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From what I have seen, Westminster/St. Paul's will ask/soft-require students to do the kind of research papers you likely wouldn't see as assignments until a 200-level college class in the States, then submit them for prizes (one I recall hearing about was on the origins of state criminal prosecution as a concept in medieval England). This is on top of exams - all British schools are forced to teach heavily to the test, and the exams are extremely formulaic, but the essays they ask for are more complex than those generally asked of American high schoolers ("evaluate the arguments for and against this idea and come to a conclusion" rather than "argue for your position"). No idea about STEM, but basically I'd say that non-STEM students from top British schools come to uni roughly equivalent to a comparable American student who already has one year of college under his belt.
Tutoring is common among these kids in three broad categories: kids who aren't bright/focused enough, kids who want to study a subject not offered at their school or study more subjects than the school lets them take at once (after 16, British kids typically narrow down to 3/4 subjects), and kids looking at American universities taking American-specific tutoring like for the SAT. There are probably some tiger parents around but generally the Asian kids going to top British schools have much chiller families and assimilate into school culture well.
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