By Kate Knowles
On the morning of Tuesday 15 October 2024, parents from across Birmingham logged into the elevenplusexams.co.uk forum. The topic of discussion that day was exam results — and nerves were running high. One knowledgeable poster informed the rest that the scores should arrive in inboxes by mid-morning. “That’s reassuring,” wrote a parent, reflecting on their experience two years previously. “I don’t think I’d be able to concentrate on my work if it was late afternoon again!!”
Clearly, a lot of anxiety surrounds getting into a local grammar school — especially King Edward’s. Established as a single boys school in the 16th Century, today the King Edward VI Foundation has grown into a prestigious umbrella organisation. It includes two independent schools, six grammars and six academies — including my old school, which was converted from a state comprehensive in 2011. The Foundation’s website boldly declares its mission to make Birmingham “the best place to be educated in the UK.”
This reputation is, as the former head teacher of King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Girls, Linda Johnson tells me, down to the emphasis on academic excellence combined with extra-curricular opportunities. “The expectation [at Camp Hill] that all students participate in life beyond the curriculum, be it Music, Sport, Drama, charities etc. is something most parents feel is essential to developing as a well-rounded, confident young person and something students engage with,” she says.
With three of the grammar schools making the top five of The Times’ best West Midlands state schools league table for 2025, families are falling over themselves to get in. While those children who do get accepted are no doubt thrilled that their hard graft paid off, behind the scenes is a cast of warring parents and frazzled tutors whose lives are temporarily turned upside down in the pursuit of a King Ed’s education.
Last year, 6,500 pupils from across the city applied to the grammars, fighting for just 962 places in September 2025. That lopsided ratio has been consistent for the past five years and doesn’t seem to be changing any time soon. Competition is fierce and, since Labour announced its plans to hike VAT on private schools, expected to get all the more intense. Compounding this filial frenzy is the fact that, since 2020, the Foundation has taken greater steps to help more disadvantaged pupils get admitted, which some parents are reportedly very unhappy about. To meet this demand, there is a healthy tutoring sector, ranging from freelancers who teach from their homes and online, to larger chain companies situated on local high streets that promise to get primary school pupils up to scratch in time for the 11+ exam. The stakes are high and the parents are prepared to pay — but what does it cost the tutors?
Aaron Dhunna, the managing director of Key Stages Online (KSOL), which has four tuition centres in Birmingham including one in Harborne, says that with the Covid pandemic normalising online education, business has ramped up. But, the landscape has also changed dramatically since he began tutoring in 2002. Then, there were about 900,000 pupils living in the catchment areas for King Ed’s schools. Today that has swelled to about 1.3 million. “Competition is going to increase and Birmingham is quite fortunate because we have a rich set of grammar schools — naturally parents want to look at those.”
The demographics have also shifted — KSOL is seeing a lot more pupils from the African black community and Asian communities, especially from Chinese backgrounds. “This is reflective of the wider population of Birmingham, so no surprises there,” says Aaron. “And a lot of ethnic minorities do put a big emphasis on education.” KSOL’s focus is on improving Maths and English, whether the kids want to go to grammar school or not, and input from parents is a big factor in the success of the young people. But for other tutors, that’s precisely the aspect of the job that has proved most challenging.
Karen O’Rourke spent 30 years giving tuition to small groups of pupils from her living room. 11+ preparation was just one of the services she offered, and she gained a reputation for success that travelled by word of mouth at the school gates. Three years ago, however, Karen hung up her marking pen, in large part, she tells me, because of the increasing pressure piled on her by desperate parents.
She says there was a “particularly virulent strain” of parent: “All they were interested in was their child passing the test, they didn’t care how it was done, they just wanted to pay for it.” Each year, as the end of summer term drew near, angry phone calls from fathers, unhappy with their child’s performance at school and concerned about their chances of passing the test, increased. There was especially an issue for those children who were not, in Karen’s professional opinion, ready to prepare for the 11+ or the private school exam. Often, they didn’t want to take no for an answer.
“I had parents showing up at my door, sometimes with the child in hand and I had to say to them, ‘You can’t do this, it’s not reasonable’. I would have to speak to the child and say, ‘Mummy and I, we’ve had a misunderstanding.’” On one occasion, a mother was so unhappy to hear Karen tell her that her son was below average and needed help with his English, that she spat in Karen’s face. “I was very upset,” she says. “I said to her, ‘Your poor child, you’re not recognising that he has needs and what he doesn’t need is to be prepared intensively for this test.’”
According to Karen, many of her clients were angry in 2020, when the King Edward VI Foundation changed its admissions policy to further widen access to the schools. Under these new rules, 25 percent of places at the six schools were made available to Pupil Premium students — those who are either in care or on free school meals at their primary school. This means that disadvantaged pupils can access a grammar school place with a score considerably lower than what was required before the introduction of this policy, but still higher than the average point score, meaning that the students are still academically able. The use of catchment areas guarantees these pupils a place at their local grammar school if they achieve the qualifying score.
“Families were all aware that parents who were self-employed were getting their kids in by claiming they were earning less than they were,” says Karen. “One very wealthy couple separated so they could say they were single income.” That anxiety often gets passed onto the children themselves, with Karen saying she would do her best to make sure sessions were fun and pressure-free. Still, this didn’t stop some children from bursting into tears and she would feel compelled to have a word with their parents.
Splitting up, spitting in faces, crying kids — these accounts bring a soap opera’s flair to what I once thought was a dull topic. But it isn’t just tutors who are coming to loggerheads with moms and dads — they’re falling out with each other too. One father, who wishes to remain anonymous, tells me his stance against selective education goes back to his upbringing as a bright working-class Brummie. Many of his friends shared his views, or so he thought. When the time came for their own kids to go to secondary school, he was shocked to find out his mates were forgetting their roots and doing everything they could to get their children into a grammar.
“It’s caused a lot of arguments,” he says, and some relationships have been irreversibly changed. “It’s a tricky discussion to have because we all want the best for our kids but if we perpetuate this selectiveness, we have to think more broadly than ourselves and about how to make society better.”
For others, however, if the system is already broken it’s a matter of using it to get your children the best possible chance. James Bolle lives in Harborne with his wife Ruth and their two daughters, 11-year-old Martha and eight-year-old Pru. Having passed the 11+ in the autumn, Martha has secured herself a coveted King Ed’s spot. For James, the decision to enter Martha into the marketplace for education was carefully made, and one at odds with his politics.
“When I’m a couple of pints in, at the pub with my friends, my position is somewhere between arguing that grammar schools shouldn’t exist, and that there should be a tutoring tax of at least £200 on those families that use tutors, which gets paid into the comprehensive school system,” he says. That’s a pretty radical measure, for which James and Ruth themselves would be liable. To help Martha prepare for the 11+, they secured the help of a private tutor who gave her one-to-one online lessons for two hours a week from the end of Year Four. “Lots of people told us it was too late,” James explains.
This input from other parents sounds inescapable in their neck of the woods (James refers to it as “the Harborne bubble”). One person, who James describes as “an idiot”, recently told him that “you only need to look at the kinds of children waiting for the bus outside Harborne Academy to know it’s not the kind of place you want to send your children to.” On the other hand, another parent tells me that those who are against selective education say the opposite: that they wouldn’t want their children learning alongside the kind of privileged kids who go to grammars.
Whether you’re desperate for your children to pass the 11+ or staunchly against the entire charade, deciding where to send them for secondary in Birmingham is clearly a minefield. What is obvious is the King Edward VI brand is going nowhere. The Foundation has aspirations to expand its number of academies, to share “excellence” from across all of its schools. You never know, your local comp could be next.
Comments