Should you tutor your own child for the 11+?

Here's a scene a lot of parents know.

It's a Sunday evening. Your child has a maths worksheet. You sit down to help. You work through it together, dusting off the maths you learnt at school, maybe even feeling quietly pleased with yourself.

Then your child says, "But that's now how we're told to do it at school."

That moment, right there, is the thing most guides about parent tutoring don't warn you about.

Teaching your own child isn't just about knowing the subject. It's about knowing how it's being taught, how your child responds to you specifically, and how much of yourself you're prepared to invest in something that can go badly wrong on a Wednesday night when everyone's tired and nobody wants to be there.

This is the honest guide. Not "ten top tips for tutoring at home" – a real look at whether it's right for you, what the pitfalls are and how to structure it so it helps rather than creating new problems.

And if you decide you'd rather hire a tutor, we've written a full guide to finding an 11+ tutor – costs, vetting, safeguarding and all the questions you should ask before your first session.

The case for doing it yourself

Let's start with the obvious one: money.

A specialist 11+ tutor in the UK in 2026 typically costs £40 to £70 an hour. In London, add another £10 to £20 on top of that. A weekly session from the start of Year 5 through to the September exam adds up to £1,800 to £3,000 or more. Some families spend considerably more.

Doing it yourself costs nothing – or close to it.

There's also the fact that you know your child better than any tutor ever will. You know when they're genuinely stuck versus when they're avoiding something. You know what kind of explanation lands with them and what sends their eyes glazing over. You know whether they work better first thing in the morning or after dinner. If they're too tired, you can skip a session and do it the next day, without any issues.

And for some families, working together on something hard brings them closer. It can be one of those things you look back on.

The method problem

This is the one most parents don't see coming.

The KS2 maths curriculum teaches specific written methods. Long multiplication is taught as a formal column method – but also, often, using the grid (or area) method first, to help children understand what's actually happening before they move to a more efficient written form. Long division is taught using short division ("the bus stop method") with explicit remainders. Bar modelling – a visual approach borrowed from Singapore maths – is now widely used for word problems.

If you learnt maths in the 1980s or 90s, you may have been taught different methods. Neither method is "wrong", but if you show your child a different approach to the one their teacher uses, you create confusion. They may end up with two half-understood methods and no certainty about which one to use in an exam.

The same problem appears in English. Primary schools now teach grammar using specific terminology – subordinate clauses, fronted adverbials, determiners – that many parents weren't explicitly taught at school. You might have an excellent intuitive grasp of the language and still not know what a fronted adverbial is, which makes it hard to explain why one is or isn't in the right place.

The fix is straightforward: before you teach something, check how it's being taught. The KS2 curriculum is publicly available. Spend 10 minutes looking at the method before you sit down with your child. It's not embarrassing – it's good preparation, and it shows your child that looking things up is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

The authority problem

Children are wired, somewhere around age 9 or 10, to push back against their parents in ways they'd never push back against a teacher.

This isn't a problem with your child, or with you. It's just the normal developmental shift towards independence that happens in late primary school. They're trying to establish that their own thinking has validity. Unfortunately, that coincides exactly with the period when you're trying to prepare them for an exam.

The practical effect is that the same correction lands differently depending on who delivers it. When a tutor says, "That's not quite right – here's what went wrong," then the child adjusts. If you say the same thing, it can turn into a 20-minute argument about whether you even know what you're talking about.

The other side of this is emotional. Children often don't want to look stupid in front of their parents. With a tutor, getting something wrong is just feedback. With you, it can feel like more than that – even if you're careful not to make it so.

There's no complete solution to this, but there are things that help. Keeping sessions short and time-boxed (20 minutes, then done) removes the sense that it's endless. Being explicit that you don't know everything and are working it out together – rather than positioning yourself as the person who has all the answers – takes some of the pressure off. And letting an app deliver the repetitive practice means you're not the one repeatedly marking things wrong.

The relationship problem

Tutor sessions stay at the tutor's house, or end when the video call does.

Home sessions don't have that boundary. If a session goes badly – if your child gets frustrated, if you get impatient, if you both end up upset – it bleeds into dinner, into the rest of the evening, into how you feel about each other for the next 24 hours.

This is the risk that's least talked about and probably the most important one to take seriously. Some parent-child pairs handle it well. Some find that anything that makes the 11+ prep feel high-stakes at home creates an anxiety that ends up doing more damage than any gap in maths knowledge.

The question to ask yourself: how does your child currently respond when you correct them on something they care about? That's probably how it's going to feel.

Where HeyKitsu fits in

An adaptive platform doesn't replace a parent's involvement. But it does solve two of the three problems above in a way that's worth thinking about.

The method problem: HeyKitsu uses the correct KS2 curriculum methods and explanations, written for 10 and 11-year-olds. When a child gets a question wrong, the explanation shows them the right approach – the same one their teacher uses. You don't need to have memorised the grid method before you sit down with them.

The authority problem: the app delivers the feedback, not you. When a child gets something wrong on HeyKitsu, they've got it wrong according to the platform. That's a categorically different thing from a parent telling them they've got something wrong. Children who'll fight you on a correction will often quietly read the explanation and absorb it – because there's no ego involved.

It even helps with motivation. While we won't pretend that HeyKitsu is as fun as playing football, chatting with friends or gaming, it is designed to motivate children to enjoy practising for the 11+.

The partnership that tends to work best is one where HeyKitsu handles the daily practice and identifies where the gaps are. Then you handle the logistics, the encouragement and the subjects you're comfortable with. A tutor – if you use one at all – handles the specific weak spots that HeyKitsu surfaces.

If you then drop from weekly to fortnightly tutoring, that halves the costs of a full weekly tutoring programme and produces more total practice hours than any of the three approaches would on their own.

Questions to ask yourself

Before you decide, some honest ones:

How does your child respond when you correct them on something right now? Not during 11+ prep – in general life. Do they take it on board or does it become a standoff? That's your baseline.

How confident are you with the KS2 curriculum specifically? Not maths in general – the KS2 methods. If you're not sure, spend 30 minutes looking at a Year 5 or Year 6 textbook before you commit.

How much time do you actually have? Not in theory, but on a Tuesday evening after work, after dinner, when your child is tired and you're tired. Fifteen minutes of consistent practice beats two hours every fortnight.

What happens to your relationship when it goes wrong? Some parents and children come out of a bad session and move on. Others carry it. Know which one you are.

The split that most families land on

Very few families do it entirely on their own or entirely with a tutor. The most common approach – and often the most effective – is a split: a platform handles the daily practice and surfaces the gaps; the parent covers the subjects they're confident in and keeps the habit going; a tutor, used less frequently, handles exam technique and the specific areas the platform flags.

That split costs £179.99 a year for HeyKitsu on an annual plan – 49p a day – plus targeted tutor sessions when they're needed rather than weekly as a default. For most families, that's a significant saving against a full tutoring programme, without sacrificing preparation quality.

If you're still weighing up whether to bring in a tutor at all – what to look for, what to pay, what questions to ask – our complete tutoring guide to the 11+ covers all of it.