Parents do not pay for the answer. They pay for the explanation. So here is one real 13+ question, worked from the paper to the mark, with the answer key printed in full — before you spend anything.
Judge the product before you pay for it.
Every question paper on this site is free. The worked answer keys for all 36 of the 13+ papers are £50 — £1.39 a paper, paid once, with access for a year. Two of those answers are printed in full below, copied out of the keys word for word. Read them first.
See all 36 free papers and the £50 answer packAsk a parent who has already been through 13+ what they were actually short of, and the answer is rarely the papers. Papers turn up. Schools publish some, forums pass them around, and thirty seconds of searching produces a PDF. What does not turn up is anything that tells you why a particular answer is the right one.
The distinction parents draw, over and over, is between a mark scheme that says which answer is correct and one that explains how you get there. A numerical answer, on its own, helps very little if your child could not do the problem. It confirms the failure without touching the cause. You end up with a red cross, a child who already knew they had got it wrong, and no idea what to do on Tuesday.
This page is here to settle the question the only way that is fair: by showing you what is actually inside one of these answer keys, in full, from papers you can download for nothing and check against. If the explanations are not worth having, you will be able to tell from this page, and you will not have spent anything finding out.
The paper is Forest School 13+ Mathematics, Sample Paper 1. It is a one-hour non-calculator paper, and the instructions on its front page are unambiguous: “You should show your working to justify your answers.” You can download the paper free and read the question yourself before you read another word of this.
Question 8, part (iii). Class A and Class B sit the same maths test. Class A averages 50 per cent; Class B averages 80 per cent. A pupil called Sophia concludes that everyone in Class B did better than everyone in Class A. The paper asks whether you agree, and then adds five words that decide the whole question: explain your reasoning clearly.
No, because the mean is only an average.
That sentence is not wrong. It is also not an explanation. It restates the definition of a mean and stops, which is exactly what a child does when they have a feeling that Sophia is wrong but cannot yet say what would have to be true for her to be right.
This is the entry for question 8(iii), copied out of the key without a word changed:
No, I do not agree. The mean score for each class tells us the average performance, but it does not tell us about individual scores. It is possible for some students in Class A to have scored higher than some students in Class B. For example, Class A could have one student who scored 100% and others who scored much lower, while Class B could have all students scoring around 80%. Without knowing the individual scores or the range/spread of scores in each class, we cannot conclude that every student in Class B did better than every student in Class A.
Look at what that paragraph does that the one-liner does not. It states the position. It says what a mean does tell you, which is the part children skip. It says what a mean does not tell you. Then it does the thing that actually earns the marks: it invents a counter-example, with numbers, in which Sophia’s claim is false. And it closes by naming the missing information — the individual scores, or the spread — that would be needed to settle it either way.
Here is where we have to be careful with you. Forest School’s sample paper does not print a mark tariff beside each question, and the school does not publish a mark scheme for it. So anyone who tells you this answer is worth exactly two marks and the one-liner exactly one is guessing, and we are not going to.
What the paper does tell you, in its own words, is that you should show your working to justify your answers, and that this particular question wants your reasoning explained clearly. A child who writes “No, because the mean is only an average” has answered the first half of the question and ignored the second. The gap between the two responses is not a matter of style. One of them contains a counter-example and one of them does not, and the counter-example is the reasoning.
Some papers do print the tariff, and then the arithmetic of a weak answer becomes exact. Aldenham School’s 13+ Biology sample paper is 28 marks in 20 minutes, and it prints the marks question by question. You can download it free as well.
Question 1(a) shows a diagram of a plant cell and asks two things about the part labelled A: give its name, and give its function. The paper prints 2 marks next to it.
The answer key reads:
Name: Chloroplast
Function: Site of photosynthesis / to carry out photosynthesis / to produce glucose and oxygen using light energy
Two things are going on there. The first is that a child who writes “chloroplast” and nothing else has answered half a two-mark question and scored one. That is not a subtle loss on a 28-mark paper — it is the difference of nearly four per cent of the whole thing, on a question the child genuinely knew.
The second is the forward slashes. They are doing the job a real mark scheme does: showing the alternatives a marker would accept. “Site of photosynthesis” earns it. So does “to produce glucose and oxygen using light energy”. A parent marking at the kitchen table needs to know that both are fine, because otherwise they will mark a correct answer wrong and take the child’s confidence with it.
We are not going to pretend every entry is a paragraph. Question 1 of that same Forest School paper asks you to calculate 9784 + 8367. The key says 18151. That is the whole entry, and it should be.
A worked explanation of a column addition would be padding. The useful rule, and the one the keys follow, is that the answer matches the question: a question that asks you to calculate gets a number, and a question that asks you to explain, justify, compare or suggest gets prose. If you buy the pack expecting a written commentary on every arithmetic drill, you will be disappointed, and we would rather you knew that now.
| Question type | What the key gives you | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Calculate / work out | The number, on its own | Nothing else would tell you anything |
| Multi-step calculation | The number plus the working, sometimes by two routes | So you can see which step went wrong, not just that one did |
| Name / label / state | The term, with accepted alternatives separated by slashes | So you do not mark a correct synonym wrong |
| Explain / suggest / justify | A written answer in full sentences | The reasoning is the thing being marked |
| Draw / plot / construct | A description of what the finished drawing must show | A PDF cannot hand you a graph, but it can tell you what to check |
| Extended English response | A model answer with quoted evidence, plus what a marker is looking for | There is no single right answer, only stronger and weaker ones |
English is the subject where the word “answer” stops being quite the right word. The Sevenoaks School Year 9 English paper in this collection sets a passage and asks what you learn from the first paragraph, what atmosphere is created, and how the writer presents the future. There is no correct string of words for any of those.
So the English keys do something different. They give a full model response that quotes the passage, points at the specific phrases doing the work, and names the effect each one has. Where the question is an extended one, the key also sets out what a marker would reward — how many distinct points a strong response covers, and what separates a strong answer from a weak one that lists features without saying what they achieve.
The honest limit is this: a model answer is one good answer, not the only one. If your child writes something quite different and it is well evidenced, it may be just as good. What the key gives you is a standard to hold the child’s writing against, which is more than a blank page gives you.
They are not the schools’ official mark schemes. Most independent senior schools do not release a mark scheme with their sample papers at all, which is precisely the gap this pack exists to fill, but it means what you are buying is our working, written against the school’s question paper — not a document issued by the school. If a school does publish its own mark scheme, use that one first. Our page on where to find free 13+ past papers lists which of them do.
They are not a per-point marking grid. Where a school prints marks on the paper, you can see the tariff for yourself; where it does not, we do not invent one. Nor are they a prediction of what a school will set next year: a sample paper shows the format a school has used, and formats change.
One more thing you will meet, and we would rather flag it than have you find it. A handful of these papers are scans in which a question runs across a page break or a diagram carries information the text does not. Where that happens, the key says so and explains what would be needed to answer it, rather than inventing an answer to a question it cannot fully see. That is deliberate. A confidently wrong answer is worse than no answer, because you would mark your child against it.
The mistake is to treat the key as a marking device and stop there. A score out of 28 tells you almost nothing you did not already suspect. The value is in the second pass.
Sit the paper properly first — timed, in one go, without the key anywhere in the room. The Aldenham Biology paper is 20 minutes; the Forest Maths paper is an hour. Time pressure is half of what these papers test, and a paper done in leisurely instalments over a week measures something else entirely.
Then mark it together with the key open, and sort the wrong answers into two piles. Pile one: the child knew it and made a slip. Those need no teaching, only slowing down. Pile two: the child did not know it. Those are the only ones worth spending an evening on.
For anything in pile two, read the key’s explanation aloud, close it, and ask the child to answer the question again from scratch, in writing. If they can reproduce the reasoning rather than the sentence, it has landed. If they can only echo the wording back, it has not, and the same question will beat them again in three weeks. This is also the point at which a parent who never studied the subject can still be useful: you do not need to know any biology to ask “which part of that did you not have?”
The 36 question papers are free, from the 13+ papers hub, as direct PDF downloads with no account and no email address. The £50 unlocks the worked answer key for every one of them — £1.39 per paper, paid once, no subscription, and the answers stay available to re-download for a year.
The collection covers 22 independent schools and ISEB, split evenly at 12 Maths, 12 English and 12 Biology papers. The ISEB paper is a Common Entrance Level 2 Biology specimen. ISEB sets Common Entrance at 13+ for pupils in Year 8, with three examination sessions a year — November, January and May/June — and English, mathematics and science compulsory for every candidate.
If you would rather see the whole list arranged by date first, we publish all 36 papers by year, and the same collections exist for 11+ and across the rest of the resources library.
Both, depending on the question. A question that asks you to calculate 9784 + 8367 gets the number and nothing else, because nothing else would help. A question that says “explain your reasoning clearly” gets a written explanation, because that is what the marks are for.
No, and we say so plainly. Most of the 22 schools in this collection publish no mark scheme at all. These answer keys are written by us against the school’s own question paper. Where a school does publish its own mark scheme, that is the one to trust first, and we tell you which schools those are.
The worked answer key for all 36 papers in the 13+ collection — £1.39 a paper, paid once, with access for a year. The 36 question papers themselves stay free, with no account and no email address.
You are reading two of them. The Forest School statistics answer and the Aldenham cell-structure answer on this page are copied out of the keys word for word, not paraphrased or tidied up.
That is the main reason parents buy one. A bare answer leaves you unable to say anything except right or wrong. A written explanation lets you ask your child the one useful question: which part of this did you not have?
They are written by people, so yes, occasionally. They are not issued or checked by the schools. If you think an answer is wrong, send the paper name and question number to hello@leadingtuition.co.uk and we will check it against the paper and correct the key.