How to Help Your Child Revise for the 11+ at Home

Most 11+ revision advice is opinion. This guide is built from what the test setters publish: Buckinghamshire's 121 qualifying score, Kent's 25 minute test sections, Tiffin's Year 5 content ceiling, and the Education Endowment Foundation's own figures on what study habits actually do. Where the evidence is thin, we say so. Where a deadline for September 2027 entry has already passed, we say that too.

Which test is your child actually sitting?

There is no national 11+ paper. The question "how do we revise?" cannot honestly be answered until you know who writes the test your child will sit, because the setter decides the paper types, the content ceiling and how the marks are weighted. Two children in different counties can both be preparing for "the 11 plus" and be sitting almost nothing in common. Skipping this step and going straight to a revision timetable is how families end up drilling a subject their child's test does not contain.

GL Assessment, which supplies papers across a large number of selective areas, publishes its practice material in four specific areas — verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, English and maths — with three books, or packs, available for each area as well as a bundle. That structure is a useful map of what a GL-based test can contain. It is not a promise that your child's school uses all four, and treating it as one is the most common way a revision plan goes wrong before it starts.

GL's own FAQ explains why one of those four keeps turning up: "Most 11+ papers contain a verbal reasoning test as this has been proven to be the best predictor of future academic potential." Whether or not you accept the underlying claim about prediction, it tells you something practical. Verbal reasoning is not one subject among four equals. It is the paper GL says most 11+ tests contain.

Some revision guides still say schools use "the GL Assessment or CEM format". We could not confirm at any primary source that CEM still sets 11+ papers, so we do not repeat it. What we can state is what we verified: Tiffin School says it works "Through our partnership with Quest"; Buckinghamshire Council points parents at GL Assessment's free material; Kent, Buckinghamshire and Sutton each publish their own arrangements. Treat the school's or council's own admissions page as the only authority on which provider writes its paper, and check it before you buy or download anything.

Some areas do simplify the admin. Sutton's council pages tell parents that to register they should go to the website of any of the participating schools, and that "You only need to register your child once." Sutton also prints the cohort definition plainly: "Children born between 1 September 2015 and 31 August 2016 are due to start secondary school in September 2027." If your child's birthday falls inside that window, every date later on this page applies to you, and for September 2027 entry every registration deadline among them has now passed. Our eleven plus preparation pages set out the school-by-school picture in more detail.

If you are not sure which setter writes your child's paper, book a free consultation and our specialist 11+ tutors will work it out from your shortlist.

How far ahead of the curriculum does your child need to be?

This is where families over-prepare, and the top-ranking advice pages we read do not answer it with a source. There is no single national answer, because the two setters we could verify publish two different ceilings — and both statements come directly from the people who write the papers. Putting them side by side is more useful than picking one and pretending the other does not exist.

GL Assessment's FAQ says its "English and maths tests are less frequently used and are based mainly around curriculum content reached during the early part of Year 6." Two things follow from that one sentence. First, on a GL-based test, English and maths papers may not appear at all, which changes where revision time should go. Second, where they do appear, a small amount of early Year 6 content is fair game — but mainly early Year 6, not the whole year, and certainly not Key Stage 3.

Tiffin School, whose papers are set by Quest rather than GL, publishes a harder ceiling. Its illustrative maths questions state that "When setting the admissions tests in Maths, Tiffin School assumes that those sitting the tests will have completed the National Curriculum in Maths for Year 5 students when they sit the tests. Tiffin School does not expect students to have covered topics beyond this." Its 2027-entry FAQs put it even more simply: "We design our tests so they do not require knowledge beyond the Year 5 National Curriculum in English and Maths."

Those two statements set different ceilings for different tests. There is no universal "end of Year 5 cap" on the 11+, whatever the forums say. There is a GL statement and a Tiffin statement: one reaches into the early part of Year 6 while the other stops at the Year 5 curriculum. The practical rule is unglamorous: find the sentence on your own setter's site, believe that one, and let it define the outer edge of what you cover at home.

What this should change is the shape of the work. If the content ceiling is that low, buying material pitched at Year 7 is not preparation, it is a detour. Depth inside a narrow syllabus — fluency, accuracy under time pressure, reading with real comprehension — is what the papers actually test. Acceleration is what parents reach for because it feels like progress.

Where the marks actually are: published weightings and scores

If you only read one section of this page, read this one. Buckinghamshire Council publishes the exact composition of its Secondary Transfer Test Score, and it is not an even split. The published breakdown is 50% of the standardised score for verbal skills, 25% for mathematical skills and 25% for non-verbal skills. Buckinghamshire's verbal paper covers comprehension, technical English and verbal reasoning, so English and verbal reasoning together carry half the score, and maths and non-verbal reasoning a quarter each.

Buckinghamshire also publishes the number that decides whether a child qualifies: "If your child's STTS is 121 or above, they qualify for grammar school. We expect that about 37% of children will get an STTS of 121 or more." The score is a threshold to clear, not a competition to win.

The scale itself matters too. Buckinghamshire says the score "takes into account each child's age in years and months on the date they take the test" and that a child's standardised score "will be between 60 and 170". In other words, the August-born disadvantage families worry about is already adjusted for in the arithmetic. It is not something you need to compensate for with extra hours, and treating it as one adds pressure without adding marks.

Kent County Council is blunter about who the tests are for. Its registration page says: "Many children will find the test difficult. Grammar schools in Kent provide for children in about the top 25% of the ability range." That is a council telling parents in plain words that the paper is designed to be hard for many of the children who sit it. It is a useful sentence to have read before the first practice paper comes back covered in crosses.

None of this means the same weighting applies where you live. Buckinghamshire's split is a Buckinghamshire figure. The point is that where a weighting is published, finding yours is worth more than any generic timetable. If your child is also being entered for school-set papers, our guide to grammar school and independent school entry covers how those differ from council-run tests.

How long should a session be? Let the papers decide

The better way to set session length: take it from how long the real papers are, because those lengths are published and they are the stamina your child actually has to produce on the day.

Buckinghamshire states that "Each paper is about 45 minutes long (60 minutes including the introduction and examples)." That single sentence gives you two useful things. The working time is about 45 minutes, so a home block that mirrors the paper is 45 minutes, not two hours. And since the full slot is 60 minutes, roughly 15 of those 60 minutes (60 minus 45) go on the introduction and examples, which an audio soundtrack delivers, rather than on questions.

Kent is structured completely differently, and it changes the answer. Kent County Council says: "The first test will be an English and maths paper and will take 1 hour. Each section will involve a 5 minute practice exercise followed by a 25 minute test." So the endurance Kent asks for is not a continuous hour of concentration. It is repeated 25 minute bursts, each one entered from a short warm-up. A child who can hold focus for 25 minutes and then reset has met the requirement.

Tiffin's papers are longer: "The tests are about 40 to 60 minutes each with a short break in between." Again, the break is part of the design. Practising a full uninterrupted morning at the kitchen table trains something the exam does not ask for, while leaving the harder skill — recovering concentration after an interruption — entirely untrained.

The build-up follows from this. Start below the published length, get the child comfortable finishing a block without losing accuracy, then step up to the real duration in the weeks before the test. Once a child can complete the published block cleanly, longer sessions add fatigue rather than readiness. There is no published paper on this page that requires more than an hour of continuous work, so there is no reason your kitchen table should.

What the evidence says about how to revise — and what it does not

The top-ranking pages we read assert revision techniques without citing anything. The Education Endowment Foundation maintains a toolkit and a review of cognitive science approaches that put numbers to several of the habits parents are told to adopt, so it is worth reporting those numbers honestly, including the parts that are less flattering than the headline.

The most transferable finding is about testing versus re-reading. The EEF's review states that "The retrieval practice evidence base (both basic and applied) suggests that testing learning is often a better strategy for learning than restudying or recapping the same information." For 11+ revision at home this is the difference between a child reading through a vocabulary list again and a child covering it and writing down what they can recall. The second feels harder and less productive. That is roughly the point.

The same review attaches a condition that is easy to miss: "Planning test difficulty is particularly important — pupils should be able to retrieve at least some of the content they are tested on." Self-testing a child on material they have not met produces a blank page and a bad afternoon. Retrieval works when the child can get some of it back. That is a real constraint on how far ahead of the curriculum you should be working, and it agrees with what the setters publish about content ceilings.

On spacing, we are going to under-claim rather than over-claim. The EEF's review found 18 studies of spacing across days and lessons. That is the figure we can source, and we are not going to attach a months-of-progress number to spacing that the review does not give in the passage we checked. Practically: revisiting a topic across several days beats massing it into one long Sunday session, and the evidence base for that is real but modest, and stronger across days than within a single sitting.

The largest number in this area belongs to metacognition and self-regulation — teaching a child to plan, monitor and check their own work. The EEF rates the security of that evidence as high and identified 355 studies. It also refuses to oversell it: the impact of these approaches is high, at +8 months additional progress, "however, it can be difficult to realise this impact in practice" unless the strategies are explicitly taught. Which is the honest version. Telling a ten-year-old to "check your work" is not metacognition. Showing them a specific checking routine, watching them use it, and asking them afterwards what they would do differently, is.

Our specialist 11+ tutors build retrieval, spacing and self-checking into every session; book a free consultation to see how that would work for your child.

How much revision is too much?

No test setter or council whose pages we read publishes a recommended number of 11+ revision hours, and we know of no study that sets one. What does exist is evidence about how much home study helps children of this age at all, and it is not the evidence most parents expect.

The EEF reports that studies of homework "in secondary schools show greater impact (+5 months) than in primary schools (+3 months)." The gap between those two figures is two months of progress, and it runs the wrong way for anyone planning an intensive home programme for a Year 5 or Year 6 child. Home study at primary age does something — +3 months is not nothing — but it does less than homework does at secondary age, and the EEF rates the security of this homework evidence as low.

There is a second finding that cuts against volume directly. The EEF notes that "There is some evidence that the impact of homework diminishes as the amount of time pupils spend on it increases. The studies reviewed with the highest impacts set homework twice a week in a particular subject." Twice a week, in a subject. Not daily. Not a rolling schedule that eats every evening from January. The strongest results in that evidence base came from a cadence most 11+ households would consider light.

Nothing in that data says an hour a day is harmful, and we are not going to claim it does. What it says is that adding hours is not the lever it is assumed to be, and that the returns thin out as the hours climb. If a plan is failing, the answer supported by this evidence is to change what happens inside the sessions — more retrieval, more checking, more spacing across days — before adding more of them.

Buckinghamshire Council's own advice to parents is consistent with that, and it is striking how little of it is about papers. The council points families to reading, understanding and problem-solving, and adds: "You can also find additional free familiarisation materials from the GL Assessment website." A council that runs a selective test system is telling parents to read with their children and use the free familiarisation material. That is a lower-intensity recommendation than almost anything sold to parents on this subject.

Why past papers give diminishing returns

Past papers are the default currency of 11+ preparation, and for some tests they are close to worthless as a format guide. Tiffin School explains why, while granting that "some exam paper practice may be helpful". Its illustrative questions document says: "The papers change significantly from year to year; changes usually include the number of questions on each paper, the time allocated for the different papers, and the types of questions assessed. Every year completely new papers are written."

Read that carefully, because it undercuts a whole strategy. The number of questions changes. The timing changes. The question types change. A child who has drilled last year's structure has memorised an arrangement that will not be there. Tiffin publishes illustrative questions rather than past papers — the purpose of the material is familiarity with the kind of thinking required, not rehearsal of a fixed shape.

The structure can also change between stages of the same school's process. Tiffin's Stage One tests are answered on an OMR sheet marked by a computer. Its Stage Two tests "require hand written answers, and some questions on the English paper will require longer written answers." A child who has practised only multiple choice has trained for the first stage and not the second. Handwriting stamina and extended writing are separate skills from selecting an option, and the switch between them is a known place where confident children stumble.

Kent adds a subtlety that changes how much writing practice is worth there. Its published description of the test says: "There will also be a writing exercise which will not be marked but may be used by a local headteacher panel as part of the headteacher assessment stage of the process. 40 minutes will be allowed for the writing task, including 10 minutes planning time." So the writing does not add to the score directly — but it can be read by a panel deciding a borderline case. That is an argument for a child being able to produce something coherent and legible in 40 minutes, and against pouring weeks into polishing creative writing for marks that do not exist.

What replaces paper volume is the retrieval finding above. A paper that is completed, marked, corrected, and then re-attempted on a later day does far more than three papers completed and filed. The child who explains why an answer was wrong is doing retrieval and metacognition at once. The child who has done thirty papers and reviewed none has practised the act of sitting still. Families preparing for later selective entry face the same choice; our thirteen plus entry guidance covers the ISEB Common Pre-Test.

Book a free consultation if you would like a specialist 11+ tutor to plan how many papers your child does, and what happens to each one afterwards.

Every free official resource, in one place

Here is the inventory of free official material, taken from the providers' own pages. Use those pages directly rather than any copy of them — GL Assessment in particular restricts reproduction of its familiarisation content, so the right thing for any site, including this one, is to link rather than mirror.

GL Assessment publishes the largest single block of it. Its free materials page explains that to give "children the opportunity to experience sample questions across a range of question types in advance of the test, we provide 10 hours of free familiarisation materials. These are particularly useful for verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning tests as children may not have encountered these types of questions before." That last clause is the reason to start there: reasoning question types are the ones a primary school will never have shown your child.

Quest Assessments, which sets Tiffin's papers, publishes its own familiarisation route covering English, maths, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning, and invites parents to "explore some Quest style 11+ questions and practice filling in an answer sheet", alongside vocabulary and reading guidance. Practising the answer sheet itself is not a trivial detail when the paper is computer-marked from an OMR form — a correctly worked question in the wrong row scores nothing.

There are two routes worth flagging for any family that qualifies, because they are barely publicised. Tiffin School says that "Through our partnership with Quest we are also able to offer free familiarisation materials and guidance through Atom Learning for all Pupil Premium pupils to support their preparation for the Tiffin School Year 7 Entrance Tests." And Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet goes further: "If your child has been eligible for free school meals at any point in the last six years, they will be given entirely free access to Atom Home by registering via Queen Elizabeth's School below. You do not need to be planning to apply to Queen Elizabeth's School to be eligible and the materials are equally open to girls as well as boys." Read that twice: eligibility is not conditional on applying to that school.

Working backwards from the 2027 entry dates

This is the section that turns a revision plan into a timetable, because in several areas the decisive deadline arrives long before the test does. For September 2027 entry, every registration below has now closed; the dates show how early the next round's deadlines will fall.

Kent is the clearest example. Kent County Council lists the Kent Test for pupils who attend a Kent primary school as Thursday 10 September 2026, with registration having closed on Wednesday 1 July 2026. A family that starts thinking about the Kent Test in the September of Year 6 has missed the Wednesday 1 July 2026 deadline by at least two months, and can only email Kent's admissions team to ask about next steps. Kent publishes the results on Thursday 15 October 2026. Buckinghamshire's Practice Test was on 8 September 2026 and its Transfer Test on 10 September 2026, the same day as the Kent Test: "The Secondary Transfer Test dates for children due to move up to secondary school in September 2027 are 8 and 10 September 2026."

In London the pattern repeats with different numbers. Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet publishes its entrance test across 16th and 17th September 2026. Tiffin School's Stage One tests are scheduled for Friday, 2 October 2026, and its registration notice said registration "will close at 12 noon on Tuesday 1st September 2026. No late applications will be accepted." Its registration portal now reads "Registration has now closed". For a family planning the next round, that is the kind of sentence to write on the calendar.

Put those together and the shape of the year becomes obvious. The tests cluster in September and early October of Year 6, which means the last genuinely useful revision happens over the preceding summer — and the administrative work happens in the spring and early summer before that. Preparation that begins in the autumn term of Year 6 begins days or weeks before the paper, not months.

The part that is not about papers

There is a version of this process that damages children, and it is not the one where they do not get an offer. It is the one where a ten-year-old concludes that a place at a particular school is what makes them acceptable. Kent County Council's own framing is a useful antidote, because it is unsentimental: many children will find the test difficult, and Kent grammar schools provide for children in about the top 25% of the ability range. A test built for roughly a quarter of children will be hard for many children who sit it. That is design, not failure.

The parental habits that help here overlap almost exactly with the highest-rated strand in the EEF Toolkit. Metacognition and self-regulation — planning, monitoring and evaluating your own work — is what a calm parent is teaching when they ask a child which question they found hardest and what they will try first next time. It carries the toolkit's +8 months figure and its unusually large base of 355 studies, with the security of the evidence rated high.

It also carries the caveat, and this is the one that should change your behaviour rather than reassure you. The EEF says the impact is high "however, it can be difficult to realise this impact in practice" unless strategies are explicitly taught. Applied at the kitchen table, that means the routine has to be concrete and repeated. Before starting: what is this question type asking for? During: am I on pace for this block? After: which errors were careless and which were genuinely not known, and what is the plan for each? Said once, that is a nice idea. Done every session for a term, it is the strand with the biggest number attached to it.

Two practical consequences. First, your child should be marking their own work at least some of the time, because a child who never sees their own errors cannot evaluate anything. Second, your reaction to a bad score is part of the method. If a low mark produces an atmosphere, the child will start managing your reaction instead of managing the work, and the entire self-regulation loop breaks.

And keep the outcome in proportion, because the published figures do that for you. Buckinghamshire expects about 37% of children to reach a qualifying score of 121 or more. Kent's grammar schools provide for about the top 25%. Those are large groups and small margins, and a child on either side of the line is the same child on the Monday after. A selective place is a route, not a verdict — and for families whose child does not take one, the same work on retrieval, checking and planning pays out again later at GCSE.

If the process is starting to weigh on your child, book a free consultation: our specialist 11+ tutors can help you set a pace that keeps the work, and the outcome, in proportion.

Reviewed September 2026: every test date, weighting, qualifying score and section timing checked against Buckinghamshire Council, Kent County Council, Sutton Council, GL Assessment, Quest, Tiffin School, Queen Elizabeth's School Barnet and the Education Endowment Foundation.

Frequently Asked Questions