London is not one school system. Seven boroughs have selective state schools and twenty-five do not, so the address you live at — not the city you live in — decides what your child should be preparing for. Twenty-four districts, and the honest position in each.
Same city, different rules. Below is the borough-level position for twenty-four districts — whether selective state places exist where you are, where the realistic routes run if they do not, and the year the decision actually has to be made. No school names, no league tables: the part that changes with your postcode.
If you are looking for an online tutor in Borough, an online tutor in Covent Garden, Oxford Circus, Walthamstow, Temple or any of the twenty-one others below, the answer to can you teach here is always yes — the lessons are online. The part worth reading is what your district changes about the exam underneath.
No selective state schools in any of these boroughs, and a different way out of each.
No selective state schools in the borough, so families aiming at a grammar place look to neighbouring Redbridge. The catchment there is drawn by postcode rather than by borough, so check your address against the council map before planning a year around it.
Havering has no grammar places of its own and sits outside Redbridge's catchment, which leaves the selective schools over the Essex border as the realistic route for most addresses. That test is sat in September at the start of Year 6, earlier than most families plan for.
Nothing selective inside Tower Hamlets. The routes out run east into Redbridge or into the independent sector, and either decision gets made in Year 5 rather than Year 6.
Same borough as Whitechapel and the same absence of selective places, but a different practical problem: the E2 addresses sit further from the Redbridge boundary, so the journey a grammar place would commit your child to is the thing worth working out before the preparation starts, not after.
Newham has no grammar places. Redbridge, immediately to the north-east, does — and its admissions are decided on distance from the school rather than on which borough you pay council tax to, so two Newham addresses a mile apart can have genuinely different odds.
Selective places exist nearby, but always in somebody else's borough.
Southwark has no grammar places, so a state selective route means looking south into Bromley. The larger local option is the independent cluster around Dulwich, where registration deadlines differ from one address to the next.
The same borough position as Borough, one stop further out. What changes is the sixth-form question: a good many SE16 families settle secondary locally and then look hard at post-16 across the river, which makes GCSE grades the thing that actually decides the outcome.
The same picture one borough east, with Bromley the nearest state option. For most families here the real question turns out to be GCSE and sixth form rather than the 11+, and it is worth saying so early.
Lambeth has no grammar places and the SW4 postcode straddles two boroughs, which matters because the nearest state selective cluster is in Sutton — far enough that the daily journey is a real part of the decision rather than a detail. Most families here weigh it against the independent sector rather than assuming it.
No grammar places in Wandsworth, so the realistic state selective route runs into Kingston, among the most competitive in the country. The south-west London independent sector is the other route and it assesses differently again.
Mostly postcodes where far more people work than live — and two that sit on borough lines which decide the admissions route.
Legal London, and one of the smallest resident populations in the country. A search from EC4 is almost always a parent at work, planning around a child who is at school somewhere else.
Unlike Temple, this is about the families who do live here — the residential pockets on the northern edge of the Square Mile. The City is its own admissions authority rather than part of a London borough, and it runs almost no state secondary provision, so applications are made through neighbouring boroughs' coordinated schemes on their deadlines, not the City's.
Theatre, retail and offices, with a small resident population split across two boroughs. Whatever you are preparing for here usually belongs to the borough the family actually lives in.
Almost purely commercial ground. What a search from W1 needs is not a tutor nearby but a lesson slot that survives a working day, which is the thing online tutoring is genuinely good at.
Camden has no grammar places, but Holborn sits at the south end of a borough whose northern edge meets Barnet — one of the few London boroughs that does. Whether that route is open to you is decided by distance, so it is worth checking rather than assuming either way.
The one W1 postcode with a substantial resident population, which makes it the one where the question is admissions rather than scheduling. Westminster has no selective state places, so the routes are the independent sector or Barnet to the north — and Barnet is far enough that most families here treat it as a stretch rather than a plan.
A postcode split down the middle of two boroughs, neither of which has selective state places. The practical consequence is administrative rather than academic: which council you apply through depends on which side of the line you live, and the deadlines are not identical.
The densest independent sector in the country, no state grammar places behind it, and one borough with no selective neighbour at all.
No selective state schools in the borough at all, and the highest concentration of independent schools in the country sitting where they would be. That makes the timetable the deciding factor: independent assessments run to their own dates, and several of them fall a full year before the state 11+ your neighbours are talking about.
The SW1 and SW7 addresses here fall across two boroughs, neither with grammar places. Families preparing from Knightsbridge are almost always sitting independent assessments rather than a council-run test, which changes what practice is worth doing — the formats are set by the schools, not standardised across a consortium.
Same borough position as Kensington, with more families staying in the state sector through primary and deciding late. Deciding late is the risk: by the time the independent timetable is obvious it is often too late to prepare properly for it, so the choice is worth making in Year 4.
Ealing has no grammar places, and unlike most of London there is no neighbouring borough that does. The state selective routes families here look at are outside Greater London altogether, in Buckinghamshire and Berkshire, which puts them on different tests, different dates and different registration systems from anything a London council runs.
The one part of the city where a grammar place can be genuinely local — for some addresses.
The most useful thing on this page for an NW3 address: Camden has no selective state schools, but Barnet does, and Hampstead sits on the boundary between them. Which side of the line you are on is not a technicality — it is the difference between a realistic state selective route and no state selective route at all, and it is worth establishing before anything else.
No grammar places in the borough. The two directions that have them are Barnet to the north-west and Redbridge to the east, and both are far enough that most Islington families treat the independent sector or a strong local comprehensive as the primary plan rather than the fallback.
The same borough as Islington and the same absence of selective places, but a much smaller and more central resident population. EC1 searches split fairly evenly between families who live here and parents working here whose children are at school elsewhere.
Not on the list? The shape of the answer is usually the same, and the London tutoring page covers the citywide picture. For the exams themselves, see 11+ preparation, when to start and how the GL format works.
London has no shortage of tutors. It has a shortage of hours that do not disappear into travel, and of straight answers about what your address actually allows.
From £15 an hour for the 11+ and KS3, £20 at GCSE and £25 at A-Level — the same rate in Zone 1 as in Zone 5, with no agency fee on top.
Lessons run on Google Meet in the browser, nothing to install. An hour of tutoring costs you an hour, not an hour plus the travel either side.
Matched to the exam your child is actually sitting rather than to the nearest postcode, so the plan carries over from one lesson to the next.
Evenings and weekends are available, and you can reschedule free with 24 hours' notice when a week goes sideways.
One full lesson with an assessment of where your child stands. No card details, no obligation, and nothing to cancel afterwards.
If your postcode does not open the route you were hoping for, we will say so at the demo rather than sell you a year of the wrong preparation.
Nobody is looking for a tutor in EC4 or W1. A search from a central London postcode is usually a parent at work, looking for something that will still be true when they get home.
So the answer is scheduling, not geography. Lessons happen wherever your child is, with the same tutor each week, and you get a short note afterwards on what was covered — the part that matters when you were not in the room. How it works walks through the first fortnight, and what happens in a lesson is worth five minutes if this is new.
The 11+ is the one exam where your address changes the answer. After it, what matters is the exam board your child’s school picked, and London schools pick subject by subject.
GCSE, A-Level and KS3 lessons are taught to that exact specification, with past paper practice from the first month. English is where we see the most avoidable damage, because nothing about Year 8 English feels urgent at the time. For the 11+ itself, verbal and non-verbal reasoning matter most, and standardised scores explain how the results are calculated.
Full rates are on the pricing page, and what a tutor costs in the UK puts London’s going rate in context.
Bring your address and the schools on your list to the free demo class and we will map the routes genuinely available before any lessons are booked.
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