James Allen’s Girls’ School (JAGS) Entrance Guide

Richard was a fabulous tutor. Our children really enjoyed working with him and he helped them to achieve all of their goals, including succesful entry to our first choice school through a very competitive process.

Amy helped prepare our daughter for her 7+ and kept her thoroughly engaged throughout the sessions and improved her maths and English comprehension in particular.

Frankie is very patient, professional, flexible and creative to make the lessons fun. The usual tasks that my child did not enjoy doing at school was really fun to do with Frankie. We would recommend Frankie to other families.

Frankie is wonderful. Diligent, patient, kind and so committed to the girls. We consider ourselves very lucky to have found her.

Sobia has been such a help - she is patient and explains concepts in a clear manner. My daughter has really grown in confidence and her maths has improved significantly as has her non-verbal reasoning. What is more my daughter comes away from her sessions with Sobia saying how much she has enjoyed the hour!

I wanted to write to you to tell you how pleased we were with the results we got from working with Josh who you introduced us to start of 2021. My daughter was in year 5 at the time so we were relatively late to tutoring compared to some of her peers. Though our daughter had a good grounding and support from her prep school I know that working with Josh was a huge factor in her success. She’s just had offers from CLSG, Jags, Alleyn's, Sevenoaks and an academic scholarship at St Dunstan’s. The first three would have been considered stretch options for her when we started the process. If you ever want me to do a reference for Josh I’d be delighted to as our experience has been great. We didn’t do any extra work with our daughter ourselves so Josh did all the out of school work. As well as making sure she was confident on the basics and techniques required generally he proactively worked with her on past papers for specific schools - for example highlighting the different approach to some maths questions for City and what they were looking for. His style also worked really well for us as he’s very calm about the whole process and was able to make her feel comfortable very quickly. She really enjoyed working with him and remained enthusiastic about her lessons throughout which made everything easier for me! Thank you to you too Lawrence for finding Josh for us.

Isabel was an excellent guide for our daughter in her 11+ preparations. More than the whole preparation aspect, what I was really thankful for was she helped our daughter build a strong foundation in the English language which I believe will go a long way, especially in her secondary education. Also, as our daughter was naturally very creative, she was able to channelise that skill by giving it more structure and format. I was just amazed and blown away by some of our daughter's recent creative writing pieces. Isabel's guidance definitely made that difference. She also taught our daughter the art of precision which was handy in her comprehension exercises. Most importantly, she made the whole process fun and engaging and our daughter loved her classes with Isabel. She worked with our daughter for over a year and at the end of this engagement, I can confidently say that our daughter has a strong hold and a genuine love for the language. Our daughter made it to many top schools in London including CLSG and Godolphin & Latymer that we are having a tough time choosing. Overall, we really appreciate her efforts and are thankful to Isabel especially as we are not native English speakers.

Emily has been tutor to our two primary school-aged children for almost 3 months now, as they sit entrance exams for prep school. We selected Emily after setting up trial lessons with several tutors, and found her to be the most naturally engaging as an educator and communicator, both with her pupils and with us as parents. Our children see Emily weekly and describe her as very warm and friendly. They enjoy her lessons as she keeps their attention by mixing things up and using different approaches. In terms of entrance exams, Emily is not only covering the written paper elements including sample papers and homework at stages, to assess their progress, but she also provides interview practice. Our daughter had a very good mock interview recently, the evening before her actual first one, and it was particularly useful since with COVID, the real interview was also via video. Emily covers all aspects of the interview including body language and behaviour as well as content. This was incredibly useful. As a parent of young children, Emily- both as a teacher and as a parent herself- has provided invaluable tips regarding the approach to learning. She explains things very well, is extremely patient but also knows when to be firm if needed. We would highly recommend her.

Our daughter enjoyed working with Jay very much! In fact, we've asked him today if he may be free a couple days over half term.

I initially contacted Owl Turtors in a panic as my daughter was due to take the 13+ common entrance exam in 7 weeks and was feeling unprepared and was lacking in confidence. Owl put us in touch with Sobia for online tutoring sessions. As my daughter had never participated in online tutoring she was a little apprehensive about how this would work however she needn’t have worried because within 15 minutes of meeting Sobia she felt totally at ease with her. Sobia quickly identified my daughters strengths and also the areas that she needed to work on. She taught her some excellent exam techniques and also built up her confidence. The quality of tutoring that Sobia delivers is of such a high standard and it was a pleasure to observe how she would guide the child to discover the answer themselves instead of just providing them with the answer. Sobia is very personable, patient and friendly and although she is a master in her field she tutors with such a calm, kind and fun manner my daughter really did not want the sessions to end. I felt that every minute of the session was spent learning; there was never any time wasted and if I ever needed to talk to Sobia she would ensure this was done before the session started or after it had ended. My daughter went on to pass both of her exams and has so far received 1 offer and we have our fingers crossed for the 2nd. I would not hesitate to utilise Sobia again in future.

I think Hannah is absolutely brilliant. She’s really stretching our daughter and has a wonderful calm manner with her. She’s also always extremely punctual and professional. If she has another slot come available I’d take it as we are fortnightly but she is full at the moment.