Parents demand 11-plus coaching for two-year-olds

London tutors are being asked to coach infants to pass entrance exams for grammar school and university.

Parents of children as young as two and three are trying to hire teachers to prepare them for the tests.

One London firm said the number seeking tuition for the 11-plus has almost doubled in the past year as pressure on places increases.

William Stadlen, of Holland Park Tuition, said: "Last Christmas I did a consultation with a family in Hampstead for a two-year-old. Their opening gambit was: "Have we left it too late for Cambridge?" I had to tell them to calm down."

He added that he also recently turned away a mother who wanted coaching for her three-year-old daughter for the 11-plus. But he admitted that some five-year-olds were being given 11-plus tuition.

Mr Stadlen said: "Ideally I would rather take them on when they were nine, but each individual case is different."

He said increased competition for jobs and university places is adding to the pressure, as well as the closure of some prep schools. "There is a bit of a bottleneck of children as a result of people having more babies in the late Nineties and early 2000s, when the economy was booming."

It comes after parents in Redbridge claimed that some children were encouraged to feign illness and defer taking their 11-plus for a day in 2009, so that they could find out which questions came up.

There has also been an increase in demand for "seven-plus" tuition — the age at which children take exams to get into independent prep schools. Currently 60 children are being coached by Holland Park Tuition for the 11-plus, compared with 35 last year.

Deirdre Donegan, of Gabitas Educational Consultants, said: "There has always been demand for tutoring at 11-plus but as schools become increasingly competitive numbers have increased. The main increase is at the younger end."