My ten-year-old sister had her first visit from a personal tutor yesterday. She's perfectly bright, able and alert, gets very good reports at school and isn't behind in anything. But a tutor is still very much a necessity.

That's because of the Eleven Plus exam in Buckinghamshire. It's an exam that's died out across most of the country, but it's still employed in a few counties like Bucks and Kent. The idea, for those who may not know, is that it determines entry into state grammar schools, which tend to provide a very good education at no cost to parents.

The reason my sister needs a tutor to help her through her Eleven Plus - to be sat this autumn - is that her school will offer her no help. That's because it's a public school (i.e. not state funded, paid for by parents). It is not in her current school's interests to provide any form of Eleven Plus tuition, because if she succeeds in the exam she will gain entry to a grammar school, and the old school will lose her 'business'. So students at the public school are taught as though the Eleven Plus, with its specific exam rubric and requirements, did not exist, a decision very much commercially governed.

Which is, of course, as depressing as it is understandable. Of course the school doesn't want to lose the four-figure incomes it generates from each pupil, so it won't offer help to take the exam. But equally, that means the school could be said to be crippling its young students' education for commercial gain, and this is not a public school with a particularly strong academic reputation. Though I have no exact figures in front of me, I'm of the belief that the school has produced one Oxbridge entrant in the last decade. My old school, also a public school, produced four or five a year, which whilst not outstanding is a solid enough performance for a school whose reputation, like my sister's, barely extends beyond its locality.

The irony is that my sister's school regularly beats my old school in the academic league tables. By offering what some might unkindly deem 'Mickey Mouse' disciplines at A Level, as opposed to old standards like arts and humanities, the school is able to secure a higher proportion of top grades and thereby leapfrog other institutions. This explains its league table performance versus its all but non-existent Oxbridge record. Further evidence for the attitudes prevalent at the school may be obtained by a speech made by its Chairman of Governers at a prize day several years ago. In it, she encouraged her (entirely female) charges to place marriage ahead of academic achievement in their list of priorities, asserting that a good marriage triumphed over a good career. Traditional value that that may be, it still very nearly caused me to publicly raise my objection.

So needless to say, my opinion of my sister's school isn't great. Having taken the decision to ignore the existence of the Eleven Plus - an understandable one, I do concede, given their commercial position - they're effectively attempting to entrap their students in an environment more conducive to success on the stage than in the classroom. That's as much a critical influence at the age of eleven as the Eleven Plus itself ever was.