Maths 11+ skills

The content is mostly the same. What changes is the time per question and the wording. A school question usually tells a child which operation to use and an 11+ question usually does not, so much of the difficulty is deciding what is being asked before any arithmetic starts. That is why drilling times tables on its own rarely moves an 11+ score.

Nearly always one of three things: misreading the question, choosing the wrong operation, or dropping the units. Estimating before calculating is the cheapest fix, because an answer ten times too big shows up straight away. Several of the skills below isolate exactly one of those, so you can test which it is rather than guess.

Place value and the four operations, before anything else. Almost everything else stands on them: rounding needs place value, percentages need multiplication and division, and a multi-step problem needs all four to be automatic. Every skill page here names what the skill map puts before it, so you can follow that chain backwards from wherever your child is stuck.

The exam is usually sat at the start of Year 6, which makes Year 5 and the summer before it the working window. For maths that is long enough to fix a named gap properly instead of papering over it. A child who cannot see place value inside a decimal will keep losing rounding and unit-conversion marks until that is fixed, whatever else you practise.

All 33 maths exercises linked from this page run in the browser: slice a fraction, drop a point on a coordinate grid, turn a shape on a dial, read a value off a chart. There is no account, nothing is scored and nothing is recorded. Each exercise also has its own link, so you can send a single activity to a child.