From Newsroom to Classroom: How My Journalism Career Shaped the Way I Teach 11+ Writing

People sometimes ask me how I ended up running a tuition business. The short answer is that I spent years as a journalist writing for titles including the Sunday Mirror magazine, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Woman & Home, BBC Good Homes and Retail Week, and when I became a parent, I realised that the skills I used every day in newsrooms were exactly the skills children needed to pass competitive entrance exams. Not talent. Not luck. Professional writing habits.

That realisation is what led me to found Geek School Tutoring and, eventually, to create the 11+ Creative Writing Mini Course on Geek School Courses. Everything I teach comes from the same place: years of writing to brief, to deadline, under the eye of editors who did not tolerate waffle.

What Journalism Taught Me That Most Tutors Never Learn

Most tutors come from teaching backgrounds. There is nothing wrong with that, but it means they mark writing the way they were trained to mark it at school: ticks, crosses, a level, and maybe a comment like “good use of adjectives” or “try to vary your sentence openers”. That feedback is not wrong, but it is too vague to change anything quickly.

In a newsroom, feedback is brutal and precise. An editor does not write “good effort” in the margin. An editor says: this opening is buried, move it to the top. This paragraph says nothing new, cut it. This quote is weak, find a stronger one. You learn very fast to look at your own work with that same critical eye, and that is the skill I now pass on to children.

When I record a personalised video over a child’s 11+ script in the Creative Writing Mini Course, I am doing exactly what an editor did to my copy for years. I talk through every paragraph: here is where you hooked me, here is where you lost me, here is the word that is doing nothing, here is how to replace it with something that earns its place. Children respond to that level of specificity because it respects their intelligence. They are not being told to “try harder”. They are being shown exactly what to do differently.

Why Writing Is the 11+ Paper That Catches Parents Off Guard

Most parents I work with start their 11+ journey focused on maths and verbal reasoning. Those subjects feel measurable: you can do a paper, score it and see a number. Writing is harder to pin down, and that is precisely why it catches families out.

By the time parents realise their child’s writing is not up to scratch, it is often September of Year 6 and there is very little time left. The children who do well in writing have usually had months of structured practice with someone who understands what examiners are looking for. That is what the 11+ Creative Writing Mini Course provides, and it is what we double down on in the April intensive.

I designed both programmes around the same principle I learned as a journalist: if you want someone to write well under pressure, you train them to plan fast, write with purpose and edit ruthlessly. You do not give them a list of fancy words and hope for the best.

Where to Start

If your child is in Year 4 or 5 and you want their 11+ writing shaped by someone with real editorial credentials, not just teaching qualifications, here is the path I recommend.

Start with the 11+ Creative Writing Mini Course on Geek School Courses. Your child works through focused lessons, completes exam-style tasks and receives my personalised video feedback on every piece. If you want to accelerate that progress, add the April 11+ Intensive, where we work together daily in small groups on exactly the skills that grammar and independent school examiners reward.

I built this business on the same principles that got my work into national magazines: clarity, structure, precision and a refusal to accept vague. Your child deserves that same standard of feedback on their writing. Let me show you what it looks like.