How to help your child with 11 Plus (11+) exam nerves

Four usual sources

Exam nerves at this age tend to have one of four causes, and each needs a different response:

• Not knowing what will happen. A strange room, unfamiliar instructions, no idea what the invigilator will say. This is the easiest to fix: walk them through exactly what will happen.
• Not feeling ready. A child who knows a topic hasn’t been covered is right to be uneasy about it; the answer is to go back and cover the topic.
• The weight on the result. Children absorb how much the adults around them care about the outcome, including from conversations that weren’t meant for them.
• Tiredness. Late nights in the final fortnight make every other cause worse, and it’s the one that gets the least attention.

What helps in the weeks before

The useful moves in the run-up are practical:

• Rehearse the conditions. Full papers at a table, timed, no talking, so the format itself is ordinary long before the real morning.
• Sit a mock somewhere unfamiliar if you can; one test in a strange room takes most of the novelty out of the real one.
• Walk through the day out loud: arrival, waiting, instructions, breaks. Our guide to what to expect on exam day has the detail.
• Agree out loud what happens if it goes badly. Naming the other schools on the list removes the sense that everything hangs on one morning.
• Protect sleep and food in the last fortnight, ahead of any extra revision.
• Watch your own wording. ‘You’ll be fine’ closes the conversation; ‘which bit are you worried about?’ opens it.
• Skip the countdown talk. A calendar on the wall with a number on it helps nobody.

Top tips

• Practise the impossible-question drill until it’s routine: best guess down, mark the question, come back if there’s time.
• Teach one physical reset your child can use mid-exam. Slow breathing works, and it works better if they’ve used it in practice papers first.
• Sit at least one mock in an unfamiliar room.
• Ask ‘which bit are you worried about?’, then work on whatever the answer is.
• In the final fortnight, let sleep win over extra revision.
• Keep the evening before all but free of revision.

The day itself

On the morning your job is logistics and calm: arrive in good time, hand over the water bottle, and keep the doorstep goodbye to ‘do your best, see you after’. Last-minute reminders land as pressure.

Expect a gloomy verdict on the way out. Children remember the questions they couldn’t do and forget the thirty they could, so what they say afterwards is a poor guide to the result.

And the exception: if the worry runs on for weeks, disturbs sleep or eating, or spreads into school generally, it’s beyond exam nerves and beyond what a practice paper fixes. Speak to their teacher, and to your GP if it persists. No entrance exam is worth a year of that.

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