There's a piece in The i Paper today about Colchester Royal Grammar School. I'd recommend reading it, but here's the core of it: a school that was once genuinely open to local kids – including one who grew up on a council estate and prepped with his great uncle – has become something else entirely.
Only 30% of children offered places in 2025 live locally. Coach-loads arrive from London each morning. And one parent quoted in the piece is spending around £2,500 on tutoring for his nine-year-old son in Year 5 alone – with the same again planned for his daughter.
"Nobody is getting in off the back of picking up half a dozen practice papers from WH Smith in the summer of year 5 anymore," he says.
He's right. And it's not just Colchester.
The system is doing exactly what it was designed not to do
Lee Elliot Major, former chief executive of the Sutton Trust and professor of social mobility at Exeter, calls it an "escalating arms race of education". Grammar schools, he says, are now "rewarding privilege and practice over promise".
The numbers back that up. At CRGS, just 4.5% of pupils are eligible for free school meals. The national average is 25.7%.
That gap isn't an accident. It's the direct result of a system where families with resources can buy a meaningful competitive advantage – and those without can't.
VAT hasn't helped
From January 2025, private school fees became subject to 20% VAT. The government forecast that around 37,000 pupils would leave the private sector as a result – and state school applications already rose significantly in the run-up to the change. Many of those families aren't abandoning competitive education – they're redirecting their ambitions toward grammar schools and intensifying the tutoring spend that goes with it.
For a typical day school family, average annual costs could rise by around £3,300 once VAT is factored in. And some of that money is now flowing straight into the 11+ tutoring market instead.
What does that market actually cost?
Specialist tutors focusing on entrance exams like the 11+ typically charge £45–70 per hour – and the article's Colchester parent isn't an outlier. Weekly group sessions, summer schools, mock exams: by the time you add it up, you're looking at thousands per child, per year, often starting from Year 4.
Why we built HeyKitsu – and why we priced it the way we did
We started HeyKitsu because the alternatives weren't good enough for my own son. But also, we wanted to create something that would work for everyone – creating a level playing field that allow's anyone to access effective rigorous 11+ preparation.
HeyKitsu covers all four 11+ subjects – English, Maths, Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning – with a fully adaptive platform that adjusts to your child's strengths and gaps. It's £14.99 a month on an annual plan. The first three levels in every collection are free, permanently, with no credit card required.
It's a deliberate choice about who this is for.
The system the i piece describes – where children start being tutored at eight, parents spend thousands in a single year, and coach trips from London decide who gets a place – isn't going to be fixed by any single product.
But making genuinely effective 11+ preparation available to any family, for less than a Netflix subscription, feels like the right thing to do.
If you're preparing for the 11+, you can get started at heykitsu.com. No sales pitch. Just see whether it works for your child.
Stephen ❤️
PS – the free tier never expires. If you try it and it's not right for your child, you haven't lost anything.