The 11-plus can “never be tutor-proof”, a major grammar school exam board has admitted, as one of the last remaining selective counties announced it was abandoning its five-year experiment with tests designed to be immune from coaching.
All 13 of Buckinghamshire County Council’s grammar schools are to re-instate GL Assessment as their 11-plus provider, despite axing it five years ago amid concern that its questions were predictable and therefore favoured wealthy parents who could pay for extra tuition.
From September 2018, exams written by GL Assessment will replace the current 11-plus papers, which are designed by the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM) at Durham University in a way that is meant to be unpredictable and therefore harder to prepare for. Read more