Do you need an 11 plus tutor?

A good tutor explains a method live, watching your child’s face, and goes back a step the moment it stops making sense. They notice a child who has stopped reading the question. They teach English, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning, which Kudos does not: Kudos is maths, and maths only. They may know the paper a particular school sets. And they are an appointment: the work happens because somebody is coming on Tuesday.

Nothing on a screen does all of that, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

A tutor sees an hour a week, perhaps two. The preparation is the other six days. Whatever a child practises between lessons is marked by a parent, or by the tutor at the start of the next lesson, or not at all. So the first part of a paid hour often goes on finding out what went wrong since last time, from a handful of questions, and the diagnosis is a guess made from a small sample. The parent, meanwhile, hears that it is going well.

Kudos sees every answer, every day. Each wrong answer is matched to the mistake behind it, named in plain English, and the next questions go after that mistake rather than the topic in general. That is the one thing software does better than a person: it never has to guess what the child has been doing.

Tutor-level insight, without the tutor. You do not need to be able to explain fractions. Kudos explains every question, right or wrong, in words written for the child to read alone, so nobody marks anything. What you get is the thing a tutor is really paid for: the diagnosis. The report does not say “weak on fractions”; it says which mistake the child keeps making, so you know what is wrong and can watch it go.

For a child starting from further back, the weekly course walks the whole 11 plus maths syllabus in order, with a quiz at the end of each week, and the timed mocks make exam pace familiar before it matters.

The honest limits: it is maths only, and it needs a child who will sit down for a few minutes most days. The practice is short, but a parent still has to make it happen.

More learned in every lesson. The tutor links to your child’s account, by code or by invitation, and sees the week’s practice before the lesson: which topics, which mistakes, how often. The hour starts on the problem instead of looking for it. The tutor can set topic practice or a mock paper and read the result without marking it.

Between lessons the practice is marked and explained as it happens, so the child arrives having learned something rather than having done homework. The parent sees the same report the tutor sees, so “how is it going” has an answer with topics in it.

That is where the return on a lesson comes from: every hour you pay for is spent teaching, not diagnosing. Tutors use Kudos free, with no card and no trial to run out; the only cost is the family’s own plan. How tutors use Kudos.

This is how most 11 plus preparation has always been done, and it works when the tutor is good and the child does the homework. Its weakness is structural rather than personal: everything the tutor knows about your child comes from the lesson. The practice in between, which is most of the preparation, goes unmarked or waits a week to be marked, and a mistake made on Wednesday is still being made the following Tuesday.

Choose it anyway when your child needs English, verbal and non-verbal reasoning taught and nobody else is covering them; when they will not work without a person in the room; or when the school sets its own paper and you want someone who knows it. Those are good reasons, and a tutor who meets them is worth having. The maths practice in between is still better marked by something that sees all of it.

You probably do not need a tutor for the maths if:

• your child will practise for a few minutes most days;
• you want to know what is wrong, and watch it get fixed, without teaching it yourself;
• the maths your child will be tested on is primary curriculum content asked at speed, which it usually is.

You probably do if:

• the test includes English, verbal or non-verbal reasoning and nobody else is covering them;
• your child will not work alone, whatever the app says;
• the school sets its own paper and you want someone who knows it;
• confidence has gone, and a person needs to rebuild it.

If you hire one, link them to Kudos. If you do not, Kudos is the part of a tutor’s job that can be done by software, done every day.

Kudos is £8 a month for Pass, which is the daily practice, the explanations and the reports, or £15 a month for Pass Plus, which adds the weekly course and the mock papers. Both start with 7 days free. A tutor charges by the hour, at a rate that varies by area, and a month of Kudos costs less than most tutors charge for a single lesson.

Every 11 plus maths topic is explained in a short video on the topic pages, free, with a practice question under each one. If you are earlier than that, the 11 plus exam, explained covers what the test is and when children sit it.