How to Prepare for the 11 Plus: a Year by Year Plan

Most 11 plus preparation guides open with advice. Read widely. Start early. Do practice papers. Stay positive. None of it is wrong, and none of it tells you what to do on a Tuesday evening with a child who is comfortable in maths, quietly lost in non-verbal reasoning, and eleven months away from a test date you have already circled on the fridge.

This guide inverts that order. It starts with a fifteen minute diagnostic, because until you know where your child actually stands, every plan is a guess dressed up as a programme. It then hands you a calendar pinned to dates nobody can move, with weekly budgets measured in minutes rather than in encouragement. And it finishes with the part almost nobody writes down: what to cut when the plan collapses, because at some point it will.

One honest caveat first. The 11 plus is not a single exam. Subjects, formats, timings and dates vary considerably by area and by board, so treat every specific date below as a worked example of the arithmetic rather than as your date. Check your own local authority or consortium before you build anything. If the landscape is still unfamiliar, our parent guide to what the 11+ actually is covers formats and admissions basics first.

Before you plan anything: a fifteen minute diagnostic

Ask experienced parents where to begin and they rarely say "buy a workbook". They say: sit your child down with a timed practice test and find out where the gaps are. That advice is right, and it is the one step that every commercial preparation programme skips, because a diagnostic can contradict the programme they want to sell you.

Do it this week. You need about fifteen minutes of your child's time, a quiet table and a timer.

• Ten minutes, mixed questions. Draw from the four areas boards commonly assess: verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, English and maths. GL Assessment publishes free familiarisation material as downloadable PDFs covering exactly these areas, which is a reasonable free starting point.
• Five minutes, one short timed section. Speed is a separate skill from accuracy, and you need to see both.
• Score by area, not overall. A single percentage is useless. Four separate scores tell you what to do next.

What you are looking for is not a mark. It is a shape. Is performance even across the four areas, or is one area dragging? Did your child run out of time, or run out of ideas? Those two failures need opposite responses, and confusing them wastes months.

Reading the result: which of three branches you are on

Almost every family lands in one of three places. Pick yours and skip the other two.

Branch A: broadly on track

Scores are reasonably even, mistakes are careless rather than conceptual, and timing is close. Your job is maintenance and exam craft, not new content. This branch needs the least work of the three, and the commonest error here is over-preparing a child who was already fine, then watching motivation drain out of them by August.

Branch B: one area is clearly behind

Three areas are steady and one sits well below. This is the most common result, and usually the fixable one. Non-verbal reasoning is the frequent culprit, because unlike maths and English it is not taught in primary school at all. Give the weak area roughly half your total weekly budget until the gap closes, then rebalance. If non-verbal is your gap, our non-verbal reasoning guide sets out the question families and a consistent solving method.

Branch C: starting from scratch

Unfamiliar format, no exposure to reasoning, timing well off. This is not a disaster, but it does change the sequencing: familiarity comes before content, and content comes before speed. Do not start with timed papers. Start with understanding what the questions are even asking.

Working backwards from a date you cannot move

"When should we start?" is treated as a matter of opinion across most of the internet. It is not. It is subtraction from a fixed date.

The fixed points look roughly like this, using two real examples.

• Buckinghamshire. For children moving up to secondary school in September 2027, the Secondary Transfer Test dates are 8 and 10 September 2026. That is the first fortnight of Year 6. Your preparation window is Years 4 and 5 plus a summer holiday, and no more.
• Essex (CSSE). The exam for 2027 entry is on Saturday 19 September 2026, with an English paper (sixty minutes plus ten minutes additional reading time) and a Mathematics paper of sixty minutes, and no separate reasoning paper.
• The admissions deadline. You must apply for a secondary school place by 31 October, with applications usually opening on 1 September.
• Offer day. Councils send secondary offers on 1 March.

Read those together and something useful falls out. In areas testing in early September, results often arrive in time to inform the application: Buckinghamshire indicates results going out on 9 October 2026 for papers received by 18 September, and CSSE emailed 2026 entry results on 13 October 2025. In both cases you know before you have to submit the form. That is worth knowing, because it means the autumn of Year 6 is about choosing well, not about revising.

So: count backwards from your test date, not forwards from today. Twelve to eighteen months of light, regular work is the widely recommended shape, and if your test falls in early September of Year 6 then twelve months back lands you in the autumn of Year 5. Anything earlier is foundations, not preparation. Our companion piece on when to start 11+ preparation works through several regional variants.

Years 3 and 4: foundations on 30 to 90 minutes a week

There is real demand for Year 3 and Year 4 plans and almost no honest supply, because the honest answer is uncomfortably small: at this stage you are building reading stamina and number fluency, and nothing else.

Year 3, about 30 minutes a week beyond normal school work. Twenty minutes of reading a day, most days, chosen by the child. Times tables in the car. That is the entire programme. No papers, no reasoning workbooks, no tutor.

Year 4 autumn and spring, about 60 minutes a week. Keep the twenty minutes of daily reading. Add two blocks of fifteen minutes of mental arithmetic a week, and once a fortnight ask your child to explain a passage they have read back to you in their own words. Comprehension is the single highest-leverage skill for the widest range of boards.

Year 4 summer, about 90 minutes a week. Introduce one reasoning question type per fortnight, purely for familiarity. Ten minutes at a time. If your child finds this fun, you are doing it correctly. If it becomes a battle, stop and return in September.

Year 5: the core year, term by term

This is where preparation actually happens. Total budget rises gradually and stays modest.

Autumn term, about 90 minutes a week. Two sessions of thirty minutes on the weak area from your diagnostic, one session of thirty minutes on everything else, plus the daily reading, which never stops. Re-run the diagnostic at half term to check the gap is closing.

Spring term, about two hours a week. Introduce timing gently: short sections against the clock, never a full paper yet. Two thirty minute skills sessions, one forty minute mixed session, and twenty minutes reviewing errors. That review block matters more than the practice that produced it.

Summer term, about two and a half hours a week. Now full-length practice appears: one paper per fortnight, sat properly, plus thirty minutes going through the mark scheme afterwards. Buckinghamshire makes the point neatly about its own practice test, noting that the purpose "is not to see how well your child has done" but to give them a good opportunity to prepare. Treat every practice paper that way and the emotional temperature drops considerably.

Summer holiday, about three hours a week, four weeks of six. If your test is in early September, this is your last real block. Take two weeks off entirely. Children who peak in July arrive flat.

The final twelve weeks and exam week

The shape here is fixed regardless of branch: two timed papers of about forty-five minutes a week, plus thirty minutes of mark-scheme review, plus reading. That is roughly two hours. Nothing new is learned in the last twelve weeks. You are converting knowledge into marks under time pressure.

Buckinghamshire's test, for example, consists of two papers measuring verbal, non-verbal and mathematical skills, each around forty-five minutes of testing and about sixty minutes including the introduction, produced by GL Assessment. Rehearse that structure specifically, including the break between papers. GL Assessment also cautions that timings, topics and question counts vary from area to area, so rehearse your local format, not a generic one. Full-length rehearsals under realistic conditions are what our mock tests are built for.

In the final week, drop everything except one short timed section every other day and a proper bedtime. In the final two days, drop that too.

Starting late: plans for 12, 8 and 4 weeks

Most of the internet tells parents arriving in Year 6 with nothing done that under twelve weeks "could be challenging" and then stops. Here is the rest of the answer.

Twelve weeks. Week 1 is familiarity only: what the questions look like, no timing. Weeks 2 to 5, content in the two weakest areas at ninety minutes a week. Weeks 6 to 12, one timed paper a week plus review. Total around two hours a week. Do not attempt all four areas evenly.

Eight weeks. Skip content teaching almost entirely. Week 1 familiarity, weeks 2 to 8 one timed paper a week plus a forty minute review of the errors it exposed. Accept that one area will stay weak.

Four weeks. Format familiarity and timing only. Three short timed sections a week, one full paper in week 3, review after each. The realistic goal is that nothing on the day is a surprise. That alone is worth marks.

What to drop when the plan breaks

Illness, a house move, a hard term at school. When the week collapses, cut in this order.

1. Drop first: extra workbooks, second practice papers, any area already at a comfortable standard, and anything you added because another parent mentioned it.
2. Drop second: content teaching in the weakest area. Painful, but late-stage content rarely converts to marks.
3. Drop third: reading as a scheduled task. Keep it as a bedtime habit instead.

Two things never get cut, at any branch, at any time budget:

• Timed practice. Untimed accuracy does not transfer to a timed paper.
• Mark-scheme review. A paper you do not review is a paper you did not do. Reviewing errors is where nearly all the improvement lives, and it is invariably the first thing families skip because it is the least satisfying.

If you can only protect two hours a fortnight, protect one timed section and one review session. Everything above that is optional.

Term by term checklists for your branch

Each branch has a one-page checklist you can print and stick on the fridge: Branch A (maintenance), Branch B (one area behind) and Branch C (starting from scratch). Each lists the term, the weekly minute budget, the two or three activities that fill it, and the drop order above. They are deliberately short. A plan that needs explaining is a plan that gets abandoned in February.

If you would rather the diagnostic, the schedule and the timed papers lived in one place and adjusted themselves as your child improves, you can start with a free diagnostic and let the plan follow the result.

Frequently asked questions

How long does 11 plus preparation take?

Twelve to eighteen months of light, regular work is the common recommendation, and it matches the calendar arithmetic when tests fall in early Year 6. Less is workable with sharper triage; more is usually motivation risk rather than advantage.

What age should you start preparing?

For an early-September Year 6 test, structured preparation starts in the autumn of Year 5. Years 3 and 4 are reading and number fluency only, at 30 to 90 minutes a week, and should not feel like exam preparation at all.

What are the most common mistakes?

Starting content work too early and timed work too late; treating one overall score as a diagnosis instead of four separate ones; skipping mark-scheme review; and never rehearsing the actual local format. Boards differ, and a child prepared for the wrong paper structure loses marks to surprise rather than to knowledge.

What if we miss the application deadline?

The deadline of 31 October is firm, and late applications are typically considered after on-time ones. If a place is refused, you can appeal each rejection separately and only once per rejection, with at least 20 school days allowed to appeal and hearings held within 40 school days of that deadline, as set out on GOV.UK. Put the admissions dates in the calendar before the study plan. They are the only genuinely unmovable part.