Atom Learning publishes one-to-one 11 plus tuition at forty to sixty pounds an hour in the Birmingham area and forty to eighty across the UK. A year of weekly sessions is published at two to three thousand pounds locally, and a realistic all-in programme at three to five thousand.
What does 11 plus tuition cost?
Two public sources published in 2026 give the figures below. Neither is ours, both are linked, and both were read on the same day.
| What | Published figure | Published by |
|---|---|---|
| One-to-one, UK | “Between £40 and £80 per hour” | Atom Learning, 27 August 2026 |
| One-to-one, Birmingham area | “£40-60/hr” | Atom Learning, 27 August 2026 |
| Qualified tutor, Birmingham | “£40-£60 per hour for qualified tutors with teaching experience” | TutorLab, 1 May 2026 |
| DBS-checked professional, Birmingham | “£45-£65 per hour” | TutorLab, 1 May 2026 |
| Newly qualified tutor, Birmingham | “£35-£45” | TutorLab, 1 May 2026 |
| Twelve months of weekly sessions, UK average | “Approximately £2,750” for about fifty sessions at around £55 an hour | Atom Learning, 27 August 2026 |
| Twelve months, Birmingham area | “£2,000-3,000” | Atom Learning, 27 August 2026 |
| All-in, one child, tutor-led | “A realistic all-in cost for a tutor-led preparation programme for one child is £3,000-5,000” | Atom Learning, 27 August 2026 |
| Preparing at home, no tutor | “A family preparing entirely at home with structured resources and mock exams spends approximately £350-600 in total” | Atom Learning, 27 August 2026 |
The annual figures are just the hourly ones multiplied out, and it is worth doing the sum yourself before you commit. Atom Learning publishes its own working for the national number, “approximately £2,750” for about fifty weekly sessions at around £55 an hour. Apply the same method to the Birmingham band and one session a week across a school year lands inside the published £2,000 to £3,000. How much work a child needs between those sessions is a separate question, and how much 11 plus practice a day takes it on.
Sources: Atom Learning, the cost of 11 plus tutoring and TutorLab, 11 plus preparation in Birmingham, both checked 6 September 2026.
What drives the price?
Five things move the number, and they are listed here in roughly the order of how much they move it.
Region. Atom Learning's article gives sixty to eighty pounds an hour as typical for experienced tutors in London and the South East against “£40-60/hr” for the Birmingham, Trafford and Lincolnshire band. Where you live is worth more than any other single factor.
Experience and qualification. TutorLab's Birmingham figures separate newly qualified tutors at thirty-five to forty-five pounds an hour from qualified tutors with teaching experience at forty to sixty, and from DBS-checked professionals at forty-five to sixty-five. The premium for a serving or former teacher is real and it is not enormous.
One-to-one against a group. A group session divides the tutor's hour, and the price should reflect that. Ask how many children will be in the room before comparing two quotes.
How long you run it for. This is the part families underestimate. An hourly rate is a small number; fifty of them is not. The published annual figures above exist precisely because the weekly habit is invisible until it is a year old.
Everything around the hour. Books, printing, mock exam entries, travel. Atom Learning's all-in range of three to five thousand pounds is higher than fifty hours at the Birmingham rate for exactly that reason.
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What are the cheaper routes?
Four, and the first is free. One thing to note before them: neither source quoted above publishes a separate rate for small-group or online tuition, or a regional band beyond the Birmingham and UK figures in the table, so we are not printing one. Group sessions are generally offered below the one-to-one rate, and the number to compare is the one a provider quotes you in writing.
The published familiarisation material. The West Midlands Grammar Schools consortium says “familiarisation questions can be found at the bottom of this page which show the style of questions to appear in the test and how answers must be recorded”, and the King Edward VI Foundation states that “a full familiarisation guide is available to download”. Source: West Midlands Grammar Schools and source: King Edward VI Foundation, both checked 6 September 2026. Neither costs anything and, in our experience, most families never open either.
School-run support for eligible families. Bishop Vesey's Grammar School publishes an offer of free 11 plus preparation and key stage 2 support for pupil premium pupils on its Year 7 admissions page. Source: Bishop Vesey's Grammar School, Year 7 admissions, checked 6 September 2026. We looked for a comparable published route from the other authorities that share this test and could not find one, so we are not going to tell you it exists. If your family is eligible, ask your own council and your first-preference school directly.
Books and home preparation. The three hundred and fifty to six hundred pound figure above is what Atom Learning puts on a family preparing entirely at home with structured resources and mock exams. It is a real option and it is mostly a question of whether the parent has the hours, which is the honest trade being made. Preparing without a tutor works through what that actually takes.
An online programme. Pathway Eleven costs £49 a month, which is less than one hour a week at the published Birmingham rate of £40 to £60 an hour, and it covers every area from Year 3 to the test. That is the whole comparison, stated once: what it does not include is a person in the room, and for some children that person is the thing that makes the work happen.
Not sure which route your child needs? Start a free week of Pathway Eleven and read the Starting Assessment before you commit to anything paid.
Is tuition worth it?
Sometimes clearly yes, sometimes clearly no, and the difference is whether there is a specific job for it to do.
Worth it when a real weakness needs teaching, when reasoning formats have never been introduced, or when the work is understood and simply is not happening without somebody expecting it. Those are jobs an hour a week does well.
Not worth it when it is bought as insurance. An hour a week with no diagnosis, no report and no end point is an expensive way to reproduce what a child could already do. It is worth asking, before you book, which of those three you are going to get.
One thing tuition cannot buy at any price is a place. Scores here are standardised against a cohort and places are decided by oversubscription criteria the schools publish, so no spend controls the outcome. What is a good 11 plus score explains what the published thresholds mean, and how to choose a tutor in Birmingham covers what to ask before you book.
Questions about the cost of 11 plus tuition
How much is an 11 plus tutor per hour?+
Atom Learning publishes forty to eighty pounds an hour for one-to-one sessions across the UK and forty to sixty for the Birmingham area. TutorLab publishes forty to sixty for qualified tutors with teaching experience in Birmingham, forty-five to sixty-five for DBS-checked professionals and thirty-five to forty-five for newly qualified tutors.
What does a full year of 11 plus tuition cost?+
Atom Learning puts about fifty weekly sessions at the UK average of around fifty-five pounds an hour at approximately two thousand seven hundred and fifty pounds, gives two to three thousand for the Birmingham area, and describes a realistic all-in cost for a tutor-led programme for one child as three to five thousand pounds.
Can you prepare without paying for tuition?+
Yes. Atom Learning's own figure for a family preparing entirely at home with structured resources and mock exams is approximately three hundred and fifty to six hundred pounds in total. The consortium and the King Edward VI Foundation also publish familiarisation material that costs nothing at all.
Is there free help for families on a low income?+
In places, and it is published rather than advertised. Bishop Vesey's Grammar School lists free 11 plus preparation and key stage 2 support for pupil premium pupils on its Year 7 admissions page. We found no comparable published route from the other authorities sharing this test, so ask your own council and your first-preference school rather than assuming one exists.
Does paying more improve the result?+
Nothing in the published sources supports that, and no spend controls the outcome: scores are standardised against a cohort and places are allocated on criteria the schools publish. What a good arrangement buys is a specific weakness taught properly, which is a smaller purchase than most families make.
Are group sessions cheaper?+
They divide the tutor's hour between several children, so they should be. Ask how many children will be in the room before you compare two quotes, because a group price presented as a one-to-one price is a familiar way for two figures to stop being comparable.
Where to go next
- How to choose an 11 plus tutor in Birmingham, five questions and the warning signs.
- Pathway Eleven or an 11 plus tutor?, the six decisions, side by side.
- 11 plus preparation without a tutor, what going it alone really takes.
- 11 plus mock exams in Birmingham, what a centre charges for and what it does not.
- Pathway Eleven or Bond 11 plus books?, the printed route priced up.
- Ask for a sample paper with answers, and the two complete papers arrive in the same email.
- What Pathway Eleven costs, one plan, every subject.
Find the level first, then decide what to buy. The first week costs nothing.
Every price above, with the page that published it
Every price on this page is a published figure, quoted from the page that published it and read on 6 September 2026. Nothing here is an average of our own.
- Atom Learning, the cost of 11 plus tutoring, published 27 August 2026, the UK and regional hourly bands, the annual figures, the all-in range and the home-preparation figure. Checked 6 September 2026.
- TutorLab, 11 plus preparation in Birmingham, published 1 May 2026, the Birmingham hourly bands by tutor experience. Checked 6 September 2026.
- West Midlands Grammar Schools, the entrance test, the free familiarisation questions. Checked 6 September 2026.
- King Edward VI Foundation, entrance test information, the downloadable familiarisation guide. Checked 6 September 2026.
- Bishop Vesey's Grammar School, Year 7 admissions, free 11 plus preparation for pupil premium pupils. Checked 6 September 2026.