tutored prep looks like roughly 40 to 45 weekly hour-long sessions, plus an additional 4 to 8 mock exam sessions in the final term. At £40 an hour that's around £1,800 to £2,150 in tutor fees, before workbooks and mock papers.

Longer or more intensive prep (twice-weekly sessions, two-year programmes, or holiday intensives at £68 to £90+ an hour) can push total spend to £4,000 to £6,000. In the most competitive postcodes with top-tier tutors charging £90 an hour or more, twice-weekly sessions across 18 months can run well above £7,200, though this is the exception rather than the median (figures are working estimates based on prevailing rates, not survey data).

The hourly fee is the headline number, but a few other costs add up across a year of prep.

Practice papers and workbooks: £100 to £250 across the year for a complete set of CGP, Bond and Schofield & Sims workbooks plus a stack of past papers from your local board. Most tutors expect parents to provide these rather than building them into the fee.

Mock exams: £30 to £80 per sitting. Most families do 3 to 6 mocks in the final 3 months. Independent mock providers (Bond's, NumberWorks'nWords, Atom's own mocks) usually price at the lower end, while in-person centre-based mocks are pricier.

Online platforms used alongside a tutor: £10 to £25 a month for something like Atom Home, Bofa or CGP Online for between-session practice. £120 to £300 over a year.

If you add a reasonable middle case (£1,980 in tutor fees + £180 workbooks + £200 mocks + £200 platform), the total for a tutored year of prep lands around £2,560. The £2,700 to £4,500 range you'll see quoted online is a real number, not a sales-pitch number.

A tutor isn't required to pass the 11+. Plenty of children get into grammar and independent schools each year on parent-led prep with good workbooks and a structured online platform. The honest answer to whether you need one depends on three things: How confident your child already is in the four core areas, how much time you have to sit with them through unfamiliar question types, and how competitive your target schools are.

A tutor helps when your child is fundamentally capable but needs an outside adult to keep them focused, when you're targeting a school where the cut-off score is high and small margins matter, or when verbal and non-verbal reasoning are completely unfamiliar to your family and you don't have time to learn the format yourself.

If your child is already comfortable with KS2 maths and English at the upper end, a structured platform plus parent-led practice can deliver most of the same result for £360 to £720 across a year, instead of £2,250 to £4,500. The breakdown article in this series goes into when each option makes sense in more detail.