When to Start 11 Plus Preparation: the Year 5 Decision

Most guides assert a year group. This one derives it. The statutory curriculum shows what school has taught by each month, Department for Education data shows where a child actually sits — only 8% of Year 6 nationally reach the key stage 2 higher standard — and the registration windows show when the decision is really due. For most children the answer is the start of Year 5. The reasons to move it are specific, and they are below.

When should you start — and what actually sets the date?

The honest answer has two halves, and only one of them is about your child. The other half is administrative, and it is the half almost nobody writes down. The day that closes your options is not the test day — it is the registration deadline, and in both of the largest wholly selective counties that deadline falls inside the summer term of Year 5. Buckinghamshire Council describes its own window for September 2027 entry in the past tense: "Registration opened on 1 May 2026. The deadline was 3pm on Tuesday 2 June." Kent County Council's dates table records that Kent Test registration opened Monday 1 June 2026 and closed Wednesday 1 July 2026. A family who planned to think it over during the summer holiday between Year 5 and Year 6 had, in both counties, already missed the process.

London's super-selectives close earlier still. The Henrietta Barnett School's admissions page states: "Applications for the Entrance Examination in September 2026 for Entry in September 2027 are now closed. We do not accept late applications." That is not a soft deadline with a grace period behind it. Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet publishes the same shape as a recurring rule rather than a single date: "Parents must complete the School's online entrance test registration form available via our website from early May for Year 7 entry in September the following year." Early May of Year 5 is when the paperwork opens. It is not when preparation should open.

So the calendar half of the answer is fixed, and it is early: the decision has to be settled by the spring of Year 5, because the forms fall due in the term after that. Buckinghamshire even defines the cohort by date of birth, so you can check which cycle applies in seconds — "Children born between 1 September 2015 and 31 August 2016 will be moving up to secondary school in September 2027." The rest of this page is the second half: when structured work should begin for your particular child, judged against what school has actually taught and what national data says about where they sit. If you want the month-by-month schedule rather than the decision, that is our month-by-month preparation timeline; this page decides whether and when to start, that one lays out the terms once you have. For the teaching itself, see grammar school entrance preparation.

What has school actually taught your child by now?

Every competing guide on this question asserts a year group. None of them checks the one document that settles what a child has been taught by a given month. The national curriculum is statutory in maintained schools, and its maths programmes of study are written year by year, in public, in specific terms. Set them against a test sat in the second week of Year 6 and the conventional advice stops looking arbitrary in some places and starts looking plainly wrong in others.

Read that table from the bottom and the argument makes itself. A Year 3 child working through a full 11 plus arithmetic paper is being asked for tables the curriculum does not require until the end of the following year, and for percentages it does not introduce for two years after that. None of that is harmful. But it is worth being honest about what it is: teaching ahead of school, which takes longer and costs more goodwill per unit of progress than the same work does a year later.

A child starting structured maths at the beginning of Year 5, by contrast, is working alongside the curriculum rather than in front of it. Primes, squares, cubes and percentages arrive in class that year; the 11 plus wants them fluent and fast rather than merely met. That is a far smaller gap to bridge than the one a Year 3 start is trying to close, and it is the strongest reason the conventional answer — the beginning of Year 5 — happens to be right for most children, even though almost nobody defends it with the curriculum.

The content the 11 plus tests that school has not taught yet

There is one exception to that tidy picture, and it is the most useful thing on this page. Two topics that appear routinely in selective papers are not Year 5 content at all. Ratio and proportion is statutory Year 6 maths: the programme of study asks pupils to "solve problems involving the relative sizes of 2 quantities where missing values can be found by using integer multiplication and division facts". Algebra is Year 6 as well — pupils are required to "use simple formulae" and to express missing-number problems algebraically.

Now put that beside the test date. Kent's 2027-entry test was sat on Thursday 10 September 2026, in the second week of Year 6. Buckinghamshire's Secondary Transfer Test was sat on 10 September 2026. A child taking either paper has had a matter of days of Year 6 teaching. Whatever ratio, proportion and algebra they carry into that room, they did not get it from the Year 6 classroom, because the Year 6 classroom has not taught it yet.

It is also worth killing a common assumption here. Parents often treat key stage 2 SATs as the dress rehearsal for the 11 plus. They are not, and the dates say why: "The statutory key stage 2 tests are timetabled from Monday 10 May to Thursday 13 May 2027." That is the May after a September test. SATs come eight months too late to rehearse anything, and they test a curriculum the 11 plus has already outrun.

So the honest case for structured preparation is narrower than the one the industry usually makes. It is not that school is failing anyone. It is that the test examines a slice of curriculum sitting on the wrong side of the exam date, plus verbal and non-verbal reasoning, which the national curriculum does not teach in any year group at all. Those two gaps — late-curriculum maths, and reasoning — are what a preparation programme is genuinely for. If your child is heading for an independent senior school instead, the same logic lands at a different age; see entrance and admissions test preparation and senior school pre-tests.

Reading is the exception, and it starts long before Year 5

If maths argues for a Year 5 start, English argues for something quite different, and the curriculum says so out loud. Key stage 2 English is not written year by year. It is written in two-year blocks, Years 3 and 4 together and Years 5 and 6 together, and the Department for Education explains why in a single sentence: "This is why the programmes of study for comprehension in years 3 and 4 and years 5 and 6 are similar: the complexity of the writing increases the level of challenge."

Read that carefully, because it changes what early preparation should look like. The comprehension skills themselves barely change across the four years of key stage 2. What changes is the difficulty of the text. A Year 3 child therefore cannot be taught a comprehension skill they will not meet until Year 5, because there is no such skill — there is only harder text. The variable you can move early is not technique. It is what your child reads, and how much of it.

That produces a genuinely two-speed answer, and it is the part of this question that most timelines blur. Reading starts in Year 3 or earlier, and it is not preparation in any formal sense; it is a child reading longer, older and more varied books than they would pick unaided, with someone occasionally asking what a word meant. Comprehension technique — inference, quoting evidence, working to the clock — belongs in Year 5, where it can be drilled quickly onto a vocabulary that already exists.

Families who reverse that order tend to spend Year 3 on comprehension worksheets and then discover in Year 5 that the passage, not the question style, is the obstacle. That is a slow, expensive way to find out something the Department for Education prints on its own curriculum page. It is also the reason a child who has read widely can often be brought up to selective standard in English in one year, while a child who has not usually cannot.

Two national checkpoints that turn a feeling into a measurement

"Is my child ready?" is the question sitting underneath the query, and it is normally answered with behaviour: do they concentrate, do they enjoy puzzles, do they mind being tested. Two statutory checks answer it with a number instead, and both land early enough to be useful. The first is the multiplication tables check, sat at the end of Year 4. It is not really a maths test. Pupils are told: "When the questions start, you will have 6 seconds to answer each question." That makes it the closest thing in state education to the speed-of-recall pressure of a selective paper.

The window is fixed and published years in advance, so you can plan around it rather than be surprised by it. In 2026, schools had to administer the check in the two-week period between Monday 1 June and Friday 12 June, with the week of Monday 15 June to Friday 19 June available for pupils who were absent. Families whose child is currently in Year 3 already have their date: schools must run it in the two-week period from Monday 7 June 2027.

The national picture supplies the comparison. The average score rose to 21.0 in 2025, up 0.3 points on 2024 and up from 19.8 in 2022 when the check became statutory — a rise of 1.2 points in three years (21.0 minus 19.8). Full marks is the most common score, achieved by 37% of eligible pupils in 2025 against 34% in 2024. And the comparison group is not a sample: 629,947 pupils across 15,688 state-funded mainstream schools completed it. If your child is above the average but short of full marks, they are entirely normal — and they are behind the group selective schools recruit from. Both of those are true at once, which is why a single score is information rather than a verdict.

The second checkpoint is the key stage 2 higher standard, and it has a definition precise enough to hold up against a school report. Pupils who reach it "achieve a scaled score of 110 or more in reading and maths" and are assessed as working at greater depth in writing. Teacher assessment against those descriptors exists long before the end of Year 6, and a Year 4 or Year 5 teacher can usually tell you where a child sits against them — if you ask in those words, rather than asking whether they are grammar school material.

How high is the bar? The 8% most guides never mention

One number reframes the whole question, and not one competing page on this search carries it. The Department for Education reports that the percentage of pupils meeting the higher standard in reading, writing and maths combined "remained at 8% in 2025, unchanged from 2023 and 2024". Three years, no movement. That is the national population from which selective intakes are largely drawn, and it is much smaller than the number of families currently preparing would suggest.

Kent County Council states its own target band plainly, which is more than most tuition companies manage: "Many children will find the test difficult. Grammar schools in Kent provide for children in about the top 25% of the ability range." Those two figures are not in conflict — they measure different things. The top 25% of the ability range is a far wider group than the 8% who clear the higher standard in all three subjects at once. A child can be a realistic grammar school candidate without ever appearing in that 8%.

The dashes in that table are deliberate. The Department for Education does publish subject-level higher-standard rates for reading and for grammar, punctuation and spelling, but only the maths figure was verified at source for this update, so the other cells stay empty rather than being filled with a plausible-looking number. What the maths figure does tell you is where the harder work usually sits: 26% of pupils met the higher standard in maths, up from 24% in 2024, against 8% who managed the combined standard across all three.

Geography then matters more than any of it. Higher-standard attainment "was also higher in London than in all other regions, with 13% of pupils in London achieving the higher standard compared to between 7% and 9% in all other regions". If you are competing for a London super-selective, the pool around you is measurably stronger than the national average implies. If you are in a county system, the national figure is closer to your reality. The bar is local, and so, in the end, is the right start date.

Summer-born children: the strongest case for moving the date

The most under-served question on this topic is what an August birthday should do to the timetable, and it is the one place where two independent national datasets say exactly the same thing. At key stage 2 in 2025, "pupils born in September were the highest achieving group in reading, writing and maths (combined), with 69% of pupils meeting the expected standard", while "pupils born in August were the lowest achieving group, with 56% meeting the expected standard in reading, writing and maths (combined)". That is a gap of 13 percentage points (69 minus 56) at the very end of primary school, years after the effect is supposed to have washed out.

The multiplication tables check finds the same thing two years earlier, on a completely different task. In 2025 the average score was 20.4 for August-born pupils and 21.6 for September-born — a gap of 1.2 points (21.6 minus 20.4) on a check where full marks is 25. Full marks tells the same story: 33% of August-born pupils reached it against 42% of September-born, a difference of nine percentage points (42 minus 33).

Two instruments, two ages, one direction. What that does not mean is that your August-born child will underperform. These are population averages and they say nothing whatsoever about an individual. What it does mean is that a summer-born child sitting a September test is close to a full year younger than the oldest children in the same room, and that the honest response is not more pressure but more runway — beginning the structured phase at the start of Year 5 rather than drifting into it at half term, and reading the Year 4 checkpoint as information rather than as a verdict.

It also argues for a different reading of a disappointing early score. A summer-born child who scores below the national average in Year 4 is being compared, in that moment, against children up to eleven months older on a test of recall speed. Nothing in that data says the child is not selective material. It says the measurement is taken at an age where the gap is at its widest, which is a good reason to take the measurement, and a bad reason to draw a conclusion from it on its own.

What the paper actually looks like where you live

This page used to spend several hundred words comparing test providers. That section has gone, because what a family can actually act on is the structure their own admissions authority publishes. Kent publishes its in full: "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 second paper covers verbal and non-verbal reasoning. Read the timings rather than the paper names — a 25 minute section is the entirety of a subject, and that, far more than the syllabus, is what preparation has to build towards.

Kent also sets a writing task that carries no mark and still counts: "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." Families routinely drop writing from preparation on the grounds that it is unmarked. The 10 minutes of published planning time is the tell: an exercise nobody scores does not get a formally allotted planning allowance.

London super-selectives publish a different shape again, and the shape dictates the teaching order. The Henrietta Barnett School describes "a First Round Entrance Test in Verbal, Non-Verbal reasoning and English, followed by a Second Round English and Mathematics test". Reasoning and English therefore have to be ready first, because maths is only examined for candidates who have already cleared the first round. A programme that front-loads maths for a child targeting that school has its sequence backwards.

Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet adds a scheduling trap for anyone applying to more than one selective school: "We are unable to accommodate date changes due to an entrance test clash." Clashes are not negotiated away later. They are avoided, or not, at the point of registration in Year 5 — which is one more reason the decision belongs in the spring of that year rather than in the autumn of Year 6, when the timetable arrives and the choice has already been made for you.

Working backwards from the fixed points

Here is the 2027-entry cycle as its admissions authorities published it. Read it not as a list of deadlines you may have missed — that cycle has closed — but as the shape the next one will take, because these windows recur within days of the same point each year.

The empty results cell in the Buckinghamshire table is there for the same reason as the empty cells earlier on this page. The council does publish a results date; it was not inside the passage verified for this update, so it is not printed here. The row worth noticing instead is the Practice Test on 8 September 2026, two days before the real test on 10 September 2026. It exists so that no child meets the format for the first time under conditions that count — which is, at a much larger scale, the entire point of a preparation programme.

The far end of the process is national offer day, in early March of Year 6. The Department for Education records that in the most recent cycle offers "were made, and data collected, based on the national offer days of 2 March 2026 (secondary) and 16 April 2026 (primary)". From a registration form in the summer term of Year 5 to an offer letter is the best part of a school year, which is why the decision feels premature at the moment you make it and obvious in hindsight.

Two things that could still change this timeline

Any page asking a family to plan two years ahead owes them the caveats. The first is that the assessment landscape these checkpoints sit in is formally in flux. On its own multiplication tables check page, the Department for Education states: "Following the publication of the Curriculum and Assessment Review Final Report and the associated government response, future assessment arrangements are under review in line with the relevant recommendations. Assessment arrangements for the academic year 2025 to 2026 will remain unchanged." Nothing changes for the current year. Beyond it, a family using the check as a Year 4 checkpoint should confirm it is still running before building a plan around it.

The second is a local quirk that removes the deadline altogether for a large group of families. Buckinghamshire states: "If your child goes to a state-funded Buckinghamshire primary school they are automatically registered for the Secondary Transfer Test." If that is you, the June registration deadline is not your deadline — it is the deadline for out-of-county families and for children at independent schools, who have to opt in. Knowing which of those two positions you are in is worth more than any generic timeline, because they produce completely different levels of urgency in the spring of Year 5.

Everything above points at one conclusion, duller than the industry norm and considerably more defensible. Start reading seriously in Year 3, and understand that it is reading, not preparation. Start structured maths and reasoning at the beginning of Year 5, when the curriculum begins meeting you halfway. Make the registration decision by the spring of Year 5, because that is when it is genuinely due. And move the date earlier only for a specific reason — a summer birthday, a super-selective target, a child who has not yet met the Year 4 tables standard — rather than because a timeline online said Year 3.

The corollary is worth saying too, because it is the thing families most need permission to hear. If the honest reading of the evidence is that a child is not close to the standard their local grammar school selects at, then a longer run-up is not the answer and neither is a shorter one. Selective entry is one route among several, and the same evidence-first approach applies just as well to sixth form entry and to subject tuition further up the school, where the decisions are less crowded and the outcomes are just as good.

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