6 Weeks Until the 11+: What Could Your Child Be Doing Now?

With around six weeks to go until the 11+ examinations, it is completely understandable for parents to start wondering whether their child has done enough.

Perhaps practice-paper scores are still inconsistent. Maybe there are areas of Maths that your child continues to find difficult. Vocabulary might be a concern. Or perhaps timing seems to fall apart as soon as a paper is completed under test conditions.

The reassuring message is that six weeks is still a significant amount of preparation time.

However, what children do during these final weeks matters. This is not the time to panic, dramatically increase workloads or simply complete paper after paper. The most effective preparation now is targeted, purposeful and calm.

The goal isn't to make a child perfect. It is to help them become better prepared, more accurate, more strategic and more confident than they are today.

Stop focusing only on the score

One of the most useful changes parents can make at this stage is to stop concentrating solely on percentages.

If your child scores 62% on a practice paper, the most useful question isn't:

"Why didn't you get a higher score?"

It is:

"Where did the other marks go?"

Look carefully at the incorrect answers.

Did your child:

• not understand the underlying concept?

• misread the question?

• rush?

• make a calculation error?

• misunderstand a word?

• use the wrong method?

• spend too long on one question?

• run out of time?

• fail to check their answer?

• encounter an unfamiliar question type?

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These are very different problems and they require different solutions.

A child who doesn't understand perimeter needs teaching.

A child who understands perimeter but repeatedly misreads the measurements needs a checking strategy.

A child who can answer the questions correctly but doesn't reach them because they spent four minutes struggling with an earlier question needs help with timing.

Simply giving all three children another practice paper won't solve the problem.

Use a simple five-step approach

For the remaining weeks, parents can use this straightforward process:

TEST → IDENTIFY → TEACH → PRACTISE → RETEST

A practice paper identifies a weakness.

Stop.

Teach or revise that particular skill.

Practise it in isolation.

Leave it for a few days and revisit it.

Then see whether your child can apply the skill successfully when it appears again in mixed 11+ work.

This is far more effective than endlessly completing papers without addressing the underlying reasons marks are being lost.

Identify three priorities

Rather than telling your child they need to "get better at the 11+", identify their three most important areas for improvement.

For one child, these might be:

fractions + vocabulary + timing

For another:

comprehension inference + NVR + careless calculation errors

This immediately makes preparation feel more manageable.

Review these priorities regularly. Once one area becomes secure, replace it with another.

What should children do during the remaining summer holiday?

There are still a couple of weeks before most children return to school. This is a valuable opportunity, but it shouldn't become an 11+ boot camp.

For many children, approximately 30–45 minutes of focused preparation on most days can be much more productive than hours of reluctant work.

Include a sensible mixture of:

• Maths

• English

• Verbal Reasoning

• Non-Verbal Reasoning (if relevant)

• vocabulary

• reading

• targeted work on weaker areas

• short timed activities

  
  

And include days off.

Children need their summer holiday too.

The objective is consistency, not exhaustion.

When something is difficult, go back and teach it

If a child repeatedly struggles with an individual curriculum area, don't keep presenting it within difficult 11+ papers and hoping it eventually clicks.

Go back to the underlying skill.

For Maths, Corbettmaths Primary is particularly useful because children can access short teaching videos and questions on individual topics such as fractions, perimeter, area, percentages, ratio, angles and measures.

Oak National Academy is another excellent resource when a concept needs to be properly retaught rather than simply practised.

Other useful resources include:

• Mathsframe for interactive KS2 Maths practice

• BBC Bitesize for accessible Maths and English explanations

• Oxford Owl for age-appropriate Maths and English support

• IXL UK for targeted practice of individual skills

The principle is simple:

If your child doesn't understand it, teach it. If they understand it but aren't secure, practise it.

Vocabulary needs a little attention every day

Vocabulary can have an enormous impact across the 11+.

It affects verbal reasoning, synonyms, antonyms, comprehension and a child's ability to understand questions accurately.

With six weeks remaining, I would recommend 10–15 minutes of vocabulary work most days.

But don't try to memorise hundreds of disconnected words.

For each new word, encourage your child to learn:

Meaning → Synonym → Antonym → Use it in a sentence

Then revisit it.

Useful online resources include Prep4All's 11+ vocabulary games, Elexicon from Eleven Plus Exams and the free vocabulary quizzes from Foxton Books.

Regular retrieval is important. A child knowing a word on Monday doesn't necessarily mean they will remember it three weeks later.

Don't immediately tell children why an answer is wrong

One of the most powerful things parents can borrow from good teaching practice is questioning.

When your child gets something wrong, resist the temptation to immediately explain the answer.

Instead say:

"Talk me through what you did."

Then ask:

"What did you think the question was asking?"

"Show me the part of the question that made you think that."

"What was your first step?"

"Where do you think it started to go wrong?"

You may discover that your child actually understands the Maths perfectly but misread one word.

That is important information.

Questions to ask when checking Maths

Rather than saying, "Check it again", be more specific.

Try:

Does your answer look sensible?

Have you underlined 'key' information?

Can you estimate roughly what the answer should be?

Have you used the correct operation?

Have you included the correct units?

Can you solve it another way?

Could you work backwards to check it?

Children need to learn that "checking" doesn't simply mean repeating exactly the same calculation and making exactly the same mistake twice.

Questions to ask with comprehension

One of the best questions you can ask is:

"Where is your evidence?"

Follow this with:

"Which words in the passage support your answer?"

"Are you answering from the text or from what you think might be true?"

"Can you eliminate any of the other answers?"

Encourage the habit:

ANSWER → EVIDENCE → CHECK

This moves children away from selecting the answer that simply "sounds right".

Questions to ask with Verbal and Non-Verbal Reasoning

Ask:

"What is changing?"

"What is staying the same?"

"Can you see a pattern?"

"Is more than one thing changing?"

"Have you seen this type of question before?"

"Which answers can you eliminate?"

As children become more experienced, they should start recognising question types and automatically selecting an appropriate strategy.

That saves valuable time.

Teach children when to move on

Timing becomes increasingly important during the final weeks.

Children need to understand something very important:

They are not expected to find every question easy.

A difficult question appearing halfway through a paper does not mean the test is going badly.

We want children to develop the confidence to think:

"This is difficult. I'll make a sensible attempt, move on and collect the marks I can get elsewhere."

Spending several minutes fighting for one mark can mean losing several easier marks later in the paper.

Moving on isn't giving up.

It is an examination strategy.

Keep an error log

You don't need anything complicated.

When reviewing work, categorise mistakes:

Didn't know | Misread | Wrong method | Calculation | Vocabulary | Rushed | Timing | Unfamiliar question type

After a week or two, patterns often become very clear.

If "misread" appears repeatedly, another Maths worksheet isn't necessarily the solution.

If "vocabulary" appears repeatedly, you have identified an important priority.

The error log turns practice papers into useful diagnostic information.

When school starts again, don't increase the pressure

This can feel counterintuitive.

The examination is getting closer, so parents naturally think children should be doing more.

But returning to school brings early mornings, new teachers, schoolwork and tiredness.

This is often the time to make preparation shorter and sharper, not longer.

Thirty minutes of purposeful work from an alert child can be far more valuable than two hours with a tired and frustrated one.

Be careful with comparison

You will inevitably hear about another child who is apparently scoring 90%, completing two papers every day or has been preparing since Year 3.

Ignore the noise.

Different practice materials have different levels of difficulty. Children develop at different rates and one child's preparation tells you very little about what another child needs.

The useful comparison is:

Is my child better prepared than they were two weeks ago?

That is progress.

Protect confidence

As the examination approaches, children will take their emotional cues from the adults around them.

Instead of repeatedly asking:

"What percentage did you get?"

Try asking:

"What went well?"

"What did you learn?"

"Which mistake won't you make next time?"

"What do you need some help with?"

And when something goes wrong, try:

"Let's work out what happened here."

rather than:

"How did you get that wrong?"

The difference may seem small, but it changes reviewing mistakes from judgement into learning.

What about the final week?

The final week should not be frantic.

By then, the emphasis should move towards:

• light revision

• familiar question types

• short timed exercises

• reviewing strategies

• vocabulary retrieval

• confidence

• sleep

• normal routines

Do not suddenly try to teach everything your child has ever found difficult.

We want children arriving at the examination alert, calm and ready to think, not exhausted by last-minute preparation.

What are we really trying to achieve?

By test day, ideally your child should be able to say:

"I know what the papers are like.

I recognise the main question types.

I know what to do when I get stuck.

I can manage my time.

I know I won't get every question right and that's okay.

I can stay calm, concentrate and do my best."

That is good preparation.

Six weeks can still make a substantial difference, but the answer isn't simply more work.

It is the right work, at the right level, followed by careful feedback, revisiting and encouragement.

So don't spend the next six weeks trying to create the perfect 11+ candidate.

Help your child become more knowledgeable, more accurate, more strategic and, above all, more confident in their ability to tackle the challenge ahead. You've got this!