How to prepare for an online 11 Plus (11+) test

What’s different on screen

Four differences matter more than the rest:

• You can’t write on the question. There’s no underlining evidence in the passage, no crossing out wrong options, no jotting working next to the sum. Working happens in your child’s head or on the rough paper provided.
• Questions often come one at a time. On adaptive tests your child may not be able to skip a question and return to it later, which removes the leave-it-and-come-back technique every paper-test guide teaches. The provider’s familiarisation materials say whether yours allows it.
• The difficulty may adjust as they go. On an adaptive test, a child doing well gets harder questions. Warn your child about this, because feeling the questions get harder reads as ‘I’m doing badly’ when it usually means the opposite.
• Timing is often per question or per section, managed by the screen rather than by your child watching a clock.

How to adjust the practice

Keep the bulk of the preparation exactly as it would be for a paper test, and add the mechanics on top:

• Rehearse working on separate rough paper during ordinary practice, with the question covered after a first read. It feels awkward for a week and then becomes normal.
• Practise mental methods for the arithmetic your child would usually do on the page. Short daily mental arithmetic builds this quickly.
• Use the provider’s own familiarisation test. Every major provider publishes one, and one careful run through it answers most of the mechanical questions, including whether skipping is allowed and how the timer looks.
• Check the practical setup for remote sittings. If the test is taken at home or at your child’s own school, find out the rules on rough paper and breaks in advance.

Beyond that, resist moving all practice on screen. The underlying skills are the same in either format, and on paper you can see the working and correct it.

Top tips

• Find out the provider first: the school’s admissions page names it, and the provider’s familiarisation test answers the mechanical questions.
• Mention before the day that questions getting harder on an adaptive test is a good sign.
• Don’t worry about typing: most on-screen 11+ tests are click-to-answer.
• Keep handwriting practice going anyway. Many schools with an online first round still set a written paper or writing task later.
• Book any overdue eye test before test season; squinting at a screen tires a child faster than paper does.

How to prepare

We publish full online practice tests that run the way the real assessments do, on screen and timed: four for the ISEB Common Pre-Test, one for the London 11+ Consortium and one for Cambridge Select Insight. If your child is sitting one of those, rehearsing on screen is the closest preparation there is.

Build the underlying ability on paper alongside it. Vocabulary and spelling feed every verbal test whatever the screen, reasoning methods transfer directly, and timed maths practice builds the mental arithmetic an on-screen test leans on.