Year 4 (Age 8–9): Building Foundations for 11+ Success

Year 4 is the only year of primary school with its own statutory national test. In 2025, 629,947 children sat the multiplication tables check and scored 21.0 on average. This page sets out what the national curriculum actually requires of an eight- or nine-year-old, how that check is built, what the national results say about your child's score, and the published dates that follow.

Why does Year 4 get its own national test?

Every other year of primary school is assessed by the school itself. Year 4 is not. At the end of it, inside a fortnight fixed by the Department for Education, every eligible child in a state-funded school in England sits the multiplication tables check on screen. In 2025 that meant 629,947 pupils across 15,688 state-funded mainstream schools completed it. That is a full cohort rather than a sample, which is why the figures further down this page are a firmer benchmark than anything a practice-paper publisher can hand you.

The check exists because the curriculum sets a hard deadline, and the deadline is not where most parents assume it is. The statutory programme of study says: "By the end of year 4, pupils should have memorised their multiplication tables up to and including the 12 multiplication table and show precision and fluency in their work." Not by the end of Year 5. Not by the time an entrance test comes round. By the end of the year your child is in now.

That one sentence does more work than any amount of general advice about building foundations. It names the target, the deadline and the standard — memorised, precise, fluent — and it makes clear the school is already accountable for all three. A parent who spends Year 4 on tables is not running ahead of the syllabus or stealing a march on anyone. They are keeping pace with what the state has already asked for.

So this page does something most Year 4 advice does not. It quotes the statutory curriculum for this exact year group, explains how the national check is genuinely constructed, publishes the national results so you can place your own child against them, and finishes with real dates from two grammar-school authorities. For the wider view across all three years of preparation we keep a separate page: see our year-by-year preparation timeline. This page stays on Year 4. If you want the exam-by-exam picture, start with our grammar school entrance guidance.

Which lines of the Year 4 maths curriculum does the 11+ reuse?

The national curriculum for lower key stage 2 is public, specific and short enough to read in one sitting. Below are the Year 4 lines that reappear almost unchanged in entrance papers, quoted verbatim from the Department for Education programme of study, with the entrance-test use on the right.

The multiplication line is the one most often half-learned at home. Read it again: recall multiplication and division facts. Most kitchen-table practice drills a single direction — seven eights are fifty-six. Entrance papers, and a great deal of Year 5 and Year 6 maths, lean on the other direction: fifty-six divided by seven. A child who is instant one way and hesitant the other has learned half of what the statutory line asks for, and the half they are missing is the half that costs them time under pressure.

The counting line looks trivial and is not. Counting in multiples of 6, 7, 9, 25 and 1,000 is the curriculum quietly naming the step sizes that cause the most trouble. Counting in twenty-fives underpins every percentage, quarter and money question that follows it. Counting in thousands is place value rehearsed out loud. Nine and seven are there because they are the tables children fake by adding on rather than recalling.

Place value formally reaches four digits in Year 4, and hundredths arrive in the same year. Between them, those two lines cover most of what an entrance paper means when it says number work: a four-digit figure to decompose, and a decimal that has to be read as a fraction of a hundred rather than as a number with a dot in it. Children who meet decimals for the first time in Year 5 spend that year confused; children who meet them on the school timetable in Year 4 do not.

Perimeter is the outlier on the list, and it is worth naming because it is where a confident arithmetician often drops marks. The statutory wording specifies centimetres and metres, which is the curriculum warning you about unit conversion inside a shape question. That combination — a competent calculation performed in the wrong unit — is one of the most common avoidable errors we see when we start working with a child on maths and English in this year group.

What does the Years 3–4 English curriculum already require?

Parents tend to treat 11+ comprehension as a separate discipline that has to be bolted on at home. It is not. The statutory reading requirement for Years 3 and 4 already asks for the exact skill: "drawing inferences such as inferring characters' feelings, thoughts and motives from their actions, and justifying inferences with evidence". The second half of that sentence is the whole of entrance-paper comprehension technique. Not what do you think the character felt, but which words on the page tell you so.

That changes what home reading should look like. A child who reads widely but is never asked to point at the sentence that proves their answer is practising only half the requirement. The change costs nothing: after a chapter, ask how a character was feeling, then ask which line makes that clear. Done twice a week from Year 4, it removes most of the ground that comprehension coaching would otherwise have to cover two years later.

Technical English is on the timetable too. "Using commas after fronted adverbials" is a statutory Years 3–4 grammar requirement, and it is also a standard entrance-test question type, which means the school is already teaching the thing the test rewards. Rather than buying a separate grammar scheme, it is usually more useful to find out from the teacher which of these requirements your child has actually secured and which are still shaky.

Handwriting matters more than parents expect, and again the curriculum is explicit: "Joined handwriting should be the norm; pupils should be able to use it fast enough to keep pace with what they want to say." That standard is not decorative. Several entrance arrangements include a hand-written task. Kent's writing exercise allows 40 minutes, including 10 minutes of planning time, which leaves half an hour of continuous writing. A child whose handwriting is slow or effortful loses content, not neatness, and the same is true of the written work in independent senior school entry.

There is a version of this advice on almost every competing page that consists of a list of authors to read. We have removed ours. Which novelist a nine-year-old enjoys is a matter of taste, not evidence, and swapping one name for another changes nothing. The statutory requirement is the defensible target: inference, justified with evidence, in whatever the child is willing to read.

How is the multiplication tables check actually built?

This is where the check stops being an abstraction and starts being coachable. It is a set of 25 questions, and the administration guidance is blunt about the timing: "When the questions start, you will have 6 seconds to answer each question." Six seconds is not a generous window that happens to be short. It is deliberately below the time needed to work an answer out, which means the check measures recall and nothing else. A child who reaches the right answer by counting up in sevens will run out of time and score badly while knowing their tables in every ordinary sense.

The questions are drawn from a defined pool. The assessment framework states: "Items are selected from the 121 items that make up the 2 to 12 multiplication tables." Two points follow from that one sentence. First, the pool is finite and knowable — eleven tables, each with eleven facts. Second, the one times table is not in it. Time spent on it is time spent on something the check will never ask.

The framework is also open about weighting: "There is an emphasis on the 6, 7, 8, 9 and 12 multiplication tables" because of the difficulty those tables have been found to cause. That is an unusually direct piece of guidance from an assessment body, and it is the single most actionable line in this whole page. If a family has ten minutes a day for tables in Year 4, those ten minutes belong to six, seven, eight, nine and twelve, in both directions, in random order.

The timing is fixed nationally rather than chosen by the school: "Schools must administer the official check between Monday 1 June and Friday 12 June." In practice that means the second half of the summer term is not the moment to start. Anything that is going to be recalled instantly in June has to have been rehearsed since the autumn, in short sessions, with the answers coming back faster than they can be calculated. Long weekend sessions do not build recall speed; brief daily ones do.

One caution about practice. Recall drilling is genuinely useful in Year 4 because the check genuinely measures recall. That is not an argument for timed practice across the rest of the curriculum, and it is not an argument for entrance papers, which we come to below.

What counts as a good score?

The Department for Education publishes the full national picture, and it is the most useful thing a Year 4 parent can hold their own child's result against. The 2025 release covers the whole cohort described earlier in this page.

Read the top two rows together and the picture is clear. The average rose from 20.6 to 21.0, and the proportion getting every question right rose from 34% to 37%. Full marks is now the single most common outcome nationally. That reframes the target: 25 out of 25 is a realistic ambition for a child who has drilled recall, not an exceptional one, and a score in the low twenties is squarely normal rather than a warning sign.

The regional rows are worth a second look if you live in a selective area. London averages 21.7 while the South East and the East of England — the two regions containing the largest grammar systems, Kent in one and Essex and Hertfordshire in the other — sit at 20.7, the lowest in the country. That is a full point below London. It is a reminder that competition for selective places is local and that a national average tells you less about your own catchment than it appears to.

The disadvantage gap of 2.4 score points is the largest single gap in the table — wider than the month-of-birth gap discussed in the next section. Nothing in these figures says the check has got harder or easier. They say attainment moved up slightly and that the differences between groups of children have stayed roughly where they were.

Does a summer birthday explain a low score?

Often, yes, and the reason is technical rather than reassuring. The multiplication tables check is not standardised for age. An August-born child sits exactly the same check as a child born eleven months earlier and is scored the same way, with no adjustment. In 2025 the average for August-born pupils rose from 20.0 to 20.4, and for September-born pupils from 21.3 to 21.6. At the top end the gap is wider still: the share achieving full marks went from 29% to 33% for August-born pupils and from 39% to 42% for September-born pupils.

Here is the distinction nobody else on this subject seems to make. Grammar school tests generally are standardised for age. Buckinghamshire publishes its method plainly: "A child's 'standardised score' will be between 60 and 170", adjusted for a child's age in years and months. So the same summer-born child can look a point below average on an un-standardised Year 4 check and not be below average at all on the test that actually decides a grammar school place.

This matters because families read the tables check as a verdict. It is not one. It is a measurement of recall speed taken on a day when your child may be nearly a full school year younger than the child sitting next to them, with no correction applied. Treating a 20 as evidence that selective entry is out of reach is a straightforward misreading of what the instrument does.

The gap does persist, though, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. At the end of 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". So a summer birthday is a real headwind across primary school, not an artefact of one check. What it is not is a fixed ceiling, and it is explicitly compensated for in the standardised entrance tests that follow.

What does the end of primary actually look like?

Year 4 sits two years short of the end of key stage 2, and the national KS2 results are the best available preview of where this cohort is heading. They also puncture a common assumption about what "on track" means for a selective place.

In 2025, 62% of pupils met the expected standard in all of reading, writing and maths, up from 61%. That is the figure schools report to parents, and it is the wrong benchmark for a family considering selective entry. The relevant one is the row below it: the proportion meeting the higher standard across all three subjects remained at 8%, unchanged for three years running. Eight per cent, not sixty-two.

The higher standard is defined by a threshold rather than a judgement — pupils reaching it "achieve a scaled score of 110 or more in reading and maths" alongside the higher standard in writing. That makes it the closest national analogue to a grammar school qualifying score, and it is a far more honest gauge of selective-level attainment than the expected standard. Maths alone is more forgiving: 26% met the higher standard, up from 24%.

None of this is a reason to push a nine-year-old harder. It is a reason to be realistic about what the target is, and to notice that the gap between 62% and 8% is where a lot of disappointment gets manufactured. A child comfortably meeting the expected standard is doing well by any ordinary measure and is still some distance from the higher standard band.

When does any of this actually happen?

The commonest planning error we see is a year late rather than a year early. Registration for a grammar test does not open in Year 6. It opens in the May of Year 5, more than a year before the child would start secondary school, and no authority will chase you about it. Here is the published chain from two of them.

Two things stand out. First, both authorities test in the first ten days of September, not in October: Buckinghamshire's Secondary Transfer Test dates for children moving up in September 2027 are 8 and 10 September 2026, and the Kent Test for pupils at Kent primary schools falls on Thursday 10 September 2026. The summer holiday sits immediately before the test, not a comfortable half-term ahead of it. Second, results arrive before you have to choose: Kent publishes on Thursday 15 October 2026, and the national application deadline is 31 October, so families know their score before they list preferences.

Now the arithmetic for a child in Year 4 this year, which needs stating carefully because it is easy to get wrong. The published Buckinghamshire timeline above covers children born between 1 September 2016 and 31 August 2017 — that cohort is entering Year 5, not Year 4. A child entering Year 4 is the group born in the twelve months after that one. Their transfer test therefore falls in the first ten days of September 2028, results follow in mid-October, the application deadline is 31 October, and National Offer Day is 1 March the following spring.

Those Year 4 dates are projected from the published pattern, not published themselves. Authorities confirm their dates roughly a year ahead. Treat September 2028 as the working assumption and check the authority's own page in Year 5, which is also when you will need to register. The practical instruction for this year is small and specific: put next May, and the following July, in the calendar now.

Which test will your child sit — and why is CEM no longer one of the answers?

An earlier version of this page told you that the two main 11+ providers were GL Assessment and CEM, the "Centre for Education and Monitoring", based at Durham University. That was wrong three times over, and a great deal of advice still online repeats it. CEM stood for the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring. It is not at Durham. And it is no longer a live 11+ brand at all.

The successor entrance-assessment product sits at Cambridge University Press & Assessment, which describes it in its own words: "Cambridge Select Insight computer assessments are designed for selective independent schools, partially selective state schools, Grammar Schools and schools with fair banding admissions." If you are trying to work out what your target school uses, the school's own admissions page is the only reliable source, and it is worth reading in Year 4 rather than Year 6 because the format shapes what is worth practising.

Cambridge also settles the biggest practical question of this year group, and it does so more firmly than any tutor could. It states that "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 carefully. The organisation running the assessment publishes nothing to drill and endorses nobody else's material either.

That is the strongest available argument for the thesis of this page. If there is no authentic paper to rehearse, then paper rehearsal cannot be the core activity of Year 4, and a child who spends this year on commercially produced imitations is practising somebody's guess at a format. The statutory content is not a guess. It is published, it is examinable, and it is what the school is teaching anyway. For a fuller comparison of the formats in use, see our guide to school admissions tests.

For the same reason, this page no longer carries a count of grammar schools in England. The only count we could verify is a House of Commons Library figure of 163, taken from Department for Education data that is several years old, and presenting an old number as a current one is exactly the habit this refresh is trying to break.

What is the score weighted towards where you live?

The answer to "what should we prioritise in Year 4" has a county-specific component, and at least one authority publishes enough detail to answer it properly rather than by instinct.

We have left the third row blank on purpose. Buckinghamshire's published wording gives "50% of the standardised score for verbal skills" and "25% of the standardised score for mathematical skills". That leaves a quarter unaccounted for — 100 − 50 − 25 = 25 — and the wording we are quoting does not spell out what fills it, so we are not going to state it. Plenty of pages would have completed the row. A guessed cell is worse than an empty one.

What the two published figures do establish is worth acting on. Verbal skills carry twice the weight of mathematical skills in that county. For a Buckinghamshire family, that makes reading and vocabulary the highest-leverage Year 4 activity, not arithmetic drilling — which sits oddly alongside the fact that most Year 4 home effort goes into maths. The format is also less arduous than parents imagine: each paper is "about 45 minutes long (60 minutes including the introduction and examples)".

The county also publishes the target and the odds. "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." Those are unusually honest numbers for an admissions authority to print. Kent is equally direct about its own selectivity: "Grammar schools in Kent provide for children in about the top 25% of the ability range."

Kent's structure differs again. Its first paper "will be an English and maths paper and will take 1 hour", with each section involving "a 5 minute practice exercise followed by a 25 minute test". Short sections with a practice exercise before each reward composure and quick starts rather than stamina. That is a Year 5 and Year 6 concern, not a Year 4 one, but it explains why the handwriting and planning habits described earlier are worth building early.

What should Year 4 look like, term by term?

Every row below is anchored to something published rather than to a view about what a nine-year-old ought to be doing. Nothing here requires a tutor, a scheme of work or a paper subscription.

What is deliberately absent from that table is as important as what is in it. No timed entrance papers. No verbal reasoning workbooks. No weekend mock. There is no published evidence that any of those improve outcomes for an eight- or nine-year-old, and the assessment provider quoted earlier publishes no material to rehearse in the first place. The measurable requirements for this year are all curriculum requirements, and they are all things the school is teaching.

If you do one thing after reading this, make it the recall drill in both directions on six, seven, eight, nine and twelve. It is the only item on the list where a small, boring, daily effort produces a change you can measure in June against a published national benchmark. Everything else in Year 4 is consolidation, and consolidation is exactly what this year is for.

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