What Good Looks Like at the End of Year 4: An 11+ Benchmark

No exam board, grammar school or local authority publishes an official 11+ benchmark for the end of Year 4 — because none of them measure a child at that point. The two tests that actually decide a grammar school place, the Kent Test and the Buckinghamshire Secondary Transfer Test, are both sat at the start of Year 6, two years later. The one number the government does publish that lands inside Year 4 itself is the Multiplication Tables Check: the national average score in 2025 was 21 out of 25, and 37% of children achieved full marks. That is the honest starting point for “what does good look like” at this stage — real, sourced numbers, not an invented pass mark.

Why There's No Official 11+ Benchmark for the End of Year 4

Every other stage of a child's primary education has an official checkpoint a parent can look up. There is a phonics screening check in Year 1, SATs at the end of Key Stage 1, the Multiplication Tables Check in Year 4, and SATs again at the end of Key Stage 2. It is natural to assume the 11+ has an equivalent for Year 4. It does not, and the reason is structural rather than an oversight: the bodies that actually set a qualifying score for grammar school entry do not test children until they are most of the way through Year 5, or at the very start of Year 6.

Kent County Council runs the largest single grammar-school testing system in the country, the Kent Test. Registration opens to children while they are still in Year 5, and the paper itself is sat in September, once the academic year has turned over and those children are, technically, starting Year 6. Kent's own guidance is explicit that eligibility begins with pupils currently in Year 5, and that its grammar schools are built to take children in about the top 25% of the ability range — a target defined against the Year 6 cohort, not Year 4.

Buckinghamshire runs the same pattern under a different name. Thirteen grammar schools across the county share a single Secondary Transfer Test, administered by GL Assessment, and a child needs a score of at least 121 to be considered qualified for a place. That test, like Kent's, is sat in September, at the very start of Year 6 — not in Year 4, and not even in Year 5.

This is why almost everything published under a search like this one is either a lead-generation diagnostic test that hands back a number with no context, or a qualitative checklist about whether the 11+ is “right for” a child. Neither approach is dishonest, exactly — both are working around a genuine gap: no admissions body scores a Year 4 child. Our guide to what to actively work on in Year 4 covers the activities that fill that gap sensibly. This page covers the numbers that do exist.

The Multiplication Tables Check: The One Number That Is Official

One genuinely official, government-run checkpoint does land inside Year 4 itself: the Multiplication Tables Check, sat by every eligible Year 4 pupil in a state-funded school in England in June. It is statutory, and results are published annually by the Department for Education as part of its official statistics.

The most recent published figures cover the 2025 check. The national average attainment score was 21 out of a possible 25, up from 20.6 the year before. The single most common result nationally was full marks: 37% of eligible pupils scored 25 out of 25, up from 34% in the previous year's check — a rise of three percentage points. That is a genuinely useful, government-sourced answer to “what does good look like”: a Year 4 child scoring in the low-to-mid twenties out of 25 is performing in line with, or above, the national average; full marks puts a child in the largest single scoring band nationally, alongside more than a third of their year group.

The reason the check exists at all is that times-table fluency is a specific, named requirement of the National Curriculum's statutory programme of study for maths. It states that by the end of Year 4, pupils should have memorised their multiplication tables up to and including the 12 times table, and should show precision and fluency in using them. That is not advisory language — schools are required to teach towards it, and the Multiplication Tables Check is the government's own mechanism for measuring whether they have.

It is important to be precise about what this one number does and does not tell you. The Multiplication Tables Check is a test of arithmetic recall, and nothing else. It says nothing about reading comprehension, vocabulary, written English, verbal reasoning or non-verbal reasoning, which together make up most of what a typical 11+ paper actually tests. A child can score full marks on the check and still be behind on the skills a GL Assessment or CEM-style paper will demand two years later, and a child scoring below the national average on the check can still be entirely on track for everything else. Treat it as one honest data point, not a verdict.

What a Practice 11+ Score of 100 in Year 4 Actually Means (and Doesn't)

Several of the highest-ranking pages for this search offer a free Year 4 “baseline” or “benchmark” test that emails back a Standardised Age Score. The score itself is a real, well-established statistical tool — but handed to a Year 4 parent with no further context, it is close to meaningless, because nothing on those pages says what the number should actually be compared against.

GL Assessment, the exam board behind the Kent Test, the Buckinghamshire Secondary Transfer Test and most grammar-school 11+ papers, publishes its own explanation of how the score works. A Standard Age Score adjusts a child's raw mark for their exact age in years and months, then places it on a scale where the national average, for a child of that age on that test, is 100. A score above 100 is above average for that age group; a score below 100 is below average. It says nothing, on its own, about whether a child would qualify for a specific grammar school.

For the full mechanics of how standardisation, percentiles and confidence bands work, see our separate guide to 11+ standardised scores explained. What matters here is simpler: a Year 4 child scoring 100 on a free baseline test is, by definition, exactly average for a Year 4 child taking that test — a very different statement from “on track for a specific grammar school two years from now”. There is no official conversion table from a Year 4 SAS to a Year 6 qualifying score, because no admissions body tests at Year 4 to build one from.

The table below sets a Year 4 baseline score against the two qualifying benchmarks that do exist at age eleven, purely to show the scale involved — not because a Year 4 result should be read directly against them.

The gap between an average score of 100 and a qualifying score of 121, or a place among the top 25%, looks large, and it is meant to — that is what “selective” means. It is not a gap a Year 4 child is expected to have closed already; it is the distance the next two years of teaching, at school and at home, are there to cover.

The Only Other Official Benchmark: What "Expected Standard" Means at the End of Year 6

To see what genuine national benchmarking looks like when the government actually measures it, it helps to look two years further on. At the end of Year 6, every state-primary pupil in England sits Key Stage 2 assessments in reading, maths, and grammar, punctuation and spelling, alongside a teacher assessment in writing. The results are published as official statistics, and they are directly comparable year on year in a way nothing in Year 4 is, beyond the Multiplication Tables Check.

In 2025, 62% of pupils met the expected standard across reading, writing and maths combined, up from 61% the year before — the largest year-on-year rise since the pandemic disrupted testing. That figure describes an average state-primary pupil nationally, not a child on a grammar-school track, and it is measured across four separate strands rather than the arithmetic-only Multiplication Tables Check. It is the clearest illustration of the gap this page is built around: the government benchmarks Year 4 maths fluency and Year 6 attainment across every core subject, and nothing in between.

That two-year silence is exactly the space every other page competing for this search tries to fill, usually with a past-paper percentage or a readiness checklist rather than a sourced number, because no sourced number exists yet at this stage. Our guide to whether your child is on track for the 11+ covers how to use timed past papers, rather than official statistics, to judge progress once your child reaches Year 5 — a genuinely different, and genuinely useful, kind of evidence once formal government testing data no longer exists to lean on.

Reading, Verbal and Non-Verbal Reasoning: The Skills With No Official Year 4 Measurement

The Multiplication Tables Check only covers one of the skill areas a typical 11+ paper tests. Most grammar-school and independent-school 11+ exams assess some combination of English, maths, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning. Outside maths fluency, there is no government check, no national curriculum score, and no standardised national dataset that measures a Year 4 child in any of the other three areas. This is worth stating plainly rather than working around: for reading comprehension, vocabulary, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning specifically, there is currently no honest number this page, or any other, can give you for the end of Year 4.

What does exist for English is a set of skill descriptions rather than a score. The National Curriculum's programme of study for lower Key Stage 2 sets out what a Year 4 child should be able to do with reading and writing — applying knowledge of root words and suffixes, reading with growing fluency, writing in structured sentences — but, unlike maths, it stops short of a measurable checkpoint comparable to the 12 times table requirement. There is a skill description to check a child against; there is not a national percentage to compare them with.

Verbal and non-verbal reasoning fare worse still, because neither is a National Curriculum subject at all — they are reasoning skills that most 11+ exam boards test but that primary schools are not required to teach. A Year 4 child who has never seen a codes-and-sequences verbal reasoning question, or a rotation-and-reflection non-verbal reasoning question, is not behind; they simply have not met the format yet, and there is no benchmark anywhere that says when they should have. If what you actually need at this point is a month-by-month plan for introducing these skills between now and exam day, rather than a benchmark for where a child should already be, our Year 4 to Year 6 preparation timeline sets that out in detail.

Put together, the honest picture at the end of Year 4 is this: one official, government-measured number exists, the Multiplication Tables Check; one statutory curriculum target sits alongside it, times tables to 12; and everything else — English, verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, and how a Year 4 score might map onto a Year 6 grammar-school outcome — has no official benchmark at all. Anyone who tells you otherwise is estimating, not measuring.

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