What five days of a school break can realistically fix before an 11+ test, and what it cannot.
Book a Free ConsultationA half-term 11+ catch-up plan is a five-day study schedule built around one diagnostic paper and short working blocks matched to real test timings, for a Year 5 or Year 6 child who has fallen behind. Buckinghamshire's two Secondary Transfer Test papers run about 45 minutes each. Kent's English and maths sections run 25 minutes apiece after a 5-minute practice exercise. Those lengths, not two-hour evening sessions, set the shape of a useful week.
The rest of this page does three things. It works out which half-term you are actually in, because the answer differs by county and by year group and changes what the week is for. It sets out a day-by-day structure a family could follow without anyone crying by Wednesday. And it is honest about the gaps five days can close and the gaps that need a longer plan.
Most revision advice assumes one national 11+ calendar. There is not one. A child in Kent sits the Kent Test in September of Year 6; a child applying to a London independent school may not sit anything until January. The same week in late October is therefore a post-mortem for one family and the final approach for another.
Kent County Council's published term dates for 2026 to 2027 put Term 1's end on 23 October 2026 and Term 2's start on 2 November 2026, so the October break runs from Monday 26 to Friday 30 October 2026. Here is where each family stands during exactly those five days.
| Situation | Where the 11+ cycle stands | What the week is actually for |
|---|---|---|
| Year 6, Kent grammar entry | The Kent Test was sat on 10 September 2026 and results were released on 15 October 2026 | Nothing to revise. The live task is the secondary application and, if the result was not what you hoped, the alternatives |
| Year 6, Buckinghamshire grammar entry | The Secondary Transfer Test was sat on 10 September 2026 and results were released on 9 October 2026 | Same as Kent. The application window closes on 31 October 2026, the day after the break ends |
| Year 6, London independent entry | City of London School for Girls holds its first assessments between 13 and 18 November 2026 | The genuine catch-up week. Roughly two to three weeks of runway remain |
| Year 6, second-round independent entry | City of London School for Girls' second assessments fall on 6 January 2027, with interviews later that month | Groundwork, not a sprint. There is a Christmas break in between |
| Year 5, September test in the following year | About ten months of preparation time remain | A crash week is the wrong instrument. Use the break to set a routine that survives term time |
The February break splits the same way. Kent's Term 3 ends on 12 February 2027 and Term 4 begins on 22 February 2027, so that break runs from 15 to 19 February 2027. For a Year 6 child, the exam year is finished by then: Buckinghamshire Council gives 1 March 2027 as national school offer day, and Kent County Council sent its 2026 secondary offer emails on Monday 2 March 2026. For a Year 5 child, February half-term sits roughly six months from a September test, which makes it the most valuable catch-up window in the whole cycle and the one families most often waste.
Work out your own case before you plan anything. If your child has already sat the test and the result is in, close the books. If your child's assessment falls in the fortnight after the break, the week matters and the next section is where to start. Our Kent 11+ page and our page on Aylesbury Grammar School set out the dates and formats for those two systems in more detail, and the City of London School for Girls 11+ page covers the November and January assessment rounds.
The commonest mistake in a catch-up week is to start on Monday morning with a topic the parent already suspects is weak. Suspicion is usually wrong in a specific way: parents notice the topics a child complains about, and children complain about the topics they find dull rather than the ones they get wrong.
Fix that with a paper. Both selective systems publish free familiarisation material written by the people who set the test, so you do not need to buy anything to run a diagnostic. Kent County Council publishes a Kent Test familiarisation paper as a downloadable PDF alongside its preparation guidance, and Buckinghamshire Council publishes a familiarisation booklet for children at out-of-county schools with sample questions to try.
Sit one under real conditions. A quiet room, a timer, no help, the child managing their own time. Buckinghamshire's own description of its test rooms is worth copying: invigilators aim for a quiet, organised space, and an audio soundtrack rather than a person announces the timings. A parent hovering and saying "come on, you're running out of time" produces a reading of the parent, not the child.
Then mark it with your child in the room, and sort every question into three piles rather than adding up a score:
One caution about writing. Kent's process includes a writing exercise with 40 minutes allowed, of which 10 minutes is planning time, and the council states plainly that it is not marked. It may be used by a local headteacher panel at the headteacher assessment stage. A family that spends a whole break on creative writing because the child finds it hard has aimed at the part of the Kent process that carries no score at all.
Not sure what the diagnostic paper is telling you? A single session with a tutor who marks 11+ papers regularly will usually identify the pattern faster than a weekend of guessing. Leading Tuition is rated Excellent on Trustpilot, 4.8 out of 5 from 54 reviews, and 91% of our students achieve their desired grades.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppFive days is about five hours of productive work for a ten-year-old, once rest and marking are accounted for honestly. Five hours moves some things a long way and others not at all, and the difference is not about effort.
| Moves in five days | Why |
|---|---|
| Times-table and mental arithmetic recall speed | Retrieval speed responds to short daily repetition. Two or three weak facts drilled every morning become automatic within a week |
| Separate answer-sheet technique | Kent and Buckinghamshire papers are multiple-choice with a separate, computer-marked answer sheet. Losing marks by mis-shifting a row is a mechanical fault with a mechanical fix |
| Pacing and the decision to leave a question | A rule such as "if it is not moving after 60 seconds, mark it and go" can be trained in three timed sittings |
| One bounded topic | Area of compound shapes, ratio sharing, or a single non-verbal reasoning question type. One, not five |
| Forty to sixty targeted words | Vocabulary learned in context and revisited daily sticks well enough to show up in a synonym question |
| Does not move in five days | Why, and what to do instead |
|---|---|
| Reading fluency | Reading age climbs over terms, not days. If the diagnostic shows your child could not finish reading the comprehension passage, the week's whole job is reading for pleasure, not papers |
| Inference and comprehension depth | Understanding what a passage implies is built through discussion over months. A week of comprehension papers teaches a child to guess faster |
| Extended writing maturity | Sentence variety and control develop slowly. Five days can improve planning habits and nothing beneath them |
| General non-verbal reasoning ability | Familiarity with question types improves in a week. The underlying spatial reasoning does not |
| A two-year gap in core maths | This is a teaching programme, not a revision programme. Say so out loud rather than running a week that cannot work and then blaming the child |
Kent County Council puts the selection threshold plainly on its own registration page: grammar schools in Kent provide for children in about the top 25% of the ability range, and it advises parents to discuss their child's academic achievement with the primary school before registering. That is a useful sentence to reread before planning an intensive week. A break does not move a child across that line. Consistent work across a year sometimes does.
The plan below assumes a Year 6 child two to three weeks from an assessment, which is the case where a catch-up week genuinely earns its place. It totals roughly five hours of work across five days, including marking. That figure looks small written down and feels about right at the kitchen table.
| Day | Morning | Afternoon | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | One full familiarisation paper, timed, ~45 minutes | Mark it together, ~45 minutes. Nothing else | The whole week is planned from this. Marking with the child is the session, not the admin after it |
| Tuesday | Ten minutes of number-fact recall, then one 25-minute block on the single biggest gap | Free | First working day. One target, not a list. Short enough that the child finishes wanting more |
| Wednesday | Ten minutes of number-fact recall, then one 25-minute block on the same gap | Free. Go out | Deliberately the light day. A week with no dip in it produces a child who is tired by Thursday |
| Thursday | Ten minutes of number-fact recall, then one 25-minute vocabulary or reasoning block | One 45-minute timed section under conditions | Reintroduces the clock before Friday, on a shorter piece than a full paper |
| Friday | One full paper, started at the time of day the real test starts | Mark it together, then stop for the week | Compares directly with Monday on the one dimension that matters: which of the three piles each question landed in |
| Saturday and Sunday | No 11+ work of any kind | Non-negotiable. A child who works through both weekends arrives at the assessment flat | |
Two rules make the difference between this plan working and this plan being a document on the fridge. First, the morning block happens before anything else in the day, because a Year 6 child's concentration on a school break is highest in the first hour they are properly awake and falls all afternoon. Second, when the block ends, it ends, even mid-question. A child who learns that 25 minutes means 25 minutes will start one; a child who suspects 25 minutes might become an hour will negotiate for ten of them first.
Compare Friday's paper with Monday's by question type rather than by total. Scores on familiarisation papers bounce around for reasons that have nothing to do with learning, and a child who has spent a week improving and sees a lower number on Friday will draw exactly the wrong conclusion. Count instead how many questions moved from the second pile into the first.
These lengths are not a productivity fashion. They are copied from the tests themselves.
Kent County Council describes the first Kent Test paper as an English and maths paper taking one hour, with each section made up of a 5-minute practice exercise followed by a 25-minute test. The second paper is a reasoning paper of about an hour, containing a verbal reasoning section and a non-verbal reasoning section of roughly the same length, with the non-verbal reasoning split into short sections that are administered and timed individually.
Buckinghamshire Council describes two multiple-choice papers, one testing verbal skills including comprehension, technical English and verbal reasoning, the other testing mathematics and non-verbal skills including spatial reasoning. Each paper is about 45 minutes long, or 60 minutes including the introduction and examples, and children are given a short break between the two.
The practical consequence is that the unit of concentration your child has to sustain on the day is 25 minutes in Kent and about 45 in Buckinghamshire, and never two hours anywhere. Rehearsing at the real length builds the only stamina that transfers. Rehearsing at two hours builds a tolerance for something the child will never be asked to do, at the cost of the appetite they will need.
One further detail worth copying: in Buckinghamshire the timings come from an audio soundtrack, and the practice test papers, which take about 40 minutes each, are neither marked nor sent home. Use a phone timer with an audible end, put it where the child can see it, and stay out of the room. If you want the wider argument about weekly volume rather than session length, our page on how many hours a week a child should study for the 11+ sets out sustainable term-time figures by year group.
For families in the state selective systems, the late-October break is bracketed by paperwork, and the paperwork is worth more than the papers.
Buckinghamshire Council's application window for secondary places runs from 7 September 2026 to 31 October 2026, with 1 March 2027 given as national school offer day. In Kent, where the break runs from 26 to 30 October 2026, that deadline lands the day after the children go back. On the independent side, City of London School for Girls closes registration for September 2027 entry on Friday 30 October 2026, which is the final day of the same break, and sends offers on Friday 12 February 2027.
So the week contains two hard, dated tasks that no amount of revision replaces: submit the common application form with the schools listed in genuine preference order, and complete any independent-school registrations before their own closing date. Do those on Monday and Tuesday. A missed registration cannot be recovered by a better score, and every year some families discover this in November.
Three findings from the Monday diagnostic mean the week should be redesigned rather than executed.
The child did not finish the paper and was not close. Running out of time by two or three questions is a pacing problem and this plan fixes it. Reaching barely half the questions is a fluency problem, and fluency is built over terms.
The child could not read the comprehension passage comfortably aloud. Reading is upstream of comprehension, verbal reasoning and vocabulary at once, so a reading gap shows up as four separate weaknesses and gets treated as four. It is one, and the treatment is months of reading, ideally aloud and shared.
The child cried. This one is not sentimental. A child who is frightened of the material performs below their ability on the day, and a compressed week of drilling is a reliable way to produce that state. Buckinghamshire Council's own advice to parents is notably calm: make sure your child has experience of working quietly on their own without distractions, help your child to read with understanding, ask them what words mean and what is happening in the passage, and encourage them to look things up for themselves. There is no mention of volume anywhere in it.
If any of the three apply, the useful move is to stop planning a week and start planning a year. Our six-month 11+ countdown sets out month-by-month milestones for a Year 6 child, and the Year 4 to Year 6 preparation timeline covers the longer build for families starting earlier. If the test itself is now days rather than weeks away, what to do the week before the 11+ exam is a different plan again, and a much lighter one. Families who want structured help through a break can read about our 11+ tuition.
Around five hours in total across the five weekdays, including the time spent marking papers together. That is one 45-minute paper on Monday with 45 minutes of marking, three short mornings of a ten-minute recall drill plus one 25-minute block, one 45-minute timed section on Thursday afternoon, and a final paper with marking on Friday. The number looks low against the "intensive revision week" advertised by holiday courses, but it matches the concentration a ten-year-old can give without the quality collapsing, and it leaves the weekends genuinely free.
Two, and no more: one on Monday to plan the week from and one on Friday to check what moved. Papers are a measuring instrument, not a teaching one, so a child who sits five of them in five days has measured a great deal and learned almost nothing. Use free official familiarisation material rather than buying a pack. Kent County Council publishes a Kent Test familiarisation paper as a PDF, and Buckinghamshire Council publishes a familiarisation booklet with sample questions for children at out-of-county schools.
No, not for the Kent Test. The 2026 Kent Test was sat on 10 September 2026 and results were released on 15 October 2026, so by the late-October break the outcome is known and unchangeable. The week has a different job: submitting the secondary application, which in Buckinghamshire closes on 31 October 2026, and looking seriously at the schools you would be happy with. If you are also applying to independent schools with January assessments, that preparation is live and the plan on this page applies to it.
It is late but not hopeless, and the honest answer depends on the diagnostic. City of London School for Girls holds first assessments between 13 and 18 November 2026 and second assessments on 6 January 2027, so a child starting at the end of October has weeks rather than months. That is enough to fix pacing, answer-sheet technique and a bounded topic or two. It is not enough to close a reading gap, and a family in that position should be choosing schools whose entry the child can realistically reach rather than working harder at one they cannot.
Recall of a specific, small set can. Forty to sixty words, met in a sentence rather than on a list, revisited for five minutes every morning and used in conversation, will mostly still be there a fortnight later. What does not improve in five days is the broad vocabulary that comes from years of reading, which is what most verbal reasoning questions actually sample. Treat a vocabulary sprint as marginal gains on top of an existing base, never as a substitute for one.
It helps most in two situations. The first is interpreting the Monday diagnostic: a tutor who marks 11+ papers regularly will spot the pattern behind a set of wrong answers faster than a parent working from a mark scheme. The second is a bounded topic the child has never been taught properly, where an hour of teaching beats five hours of practice. It helps least as an all-day holiday course, which usually delivers more paper sitting than any child needs and less feedback than any child needs.
Nothing related to the 11+. The plan above deliberately runs Monday to Friday and stops. Children preparing for selective entry are already carrying school work, and the marginal value of a sixth and seventh consecutive working day is negative for most of them. Reading for pleasure is the one exception, because it does not feel like preparation and is the single activity with the widest effect on 11+ performance across comprehension, verbal reasoning and writing.
Compare Friday's paper with Monday's by question type rather than by total mark. Count how many questions moved from "right but slow" into "right and quick", and whether the child finished the paper this time. Raw scores on familiarisation papers move for reasons unconnected to learning, including how difficult that particular paper happens to be, so a lower total on Friday after a good week is common and means very little on its own.
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Tell us what the diagnostic paper showed and we will tell you honestly whether five days is the right plan.
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