How to excel in the 11 plus (11+) exams

Five reasons a well-prepared child loses marks

Mark a few papers closely and the same causes keep appearing:

• Slips on questions your child can clearly do. Misreading, missing a step, or racing through the easy ones and paying for it.
• Running out of time before the end. Often this traces back to one stubborn question near the start that should have been skipped and returned to.
• Instructions read but not absorbed. Multiple-choice papers can change format slightly between sections, and it’s easy to sail past the change.
• A vocabulary ceiling. In comprehension and verbal reasoning, your child can have the technique down and still lose the harder questions to words they don’t know.
• Changing right answers to wrong ones. Some children swap a correct first answer for a wrong one on review more often than the reverse. Watch a few marking sessions to see whether a checking pass helps your child or hurts them; it doesn’t help everyone.

When the scores stop moving

If your child’s scores have levelled off despite steady practice, more papers of the same kind will usually repeat the same result. The fix is to work from an error log:

• Write down what went wrong, on every paper. A few words per mistake will do: careless slip, ran out of time, didn’t know the word, didn’t know the method.
• Reread the log every few weeks and look for the category that keeps recurring; spend a session on just that before the next full paper.
• Time sections separately as well as whole papers. A weak section score can mean the topic needs work or that the pacing does, and the two need different fixes; a section timing tells you which you’re looking at.
• Return to old mistakes after a week or two. Cover the original marking and set the same questions again. If they’re still going wrong, the first fix didn’t take.
• Change one thing at a time. If your child is both rushing and short of vocabulary, work on one before the other, or the next score can’t tell you which change made the difference.

Every subject counts towards the total

Schools usually combine scores across everything they test, so a strength in one subject doesn’t make up for a weakness in another. Excellent maths sitting next to weak non-verbal reasoning can still add up to an ordinary total.

Practice drifts towards the subject your child enjoys, because those are the pleasant sessions for everybody. Once the basics are secure, steer the extra time the other way, towards whichever subject is pulling the total down. Our guide to tracking your child’s progress shows how to spot which one that is.

Top tips

• Log the cause of every lost mark alongside the score.
• Look for the repeating category every few weeks, and work on it directly before the next paper.
• Time sections separately, so pacing problems and topic problems don’t get mistaken for each other.
• Keep daily vocabulary going; it feeds both comprehension and verbal reasoning marks.
• Give every tested subject its share of the week, including the unloved one.
• Set old mistakes again a week or two later, to check the fix held.

How to prepare

One of the most effective ways to prepare for an 11+ entrance exam is to use practice tests written by experts. We publish a full range of 11+ revision resources: area and school-specific practice tests, subject-specific packs, spelling and vocabulary resources, and reading books.

Each of our practice tests:

• is available as a PDF download or in physical format
• familiarises your child with the types of questions they will face in the real exam
• includes answers to every question, with detailed, step-by-step explanations for the maths and reasoning questions
• builds your child’s confidence before the actual exam.

Use the finder below to jump straight to the papers for your child’s school or area.

Find papers for your school or area

Grammar schools and area tests

• Bexley
• Bishop Wordsworth’s
• Buckinghamshire
• CSSE
• Ermysted’s
• Gloucestershire
• Henrietta Barnett
• Kent
• QE Boys
• Redbridge
• Slough Consortium
• St Olave’s
• Sutton
• The Latymer School
• Tiffin School & Tiffin Girls’ School
• Trafford
• West Midlands

Independent schools

• City of London School for Girls
• Hampton
• Latymer Upper
• Merchant Taylors’
• St Paul’s Girls’ School
• St Paul’s Juniors