How to improve your child’s 11 Plus (11+) non-verbal reasoning

The checklist

The features that matter barely change from paper to paper:

• Shape: how many sides, whether it is regular, whether it has become something else.
• Shading: solid, striped, dotted or white, and whether the shading swaps between shapes.
• Size: larger, smaller, or one shape scaled while another stays put.
• Rotation and reflection: which direction, and by how much.
• Number and position: how many items, and where they sit relative to each other.

Run the checklist in order and the rule shows up on most questions; staring at the whole picture and waiting for the answer to jump out rarely works.

Short sessions, said out loud

Non-verbal reasoning improves quickly, but through regular short sessions rather than occasional long ones. Fifteen minutes, three times a week, is a realistic target.

• Teach the checklist first, and have your child say it out loud as they work: shape, shading, size, rotation, number, position. Said often enough, it becomes automatic.
• Ask for the rule in words before they answer. ‘It turns a quarter clockwise each time.’ If they can’t say it, they’re guessing.
• Do the wrong answers properly. Cover the correct option and ask why each of the others fails; each wrong option is there because some children choose it, so asking why it fails teaches the rule from a second angle.
• Put a pencil in their hand. Where the exam allows writing on the paper, marking the changing feature makes a visual puzzle behave like a written one.
• Practise on screen if the test is on screen. Some tests are computer-based, with nothing to annotate. That is a different experience and worth rehearsing in itself.

Jigsaws, tangrams and pattern games all help younger children, though they are a warm-up. For the exam itself your child needs practice in the format the school sets.

Top tips for your child

• Look at the answer options early. They often tell you which feature the question is testing.
• Rule out wrong options rather than trying to prove one right. It’s usually faster.
• In a matrix, read across the rows first, then down the columns, and expect a rule in each direction.
• In code questions, match one letter to one feature at a time, and jot the pairing down.
• Count carefully! Miscounted sides, dots and lines lose easy marks.
• Keep moving. These papers usually give you lots of questions and not much time.

Common mistakes

• Choosing the option that looks most like the question. That is the trap the question was built around.
• Finding one rule and stopping. Harder questions apply two rules at once, and the answer has to satisfy both.
• Mixing up rotation and reflection. Practise them side by side until your child can tell them apart at a glance.
• Rushing the opening questions because they look easy, and slipping on the easiest questions in the paper.
• Writing off a whole question type. Every type is learnable, and the ones children avoid usually have the clearest method of all.

How to prepare

Non-verbal reasoning is best practised in the format your child will actually sit. Our non-verbal reasoning packs give graded practice with full answers, and the complete practice test bundle puts non-verbal reasoning alongside the other sections so your child gets used to switching between them under time pressure. Work through the packs first and save the full tests for when the methods are secure.