How to improve your child’s 11 Plus (11+) maths

What makes it different from school maths

• Pace. Papers commonly allow around a minute per question. A child who can do every question in ninety seconds each will not finish, and unfinished papers lose more marks than hard questions do.
• Wording. Questions arrive wrapped in a sentence or two of story, and the arithmetic is only the final step. Working out what is being asked is half the question.

Format changes the job as well. Multiple choice papers reward checking against the options and moving on; written papers award method marks, so working has to go on the page even when your child can hold it in their head. Practise in the format your child’s school sets.

Three jobs, kept separate

Maths practice goes furthest when the week splits it into three different jobs rather than blending them:

• Fluency. Ten minutes of mental arithmetic most days: tables, doubling and halving, fractions to decimals to percentages, simple ratios. This is the fastest improvement on offer, and it feeds every question on the paper.
• Topics. One weak area at a time, with a short set of questions on just that topic; a full paper only shows you where to look.
• Timed papers. One a fortnight to begin with, sat properly at a table with a clock, then marked together.

When you mark, put every lost mark into one of three piles: didn’t know it, knew it but misread it, or knew it but ran out of time. Each pile needs a different fix, and most children lose far more marks to misreading and running out of time than to missing knowledge.

A few topics appear in 11+ papers before school teaches them, and they are worth covering directly: ratio and proportion, percentages of amounts, area and perimeter of compound shapes, averages, and simple algebra with a missing number.

Top tips for your child

• Underline what the question is asking for before you start; a lot of marks are lost by answering a different part of it.
• Write the units, and check they match the ones the question uses.
• Estimate first on the longer calculations. An answer ten times too big then jumps out at you.
• Show your working, even in multiple choice. It costs seconds and makes checking possible.
• If you get stuck, leave it and come back. Every question is usually worth the same mark.
• Read every question twice. It feels slow, and it saves you time overall.

The mistakes that cost most

They are rarely in the hardest topics:

• Answering the wrong part of the question, such as giving the total where the question wanted the difference.
• Arithmetic slips under time pressure, in questions the same child sails through at home.
• Not finishing. The final questions are often no harder than the first ones; they are just never reached.
• Ignoring units, above all where a question mixes centimetres with metres or minutes with hours.
• Practising the wrong format for the school in question.

How to prepare

Choose the format your child’s school sets: our maths packs come in both multiple choice and standard format, and they aren’t interchangeable. If you’re not sure which your school uses, check its admissions page or our exam information guides. For the speed problem specifically, the 10 minute tests are the most useful thing we sell, because short bursts of timed practice actually fit into a weekday evening.