11+ creative writing: what the marker looks for

A marker reading a pile of 11+ stories is deciding two things at once. Neither is whether the plot was any good. One is whether the writing does something deliberate to a reader; the other is whether the child controls the sentences it is made of. Where a school publishes its criteria those two things are marked in separate columns and do not trade against each other, so neat and empty scores badly and so does brilliant but unreadable.

Before any of that, though, comes a question most preparation skips. Does the school your child is actually applying to set a writing task at all?

Does your child’s school set a writing task at all?

We hold and maintain a record for every selective state school we cover, each one checked against that school’s own published admissions information. Of those, eight of 164 verified records describe a written composition inside the entrance process. Everything else is multiple choice from end to end, or written short answers rather than continuous prose.

That number is not what parents expect, and the gap costs whole terms. On Newstead Wood School the selection test is verbal reasoning and then non-verbal reasoning, and the school says plainly that it does not test on any other subject . A family preparing stories for Newstead is preparing for a paper that does not exist. Check which test your child will actually sit first.

Where writing does appear, how it is used differs school by school, and that changes what is worth practising.

School	Where the writing sits	How it counts
The Crossley Heath School	Paper 3 of the entrance test	Judged only if English and maths reach the standard
The North Halifax Grammar School	Paper 3 of the same joint test	Judged only if English and maths reach the standard
Heckmondwike Grammar School	Part of the entrance test	Assessed only on an eligible English and maths score
The Latymer School	Half of a school-set English paper	Marked only for the top 700 on maths and verbal reasoning
St Olave’s Grammar School	Inside the stage two English paper	In the aggregate, and second in the tie-break order
The Folkestone School for Girls	The handwritten half of the Shepway Test	Part of the overall assessment of ability
Colyton Grammar School	Extended writing in the entrance test	The school publishes no weighting
Mayfield Grammar School	Its own optional route alongside the Kent Test	A marked English paper assessing writing skills, with a minimum standard expected on it

Is the writing always marked?

Read the third column again, because it is the part that changes how you prepare.

At The Crossley Heath School and The North Halifax Grammar School, which run a joint admissions process, the test is three papers: two mixing mathematics and English, then one in creative writing. Crossley Heath’s determined policy is explicit about the order things happen in. Papers one and two are marked, age weighted and standardised, and then “Students meeting the qualifying standard for English and Mathematics will then have their Creative Writing paper judged by a panel of staff selected from the two Halifax Grammar Schools who have been trained accordingly” . North Halifax publishes the same rule , and so does Heckmondwike Grammar School, which uses the same provider .

So the writing is a second gate rather than a rescue. A child who misses the standard on the other papers never has the story read at all.

The Latymer School is starker still. Maths and verbal reasoning are set and scored by an external provider; the English paper is set and marked by the school, and its own admissions FAQ says candidates who “score in the Top 700 will then have their English paper marked” . Everything written below that line is never read.

At St Olave’s Grammar School the writing does something different again. It sits inside the stage two English paper and feeds the aggregate, and it is also in the tie-break: where scores are tied, the policy ranks boys by “performance in the Mathematics paper, then, if required, the creative writing, then the English multiple choice, then the SET” . On a tied score the story is the second thing anybody looks at.

What does a published mark scheme actually ask for?

Most schools that set writing do not publish how they mark it. Latymer does, which makes it the one place a parent can read real criteria rather than somebody’s guess at them, and its specimen paper shows the shape too: an hour split into thirty minutes of reading questions and thirty minutes in which “The writing section of the paper will ask you to continue the story using a similar style to the writer of the extract” .

Its writing mark scheme has two columns . Content and text organisation runs from zero to twenty in four levels. Spelling, punctuation and grammar is scored separately on a five-point scale of its own, whose top point is “An impressive level of accuracy maintained throughout; used for effect” and whose next point down is “Accurate; beginning to use for effect”. Accuracy on its own does not reach the top of that column.

The top content band, level four at sixteen to twenty, is summarised in three words: “Imaginative, thoughtful, interesting”. Underneath, it asks for “Register matched to audience”, vocabulary the scheme benchmarks against the school’s own pupils in the year group the candidates are trying to join, and “Creative ideas and controlled crafting obvious in execution”. For organisation it wants writing that is “Controlled and crafted; use of sophisticated techniques, esp at beginning and end eg cliffhanger, delayed drop”. The band below, ten to fifteen, is “Clear, Detailed, Organised, Well-expressed”, with paragraphs “used for effect”.

Read those two bands next to each other and the gap between them is not vocabulary. It is deliberateness at the start and the finish.

What do a weak and a strong answer look like?

Both responses below were written for this article. Neither is a child’s work and neither is a publisher’s exemplar. The task is one we set in lessons, and both are marked against the Latymer scheme quoted above, because a scheme somebody published beats one we made up.

Write the opening of a story called The Last Bus. You have thirty minutes. You will not be able to finish the whole story, so make the opening as good as you can.

The usual wrong route

The child writes the events in the order they happen, tells the reader every feeling instead of showing one, and rescues an ending they have run out of time for by waking the character up.

The method

The response

The last bus was at ten oclock. Maya ran to the bus stop because she was late, she was very scared because it was dark. She waited for a long time. Then the bus came and she got on. The driver was strange, he did not say anything to her. She sat at the back. Then she looked out of the window and she saw that the bus was not going the right way. She was very very scared. She asked the driver where they were going but he did not say anything. Then the bus stopped and the doors opened and she got off and she was at home. Then she woke up and it was all a dream.

What the marker is thinking

1. Register and audience: present, but only just. The scheme’s level 2 asks for “Limited vocabulary but occasional evidence of audience awareness”, and that is exactly this. Nothing is wrong; nothing is chosen.
2. Vocabulary: strange, scared, long. The phrase “he did not say anything” arrives twice, and “very very” once. In our own marking, repetition like this is not emphasis, it is a child reaching for the nearest word twice, and the scheme’s vocabulary descriptors give no credit for it.
3. Organisation: one block, and the events arrive in the order they happened. Four sentences begin with Then. Level 2 wants “Evidence of considering structure but not consistently accurate”; there is little sign of structure being considered at all, which is what holds this inside level 2 rather than lifting it into level 3.
4. The ending throws the story away. The scheme rewards structure “esp at beginning and end”, and a dream ending gives it nothing to reward there. In our experience it also tells a marker that the child ran out of time and knew it; that is our reading, not the scheme’s wording.
5. Spelling, punctuation and grammar: two comma splices (“she was late, she was very scared”, “The driver was strange, he did not say anything”) and a missing apostrophe in oclock. That is the scheme’s level 3, “Some lapses in accuracy; more limited in range”, not level 4.

The one change worth most

Delete the last sentence and spend the time on the first. Nothing else in this response is as cheap to fix or as expensive to leave.

Answer: Content and organisation 8 of 20 (level 2, upper). Spelling, punctuation and grammar 3 of 5.In the paper: Thirty minutes.

Write the opening of a story called The Last Bus. You have thirty minutes. You will not be able to finish the whole story, so make the opening as good as you can.

The usual wrong route

Children who can write like this still lose marks by trying to finish the plot. This response does not finish anything, on purpose, and that is why it scores.

The method

The response

Ten past ten. The timetable said the last bus had gone eight minutes ago, and the timetable, Maya had learned, was the only thing in this town that never lied.

She counted puddles instead of minutes. Seventeen of them, each one holding a broken orange streetlight, each one shivering when the wind came down the hill. Her coat smelled of the chip shop. Behind her a shutter rattled and settled.

Then the road turned yellow.

The bus came round the corner far too quietly for something that size, and it stopped without hissing, and the doors folded open on a driver who did not look at her. Maya put one foot on the step. Inside, every seat was taken, and not one passenger had left a window free, and not one of them was reading, and not one of them turned round.

“Are you getting on,” the driver said. It was not a question.

Maya looked back at the seventeen puddles.

What the marker is thinking

1. The opening is a decision. A three-word fragment, then a fact that contradicts the title before the reader has settled: this is a story called The Last Bus in which the last bus has already gone. Level 4 asks for “sophisticated techniques, esp at beginning and end”, and this is one of them: a detail that makes a reader ask a question rather than a sentence that answers one.
2. Feeling is never named. Maya is not scared anywhere on the page; the puddles are counted, the coat smells of the chip shop, the shutter settles. The scheme has no “shows not tells” line to tick, so this is our reading rather than its wording: the absence of the word scared is what makes the page read as written rather than reported, which is what “used for effect” is pointing at.
3. Crafting is visible and controlled: the paragraph of one sentence, the run of three “and not one” clauses, the yellow road. Three of those clauses build. Our own view, not the scheme’s, is that a fourth would have tipped into mannerism, and the child stopped.
4. The register holds. It is the same voice from the timetable to the driver, which is what “Register matched to audience” means in practice.
5. It stops mid-scene, on a girl looking the wrong way, with the question unanswered. That is the cliffhanger the scheme names, and it is available to any child who accepts that a thirty-minute opening cannot be a finished story.
6. Spelling, punctuation and grammar: the comma where a question mark would go in the driver’s line is a deliberate choice and reads as one, the fragments are controlled, and the punctuation is doing work rather than merely being correct. That is accuracy “used for effect”.

Where it is not perfect

The chip shop and the shutter are one detail more than the paragraph needs, and we suspect some markers would feel the seventeen puddles is a touch pleased with itself. Neither costs a mark under the scheme as written. Level 4 does not mean flawless; it means controlled.

Answer: Content and organisation 19 of 20 (level 4, upper). Spelling, punctuation and grammar 5 of 5.In the paper: Thirty minutes, of which about four were spent not writing.

How should the thirty minutes be spent?

Where a school publishes a timing it is usually half an hour. Latymer splits its English hour into thirty minutes of reading questions and thirty of writing . The Folkestone School for Girls describes “a handwritten creative writing test, which forms part of the overall assessment of ability”, and puts half an hour against it . Others publish neither timing nor format: Colyton Grammar School says only that its test “will include English, Maths and extended writing” . A school that is silent has not published, which is not the same as having no task.

What follows is our own practice rather than anything a school publishes, and we will say so once here rather than hedge every sentence. In half an hour we want a child to spend the first three or four minutes not writing. Not planning a plot: choosing a place, a time of day, one object that will appear twice, and the last line. Then write for a little over twenty minutes, stop with three minutes left, and read it back for the two things a tired hand gets wrong, which are dropped full stops and a name that changed spelling halfway down.

Choosing the last line first answers the mark scheme rather than tidiness. Both bands quoted above reward the ending explicitly, and an ending is the thing a child writing to the bell never reaches.

How are marks lost that have nothing to do with ideas?

Bringing a story to the exam. A memorised piece has to be bent to fit the task on the paper, and the bending shows: the opening does not answer the prompt, the middle is suspiciously fluent, and the joins are clumsy. What travels well is not a plot but a few rehearsed moves, such as a way into a scene and a way out of one.

Trying to finish. Half an hour is enough for an opening, not for a story. A child racing to a resolution writes three good paragraphs and then a summary, and the summary is the last thing the marker reads. If the task asks for an opening, write one and let it stop unresolved.

Thesaurus vocabulary. The Latymer scheme benchmarks vocabulary against the school’s own pupils in the year group the candidates are trying to join , which is a deliberately ordinary bar. A child who writes that the sky was cerulean has not cleared it; a child who writes that the road turned yellow has. Precision reads as control, unusual words read as reaching.

Writing that cannot be read. Handwriting is not marked, but an illegible word is an unmarked word, and that matters more here than anywhere else because these papers are read by people rather than scanned. At Crossley Heath the writing is the one paper a trained panel judges, while the other two are marked, age weighted and standardised .

What should you do next for your child?

Start with the school rather than the skill. Look your shortlist up on the school pages we maintain and read what each one publishes about its own test. If no writing task appears, the time is better spent on the paper your child is actually sitting, which for most families means reasoning: our guide to verbal reasoning question types is the place to start, and the free test-format checker will narrow a shortlist that is still open.

If a writing task does appear, find out where it sits before you time-table anything. A task that is only assessed after a qualifying score on the other papers is not the one to prepare first, however much more enjoyable it is to practise.

Keep that practice small and frequent. One piece a week, half an hour on paper with a clock running, read aloud afterwards, beats a holiday spent on stories. If you are working out how long any of this takes, when to begin preparing sets out the realistic version, and what a school finally sees is not a raw mark but a standardised age score built out of every paper together.

Common questions

Does my child’s target school actually set a creative writing task?

Probably not, and that is the first thing to check. Of the school records we hold and verify against each school’s own published information, eight of 164 describe a writing task inside the entrance process. Read your school’s admissions page before you spend a term on stories.

How long is the creative writing task in an 11+ paper?

It varies, and only the school can tell you. The Latymer School’s specimen English paper splits an hour into thirty minutes of reading and thirty minutes of writing . The Folkestone School for Girls describes half an hour of handwritten creative writing in its Shepway Test . Half an hour is the figure to plan around unless your school publishes something different.

Is the writing task always marked?

No, and this is the detail parents miss most often. At the three schools above using the Future Stories entrance test, the writing is assessed only for children who already have an eligible score on English and maths . At The Latymer School only the top 700 candidates on maths and verbal reasoning have their English paper marked . At St Olave’s it feeds the aggregate and sits in the tie-break order .

Should my child memorise a story to use on the day?

No. A prepared story has to be bent to fit the task on the paper, and the bending is visible: the opening does not answer the prompt and the joins are clumsy. A marker reads dozens of these. What travels well is not a plot but a handful of rehearsed moves.

Do spelling and punctuation matter more than the ideas?

They are marked separately, at least where a school publishes its scheme. Latymer awards content and text organisation out of twenty and spelling, punctuation and grammar on a five-point scale of its own, whose top point asks for accuracy “used for effect” rather than merely accuracy . So neat and empty scores badly, and so does brilliant but unreadable.