Starting 11 Plus Preparation in Year 5: What the Autumn Term Should Cover

If your child is in Year 5 this September, the 11 Plus is now roughly a year away. That can feel like plenty of time or no time at all, depending on which parent at the school gate you last spoke to.

Here is the honest version. A year is enough. It is enough because it gives you time to find the gaps and fix them properly, rather than cramming practice papers in the summer and hoping.

What matters is what happens in the first term.

Start with a baseline, not a practice paper

The most common mistake we see in September is starting with timed papers. A child sits a paper, gets a score, and nobody is quite sure what the score means.

A baseline is different. It tells you where your child’s reading age sits, how wide their vocabulary is, and which maths topics are secure and which are shaky. Everything after that is built on it.

This is exactly what our free assessment does. Your child sits a short English and maths paper, we mark it, and you get honest feedback on where they are.

What a good first six weeks covers

By October half term, a Year 5 child who started in September should have:

• a measured reading age and a vocabulary baseline to work against
• seen every verbal reasoning question type at least twice
• been taught the core non verbal reasoning patterns rather than left to guess at them
• sat one full mock paper under timed conditions

And you should have a written progress note, not just a mark. That matters more than it sounds. A mark tells you how a child did on one day. A progress note tells you why, and what happens next.

English is usually where the time goes

Maths gaps tend to be specific and fixable. Fractions, ratio, a shaky times table. You find them, you teach them, they close.

English takes longer, because vocabulary and comprehension build slowly. This is why reading in Year 5 matters so much, and why we start vocabulary work in the first week rather than leaving it for the spring.

If your child is also sitting an independent school exam, the writing paper matters too. Our independent school groups cover creative writing alongside the reasoning papers.

Grammar or independent, or both

Many of our families apply for both. The preparation overlaps a great deal, because the same English, maths and reasoning skills sit underneath both. The differences are mostly in the writing and, later on, the interview.

You do not need to decide this month. You do need to prepare for whichever exam is harder, because skills transfer down far more easily than they transfer up.

How our Year 5 groups work

Our 11 Plus groups run at our Catford centre in SE13 and our Beckenham centre in BR3, with no more than six children in a group. Every group is two hours a week and covers English, maths, verbal reasoning and non verbal reasoning.

In centre groups are £215 a month and include a free online booster. If you live further away, our online Year 5 groups run live on Microsoft Teams from Tuesday to Thursday, 6pm to 7pm, at £195 a month.

Our pass rate for the Kent, Bexley and Medway grammar schools sits between 90 and 100%, and we have helped more than 1,000 children since 2013.

Where to begin

If you are not sure whether your child is on track, the free assessment will tell you. It takes around an hour, there is no obligation afterwards, and you will leave with a clear picture of what the next year needs to look like.