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Tutoring, mentoring and drilling young children to help them pass the controversial 11-plus exam to access selective schools may be making kids less intelligent and the test should be scrapped, experts have suggested.
For many parents, coughing up to pay for tutoring to pass the exam feels like a grim necessity, enabling their child to access the best education available.
But experts warn that the rise of verbal and non‑verbal reasoning papers, originally intended to sift out the most academically gifted children, has spawned a vast tutoring industry, which risks turning pupils into “exam bots” rather than nurturing intelligence.
Unlike the exam’s other two core components – maths and English – reasoning skills, which focus on problem solving through words or diagrams, are not widely taught in state primaries.
This gap has left parents scrambling for private tuition, often at great expense, to prepare their children for questions they would otherwise not encounter at school.
Hours of drilling past papers have become routine, and for many families the 11‑plus is seen less as a learning opportunity than as a senseless ordeal only useful in securing a coveted school place.
The result, critics argue, is a system that rewards coaching over curiosity, money over intellectual curiosity, and entrenches socioeconomic inequality and class divisions due to the costs of private tutoring.
There is now a growing backlash against the tests, with many people working in the area saying it either needs to be scrapped or at the very least reformed.
Will Orr-Ewing, the founder and director of Keystone Tutors, one of the country’s most prominent tutoring companies, told The Independent that the verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning elements of the exam “should be scrapped”.
“They are too easy to be gamed,” he said, adding that the way they had to be taught to get children through the 11-plus meant they had become “educationally counter-productive”, and that they were “producing exam bots with no genuine love of learning”.
He added: “Their chief problem is that they drive preparation with no enduring educational value.
“If kids were putting in 50-plus hours per year into maths, reading, history, etcetera, that would be so much more preferable.”
The cultural impact on the country of the 11-plus and its enduring role in the education system is one which has long been considered damaging by critics and those whose lives have been shaped by passing or failing the test.
The website 11plusanonymous.org publishes the often harrowing, moving and frustrating accounts of people who have been through selective exams ahead of beginning secondary education.
One person, writing about the impact failing the exam had on their life wrote: “Even now at 79 years of age I am still looking forward with confidence to the eventual final abolition of the 11-plus. For me not passing the 11-plus destroyed forever the concept of a family: My siblings went to the local grammar school but I languished in the secondary modern. When I failed the 11-plus I felt gutted.”
Another account by a “heartbroken” parent of a child who failed the 2024 exam said the “enormous pressure” on her son had made some of his hair turn grey.
Kane Taylor, founder of Taylor Tuition, a service which matches students with specialist tutors, told The Independent that the reasoning papers “occupy an interesting position as [they are] among the few assessments within British education that ostensibly seek to ascertain students’ underlying intellectual capacity, as opposed to their capacity to retain knowledge.”
But he added: ”However, as with any measure, when it becomes a target, it ceases to be a good one.”
Around the country a few grammar schools are changing how they assess the children applying for places.
Reading School, a grammar school in Berkshire, has created a new style of admissions process where subjects tested may change from year to year, from geography to history. Maths and English are also tested but only on topics taught in the national curriculum, The Times reports.
Mr Taylor added: “Generally speaking, there is a consensus around the aim of nurturing independent, confident thinkers through the process of education and there are certainly questions to be posed as to whether the 11-plus achieves this in its current state.”
