11+ tips for kids and parents

The 11+ is harder than the work your child sees in school. That’s normal — it’s designed to be competitive. Top candidates miss 5–15 questions on every paper. Getting things wrong during practice doesn’t mean you’ll fail.

What matters most isn’t talent, it’s preparation. Children who pass almost always put in 6–9 months of regular practice. Children who panic in the room usually don’t, even if they’re bright.

A line worth saying out loud: “The 11+ is a test of preparation, not intelligence.”

• Months 1–2 (March–April).Diagnose. One paper a week, untimed at first. Identify the 3–4 weakest topics. Start daily vocab.
• Months 3–4 (May–June). Drill weak topics. 2 papers a week, one timed. Daily vocab continues. Mini topic tests on the worst areas.
• Month 5 (July).Mock exam mode. Full timed papers under realistic conditions. Build stamina — the real exam is 100 minutes of sustained focus.
• Month 6 (August). Light review and confidence building. Stop introducing new material. The week before the exam should be a wind-down, not a sprint.

You don’t need to start in March. Children who start later can still pass. But the timeline gets tight, and the days get longer.

• 15–30 minutes a day beats 2 hours on weekends. Brains learn in short, frequent chunks. Long sessions cause exhaustion, not retention.
• Morning or after-school works better than late evening. Mental energy is highest after rest, lowest before bed.
• Mix subjects. 30 minutes of only maths is harder to absorb than 10 minutes of maths + 10 minutes of VR + 10 minutes of vocab.
• One full day off per week. No exceptions in the early months. Kids who never rest stop making progress and start resenting it.

Vocabulary is the single biggest swing factor in Verbal Reasoning. About 35–40% of VR marks depend directly on knowing word meanings, synonyms and antonyms. It’s also the area that’s easiest to neglect because there’s no “paper” to do.

• Reading definitions doesn’t work. Your brain forgets a list of words within a day. You need to see each word repeatedly, spaced out over weeks.
• 10 minutes a day for 3 months moves more than 2 hours a day for 2 weeks.
• See words in context.Reading children’s newspapers (First News, The Week Junior), classic novels at their reading level, even subtitles — all expose your child to advanced vocabulary without it feeling like “work”.
• Use the vocabulary trainer on this site. It uses spaced repetition automatically — words you find hard come back more often, words you know slip into the background.

When you sit down to a maths paper, take a deep breath before you start. Here are the moves that win marks:

• Read the question twice before you write anything. Most wrong answers come from misreading, not from not knowing the maths.
• If you’re stuck after a minute, mark it and move on.You can come back. Don’t waste 5 minutes on one question when there are 49 others.
• Estimate first. Before you do the working, guess roughly what the answer should be. If your calculated answer is way off, you made an arithmetic mistake.
• Work backwards from the options.If you’re stuck, try substituting each answer into the question and see which one fits.
• Eliminate impossible answers.Often you can rule out 2 or 3 options just by reading the question. Then it’s a 1-in-2 or 1-in-3 guess instead of 1-in-5.
• Watch for unit changes. The question gives the answer in cm but talks about m. Or in pence but mentions pounds. Always check the units in your answer.
• “How much more” vs “the total”.A classic trick. Read what the question is actually asking for, not what you think it’s asking.

The VR paper is 80 questions in 50 minutes — about 37 seconds per question. Speed matters as much as accuracy.

• Don’t dwell. Every question is worth the same. Spending 2 minutes on a hard one means rushing two easy ones later.
• Letter codes.Write A B C D E F G H I J in the margin of your rough paper and number them 1–26. You’ll save seconds on every alphabet-shift question.
• Hidden words.Try every adjacent pair of words. Look at the last few letters of word 1 + the first few of word 2. Sound it out. Real English 4-letter words only — don’t force a non-word.
• Synonyms and antonyms.Trust your first instinct. The wrong answers are usually “close but not quite” on purpose.
• Logic puzzles.Draw a small grid in the margin. Don’t try to hold the constraints in your head — you’ll lose track.
• If you’re totally stuck, GUESS.There’s no negative marking. A 1-in-5 guess gets you 20% of nothing. Leaving it blank gets you 0%.
• Check the answer sheet at the endif you have time. Make sure you haven’t shifted a row.

• Don’t cram new topics.A topic you learn this week won’t stick by Friday. Spend the time on what you already know.
• Two mock papers maximum. Build confidence, not panic.
• Early bedtime from Monday.Not from Sunday night — sleep debt doesn’t catch up that fast.
• Cut sugar and caffeine. If your child has either regularly, ease them off this week.
• Check the school’s instructions twice. What they need to bring, what time, which entrance. Print the email.
• Pack the night before.Pencils (three sharpened), eraser, pencil sharpener, water bottle, the school’s letter.

• Real breakfast.Porridge, toast, eggs, fruit. Slow energy. Avoid sugary cereal — the crash arrives mid-paper.
• Arrive 15 minutes early. Not 1 hour (more time to get nervous), not 5 minutes (rushed, late, panicked).
• Don’t quiz on the way.No vocab drills in the car. No “remember the function machine”. Talk about something else — the dog, the weekend, a book.
• The hug at the door is the last word.No advice, no warnings. Just “you’ve done the work, I’m proud of you.”
• Have a plan for after.Something nice but ordinary — the park, a milkshake, the library. Not a quiz session.

• Take a slow breath before you start. Three seconds in, three seconds out. It works.
• Read every word of every question.The trick is usually in a word you’d skip.
• If your brain freezes, do the easy ones first.Skip the page you’re on. Find a question you can do quickly. That gets you moving again.
• Don’t panic if other kids finish early.They’re guessing. Speed isn’t a sign of doing well. Take your time.
• Five minutes left, blank questions?Guess them all. There’s no penalty.
• If you finish early, check the answer sheet. Did you skip a number? Did you mark question 23 on the row for 24?

• Be the support, not the second tutor.If your child has a tutor, that’s the teaching channel. Your job is supply chain and morale.
• Mark papers WITH your child.Sit next to them, go through wrong answers. Ask “why did you pick this?” rather than “you should have picked that.”
• Celebrate effort and progress, not score.“You worked really hard on those fractions” lands. “You got 42 out of 50” doesn’t.
• Don’t compare to other children. Not siblings, not classmates, not the boy down the road. Each child has their own readiness curve.
• Mocks are meant to expose weak spots.A bad mock score is useful data, not a disaster. The point of practice is to get things wrong now so you don’t in September.
• Watch for distress. If your child is crying through every session, the volume is wrong. Cut sessions in half. Take a week off if needed. Burnout in July is the most common reason kids underperform in September.

• Doing too much of the same subject in one sitting.
• Studying after 8pm — tired brains don’t retain.
• Ignoring vocabulary because “they read enough.”
• Doing every paper untimed. Speed matters — build the habit.
• Comparing children’s progress. Yours is on their own curve.
• Pressing on when frustrated. If your child is in tears, stop. Whatever you’re trying to drill won’t go in anyway.
• Treating one mock score as a prediction. Mocks bounce around ±10 marks for the same child week to week.

• Don’t analyse with your childunless they ask. They know what went wrong. They don’t need to hear it from you on the walk home.
• Don’t compare with friends’ experience.Some children will say “it was easy.” They’re probably just cheerful, not Einsteins.
• Plan something normal for the afternoon. Not a celebration (premature), not a debrief (pointless). Just a regular nice afternoon.
• Results come mid-Octoberfor the SW Herts consortium. Don’t obsess over the wait. Carry on with the rest of life.
• Whatever the result, your child is the same person.Grammar school isn’t the only path. Many children thrive at their local comprehensive. This is the start of one route, not the end of all of them.

• One test, six schools.Watford Boys, Watford Girls, Parmiter’s, Rickmansworth, St Clement Danes, Queens’. Your child sits the consortium test once and the score is shared with each school they’re applying to.
• First week of September.Sat on a Saturday morning in Watford Grammar School for Boys’ sports hall (usually).
• Score is normalised by age.Children born in August are not disadvantaged — the marks are adjusted by month of birth.
• Registration usually opens in May.Each school’s deadline is different but most are in late June. Check each individually on the school websites or the consortium’s combined page.
• Format: 50-question maths in 50 min, plus 80-question Verbal Reasoning in 50 min. Multiple choice. Separate answer sheet. No calculator.
• Score thresholds change every yearbased on cohort performance. There’s no fixed pass mark. Recent years have hovered around 220–235 out of 280, but don’t plan around the exact number.

More detail on the consortium and the schools is on the SW Herts region page.