What Are Bond Assessment Papers? A Parent's Guide for 2027 Entry

Bond has been publishing 11+ practice since 1964, and the range now runs to more than 160 titles. Most guides to it — including the earlier version of this page — describe a set of tiers Oxford University Press no longer uses. This page reads the current catalogue instead, then asks the three live test providers what they make of Bond. Two of the three answers are not what parents expect.

What are Bond Assessment Papers, and who actually publishes them?

Bond Assessment Papers are graded, timed practice papers covering the four subjects that turn up across selective entrance testing in England: English, maths, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning. They are not a course, not a syllabus and not a test. They are drill books, sold in age bands, designed to be worked through in order. The publisher is precise about where they came from: "First published in 1964, the Bond Assessment Papers, written by J M Bond, have now sold over two million copies making Bond the number one provider of 11+ practice materials." Hold on to the shape of that sentence, because it is a sales claim rather than a performance claim. Volume sold tells you how many families reached for the books. It tells you nothing about whether the books match the test in front of your child.

The ownership is the part most parents miss. Bond is not an independent 11+ specialist trading on its own. "In 2013, with the acquisition of its original publisher, Nelson Thornes, the Bond range became part of the Oxford University Press family". That places Bond inside one of the largest educational publishers in the world, and it explains both the reach of the range and the caution of its language. A publisher of that size writes product claims carefully, and as the rest of this page shows, Bond's claims about which exams its books suit are considerably narrower than most parents read them to be.

The range is also much bigger than the shelf in a bookshop suggests. The publisher writes: "With over 160 titles within the Bond range, we've put together this short guide to all the different books so that you can find exactly the right resources to support your child". Nobody writes a navigation guide for a catalogue a parent can hold in their head. That size is why the first mistake families make with Bond is almost never using the books badly — it is buying the wrong ones in the first place. The Assessment Papers line on its own covers a far wider span than the eleven-plus years: "These carefully-graded practice papers provide essential practice for each question type in a realistic exam style. Ages 5-13+". That is a run from infant school to the end of Year 8. "We're using Bond" is therefore close to meaningless as a description of what a child is actually doing, which is the first thing we unpick with any family starting grammar school entrance preparation.

What are the current Bond tiers, and why has the naming changed?

Almost every page on the open web that explains Bond — including the earlier version of this one — describes the range as Starter papers, standard papers and Stretch papers. That taxonomy has been retired. There is no Starter tier in the current Bond catalogue. The line for a child who is not yet where they need to be is called Up to Speed, and the publisher's series guide describes it in a single sentence: "Practice papers for children not yet working at the level needed for exam success." If you have been searching for Bond Starter papers and finding nothing but forum posts, that is why.

The core line has been rebranded too. What most parents still call "the standard Bond papers" now sits under Assessment Practice, and the publisher pitches it wider than the top of the ability range: "Ages 5-11+. Essential learning and exam-style practice for the 11+ exam. Ideal for beginners or for levelling-up skills." Above it, Stretch is aimed at a deliberately narrow group — "More challenging practice papers to stretch the very brightest children, studying for the 11+ and Common Entrance" — and the publisher's shop filter carries a Challenge tier above that again. The 10 Minute Tests are the quietly useful line: "Ages 7-12+. Bite-sized verbal reasoning tests for quick practice and revision." That upper band runs a year past the standard 11+ books, which makes them the natural next step for a child who has worked through the age-appropriate papers with time to spare, rather than jumping straight to Stretch.

The practical consequence is that the tier matters more than the subject. Two children in the same class, sitting the same test on the same morning, can need books from different lines, and the publisher provides a free way to work out which. "Use the Bond Placement Tests to assess your child's strengths and weaknesses across the four main 11+ subjects." That is the right first step, because it is free and because it is the only stage in the whole process that tells you something about your child rather than something about the books.

Where a cell in that table reads —, the publisher did not give that detail on the pages we checked. It has been left empty rather than filled in from the pattern of the rows around it, because a plausible age band that nobody published is worse than a gap you can see.

Is Bond aligned to GL, CEM or ISEB — or only "style" matched?

Here is the sentence that does the most work on Bond's subject pages, and the one most parents read straight past: "Suitable for GL, CEM & ISEB-style exams". Style. Not aligned to. Not endorsed by. Not written with. A publisher the size of Oxford University Press does not land on that word by accident, and it is an honest description of what the printed books are — papers written in the manner of the major providers' question types, by a third party, without those providers' involvement. That is not a criticism of the books. It is simply a different thing from what the phrase "the official 11+ papers" implies when it gets repeated at the school gate.

Bond is more current than most of its retailers about one important change. Its own subject pages now read: "Assessment Practice, 10 Minute Tests, and Test Papers, specifically created for the CEM (now Cambridge Select Insight) exam." Elsewhere, large product listings still headline "CEM Standard Test Papers" with no note of the rename at all. If you are buying second-hand or through a marketplace, treat the CEM wording on a cover as a historical label rather than a live description of an exam.

One Bond product sits in a different category entirely. Bond Online Premium Plus is the only part of the range with a formal relationship to a test provider, and its scope is narrow by design: "Designed for children age 9–11 (Years 5–6)", against a printed range that spans Ages 5-13+. The three sections that follow take each provider in turn and set out, in the provider's own published words, what they say about commercial practice material. The short version is in the table.

ISEB: the one place Bond is endorsed — and it is not a book

The Independent Schools Examinations Board does something none of the other providers do: it names a commercial product. On its own familiarisation page, ISEB tells families to "Explore Bond Online Premium Plus, the only ISEB-endorsed Pre-Tests practice platform." That is an unusually direct statement from an examining body, and it is the single most useful fact on this page for a family whose target schools use the Pre-Tests. Bond's description of the same product explains what sits behind the endorsement: "Over 2,000 additional questions developed specifically in line with the ISEB Common Pre-Tests Framework". Written to the framework, and acknowledged by the body that owns the framework.

Now read the sentence that immediately constrains it. ISEB states: "The ISEB Pre-Tests are online and adaptive tests, so there are no traditional, printed mock tests available." That is not a marketing preference, it is a structural fact. An adaptive test decides what to ask next based on what the child just answered, so a fixed sequence of printed questions cannot reproduce the experience however well written it is. Every parent buying a stack of Bond paper books to prepare for an ISEB Pre-Test needs that paragraph, because the books can build the underlying skills and cannot rehearse the event. ISEB adds a second structural point that catches children out: "There is no skip or back button. Each question must be answered." Printed papers actively train the opposite habit — skip the hard one, come back at the end — and that habit does not transfer.

ISEB then goes further than most families expect. "The Pre-Tests are mapped to the national curriculum, and your child should already be familiar with the topics covered in the Pre-Tests during their current schooling. Extra revision is not necessary for your child to excel." It is worth being straight about what that does and does not say. It does not say a child should meet an unfamiliar interface cold. It says the content is school content, and that content revision is not the lever. Familiarity with format and timing is a different activity from revision, and it is the part where a well-chosen book still earns its place. That distinction shapes how we approach pre-test and Common Entrance preparation: format work in one column, subject work in another, and no pretence that the two are the same thing.

Cambridge Select Insight: the provider that tells you not to practise

If your child is sitting what people still call the CEM, the position of the organisation that owns it is the most quotable thing on this SERP, and almost nobody quotes it. Cambridge University Press & Assessment writes: "To maintain the fairness of our assessments, we do not provide any commercially available practice materials (including practice or past papers) nor endorse any other commercially available resources or tuition services." Read that twice. It is not a polite silence about third-party books. It is an explicit statement that no commercial resource carries their backing, and that includes every CEM-branded book on the shelf.

Their parent-facing guidance goes further still: "We strongly advise against practising before an Insight assessment, and we do not provide nor recommend any practice materials." That is an assessment provider telling parents to do less, not more. Whether every family follows that advice is another matter, but a page that hides it is not being straight with you. What the provider does publish about the assessment itself is thin and specific: an average duration of 60 minutes, with sections covering "Numerical, Verbal and Non-verbal ability".

There is a design reason behind the no-practice stance, and Cambridge states it: "We develop content independently from all our other assessments to ensure that candidates using our other systems do not gain an advantage through familiarity with existing assessments." In other words, the assessment is deliberately built so that having seen similar material before helps less than you would expect. A book cannot promise familiarity with a test whose author is actively engineering against familiarity. If your child's schools use Select Insight, the honest use of a Bond book is general reasoning fluency and nothing more — and the honest version of admissions test preparation for that particular assessment is much lighter than most families assume.

GL Assessment: free familiarisation, paid practice, and a competitor in the aisle

GL Assessment is where most grammar school families end up, and its own claim about reach is simple: "Our 11+ tests are used by the majority of grammar schools in the UK". Note carefully what that sentence is about. It is a claim about GL's tests, not about Bond's books, and the two get conflated constantly. No source we could find states what proportion of grammar schools or independent schools use Bond materials, so if you see that figure quoted anywhere, ask where it came from.

GL also publishes the cleanest definition on the internet of two words parents use interchangeably: "Familiarisation papers and practice papers each provide useful support when preparing for an 11+ test. Each set of materials has its own exclusive content, however they differ in a few ways. While familiarisation papers are freely available for download, practice papers are only accessible for purchase." Familiarisation shows a child what the paper looks like and how to fill it in. Practice builds fluency in the question types. GL gives the first away and sells the second — which means GL is simultaneously the test provider your child's grammar school uses and a direct competitor to Bond on the practice-paper shelf. Their free familiarisation material carries a restriction against tutors and organisations reproducing it, so we point families to GL's own site for it and never mirror it.

GL also gives you the single most useful calibration point for choosing a Bond age band: "English and maths tests are less frequently used and are based mainly around curriculum content reached during the early part of Year 6." That is a much more precise anchor than "buy the 10-11 book", and it sits meaningfully above where ISEB caps its own maths content. Matching the book to the right curriculum point — rather than to a birthday — is the same principle that governs how we scope subject tuition at every stage.

What can a Bond book not rehearse? Three structural mismatches

The earlier version of this page had a vague paragraph about "limitations". Vague is not useful. Here are three specific, sourced mismatches between what a printed Bond paper trains and what three real assessments actually do.

The first is the ISEB adaptive engine. ISEB states that "The ISEB Pre-Tests are not speed tests; accuracy and consistency are far more important than the number of questions answered. High scores can be achieved even with some incorrect answers. There is no skip or back button. Each question must be answered." A timed printed paper rewards coverage: get through everything, guess the rest, review at the end. The Pre-Tests reward the opposite behaviour. A child drilled hard on paper can arrive with exactly the wrong instincts, and the fix is a conversation about how to answer, not another book.

The second is content level. ISEB caps its maths at National Curriculum content "up until the end of Year 5", while GL pitches its English and maths at content reached "during the early part of Year 6". Those are different targets, and a Bond maths book aimed at the older band can push an ISEB candidate through material the test will never ask about. Nothing in that says the book is bad. It says the book was written for a different exam.

The third is paper structure, and the Kent Test is the clearest example. Kent County Council publishes this: "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." A 5 minute practice exercise plus a 25 minute test is 30 minutes per section, and two of those fill the 1 hour the paper is allowed. No Bond book contains a warm-up exercise that does not count, because no Bond book is a Kent paper. There is also a component nobody drills for at all: "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." Unmarked, but capable of deciding an appeal.

How should Bond work be timed against the 2027 entry calendar?

Books are bought in a panic in spring and abandoned by autumn because nobody works backwards from the dates. For a family looking at 2027 entry, two published calendars actually bind, and neither is negotiable. ISEB has confirmed its session dates: "Tuesday 9th June 2026: Guardian Portal opens for registration for the 2026-27 session. Do not register before this date. Tuesday 1st September 2026: Live testing for the 2026-27 session commences. Late May 2027: Testing for the 2026-27 session ends." That is a long window, and the length of it is a trap in itself.

The trap is that a Pre-Test is a one-shot event inside that window. ISEB states: "Tests can be taken between the beginning of October and the end of June, but can only be sat once by a pupil in any academic year." A child does not get a second attempt because the first one landed badly. The date your child sits it is chosen once, and whatever preparation has happened by then is the preparation that counts.

Kent runs on an entirely different rhythm. The Kent Test for pupils who attend a Kent primary school falls on Thursday 10 September 2026 — days into Year 6, before a single lesson of the final year has done any real work. For a Kent family, the useful preparation window is the summer of Year 5, not the autumn of Year 6. Bond's own advice on pacing is unfashionably moderate and worth quoting against the panic: "Most families prefer to build skills gradually rather than relying on intensive preparation shortly before the exam, and the majority start preparing in Year 4 or Year 5."

Which Bond books should you buy for your child's actual test?

Everything above collapses into one question: which assessment do your child's target schools run? Answer that first and the shopping decision mostly makes itself. Answer it last, and you will own a shelf of books written for three different exams, two of which your child will never sit. The table below is the version we work from with families, and the fourth column matters most: in every case there is free material published by somebody with more authority than a book, and it should be used before anything is bought.

One last thing on tier choice, labelled clearly as ours rather than dressed up as a published standard. We do not use a score threshold for moving a child up from Assessment Practice to Stretch, because nobody publishes one and we could not find a defensible source for the one that used to sit on this page. The rule we do use is behavioural: move up when a child finishes a paper inside the time, can explain why each wrong answer was wrong, and has stopped learning anything new from the tier they are on. Stretch is written, in the publisher's own words, for "the very brightest children", and pushing a child into it early usually produces slower work and less confidence rather than more.

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