When to start preparing for the 11+, honestly

For most children, start at the beginning of Year 5. Spend the years before that on reading and number, not on anything that looks like an 11+ paper. That is later than most of the market implies and more structured than most parents fear, and both halves of that sentence matter.

The market says Year 3 because Year 3 parents are the most worried and the most willing to buy. We teach 11+ children every week and we do not set 11+ papers to a child in Year 3. Almost everything that decides a result at eleven is built before the papers start, and none of it is built by a worksheet with a stopwatch beside it.

What is the calendar actually asking of you?

Work backwards from the published dates and the window stops being vague.

In many areas the registration deadline falls in the summer term of Year 5 . In Buckinghamshire, for the sitting at the start of the following school year, registration opened on 1 May and closed at 3pm on 2 June, and children at the county’s own state primaries are entered without their parents doing anything at all.

The test itself lands almost immediately after the summer holiday. Medway says plainly that its test is sat by children in Year 6, and for that cycle it fell on Tuesday 15 and Wednesday 16 September 2026. Results follow within weeks. Buckinghamshire emailed most families after 4pm on 9 October 2026, and offers came the following spring, on 1 March 2027 in that county.

Read that sequence twice and the practical point falls out on its own. The last week of useful preparation is not somewhere in Year 6. It is the August before Year 6 begins. Everything your child carries into that room is built in Year 5 and in the summer that follows it.

Those are two councils rather than the country, and dates move. Some areas test in the first days of Year 6, some run two stages a fortnight apart, and some schools set their own paper on their own day. Neighbours differ too: how the Kent Test is run is not how Medway runs its own. So before you plan a single week of work, find your school’s own dates from the school or the council rather than from a forum. On Newstead Wood School you can see the format and timetable the school itself publishes, with the date we last checked them.

What should a Year 3 child be doing?

A child who reads a great deal arrives at the 11+ with a vocabulary nobody had to teach them, a tolerance for long passages, and an ear for how a sentence is put together. A child who has been drilled on question types since Year 3 arrives able to recognise a layout. The first child can be taught technique in a term. The second cannot be taught several years of reading in one.

We cannot give you a figure for that, and we would distrust anyone who offered one. Nobody has run the trial that would produce it, so call it a teaching judgement rather than a statistic. What we can tell you is what it looks like in a lesson. The comprehension mark, the verbal reasoning mark and a good deal of the maths mark all sit downstream of reading speed, and by Year 5 the distance between a reader and a non-reader is wide enough that no amount of Saturday practice closes it inside a year. Once the reading is there, how to spend the thirty minutes on a comprehension paper covers what the paper itself then rewards.

So Year 3 does have a syllabus. It is short. Read, and read aloud together well past the age at which a child can manage alone. Know number bonds and tables without counting. Write by hand long enough that it stops hurting. None of that is 11+ preparation, and all of it is.

What should a Year 4 child be doing?

The gap between a child who can do the arithmetic and a child who is quick at it decides more marks than any technique will. Under time pressure an 11+ question rarely fails because the child did not know the method. It fails because the arithmetic ate the seconds the thinking needed.

A coach carries 52 passengers. How many coaches are needed to take 375 children on a trip?

The usual wrong route

Most children divide correctly and then answer 7, or write 7.2 and leave it there. The division is not the hard part. Realising that a remainder means one more coach, and still having the time left to realise it, is.

The method

1. Fifty-two sevens are 364, which leaves 11 children with nowhere to sit.
2. Those 11 children still have to travel, so an eighth coach is needed.
3. The answer is 8 coaches. Not 7, and not 7.2.

Answer: 8 coachesIn the paper: About 45 seconds in a real paper.

A Year 4 child who has to work out fifty-two sevens on paper will get there. A Year 4 child who simply knows it is two steps further into the question by the time the first child stops multiplying, and those two steps are the part the test is really measuring. That is why Year 4 belongs to tables, number bonds, mental division and reading, and not to a book of practice papers.

There is one exception. If your child is heading for a paper full of verbal reasoning question types they have never met, a few short sittings of familiarisation in Year 4 do no harm. A year of them does.

What does starting in Year 5 actually mean?

Starting is not buying a book. It is four things in order, and the order is what makes one school year enough.

Find out where your child actually is. Not where the school report says, and not where you fear. Topic by topic, on the kinds of question the test uses. This is the step families skip, and skipping it is how an autumn gets spent practising what a child could already do. Our free diagnostic does exactly this and costs nothing: it marks a short adaptive sitting and names the weakest topics to start on.

Fix the fluency gaps the diagnosis finds, before anything else. If tables are slow, tables come first, even in Year 5, even in October. Technique laid on top of shaky arithmetic collapses the moment a clock is started.

Learn the format, once you know which format it is. Boards differ, and schools differ within a board, so which 11+ test your child will sit is a question with a real answer. You can check what a named school sets before buying anything shaped like it.

Sit whole papers under time, but late. The spring and summer terms of Year 5, and the holiday after, are when timed papers earn their place. Before that, a full paper mostly measures a stamina the child has not been given time to build.

There is a fifth thing, and it is not practice at all: understand what the result will look like before it arrives. How a standardised age score is worked out and what a qualifying score actually is are both easier to read in Year 5, when they are abstract, than in the October of Year 6, when they are not. The same goes for what results day and the waiting lists involve.

How quickly does a measured level move?

Here we can offer something firmer than a judgement, because it is a description of a mechanism we built and can read off rather than a claim about children in general.

Our practice engine holds a separate rating for each child on each topic and shows it as a level from one to five. Every answer moves it. How far it moves depends on how well the engine knows the question, not the child: an answer to a question fewer than ten children have met moves the rating two and a half times as far as an answer to one that thirty or more have met, and the same step applies to the question’s own rating. In practice a child’s early sessions in a topic meet more of those lightly used questions, so early ratings tend to move further, but that is a consequence of the question pool rather than a schedule the engine keeps for each child. The engine also serves questions slightly above the current level rather than at it, so a run that feels comfortable is usually a run that has moved very little.

The message at the end of a session is the same arithmetic seen from the other side. Nine or ten right out of ten raises the level the next session aims at, seven or eight holds it, and six or fewer removes the stretch so the next session is genuinely gentler.

Two caveats belong in the same breath: that describes our engine rather than measuring how quickly children learn, and no engine’s level is the score a school will send you. But it is a fair corrective to the panic that sells Year 3 worksheets. What you are trying to move responds to weeks of steady evidence. It does not respond to one heavy fortnight, and it is not hurried by starting two years earlier and practising badly.

When	What it is for	What it is not for
Year 3	Reading widely, number bonds and tables, handwriting stamina	Papers, question types, timing
Year 4	Arithmetic fluency, vocabulary through reading, a first sight of unfamiliar question types	Weekly practice papers
Year 5, autumn	A topic-by-topic diagnosis, then short daily practice on the weakest topics	Full timed papers
Year 5, spring and summer	Format-specific technique, then whole papers under time. Registration closes in many areas	New topics begun from scratch
Year 6, September	Sitting the test, in many areas within days of going back	Anything new

What should you do next for your child?

If your child is in Year 3, the best 11+ preparation available to you is a library card and five minutes of tables a day, and we would rather you spent the money on books than on papers.

If your child is in Year 4, keep going with fluency, and let them meet an unfamiliar question type occasionally without it becoming a routine.

If your child is in Year 5, start now, and start with a diagnosis rather than a purchase. One school year of short, regular sessions is genuinely enough for a child whose reading and arithmetic are sound, and it is not enough for a child whose are not, which is the real reason the earlier years matter.

If your child is in Year 6 and you have not started, do not panic and do not buy a shelf of books. Find the weakest topics, work on those, and sit a few whole papers under time so that the day itself holds no surprises.

And whichever year they are in, check your own school’s dates and format rather than borrowing somebody else’s timetable. That is the one piece of preparation that costs nothing and cannot be done late.

Common questions

Is Year 3 too early to start 11+ preparation?

For almost every child, yes, if by preparation you mean papers and question types. Year 3 is for reading widely, for knowing number bonds and tables without counting, and for writing by hand without it hurting. That work is not a delay before the 11+ starts; it is the part of the 11+ that cannot be crammed later.

When should we start if our child is already in Year 5?

Now, and calmly. Year 5 is the year the timetable is built for: registration in many areas falls in the summer term of Year 5 and the test itself sits at the very start of Year 6, so a full school year of short, regular practice fits comfortably inside it.

Is it too late to start in Year 6?

It is late but it is not hopeless, and the answer depends on where the child already is rather than on the calendar. A child who reads fluently and is quick with number has far more room in Year 6 than one who is still counting on fingers, because the second child needs the fluency work first and the test will not wait for it.

How much practice a week is enough?

Short and regular beats long and occasional, and that is a judgement from teaching rather than a figure anyone has measured for your child. Ten or fifteen minutes on most days, at a level the child can mostly do, holds attention and keeps the work honest. A three-hour Sunday session tells you more about a family’s stamina than about a child’s.

Do we need a tutor to start?

No, and starting without one is often the better order. Find out where your child actually is first, fix the fluency gaps that show up, and then decide whether a tutor is buying you something you cannot do at the kitchen table. Hiring first and diagnosing later is how families end up paying for a year of the wrong work.