11 Plus Parents' Guide (Everything you need to know to practice and pass English, Maths, Verbal and Non-Verbal Reasoning)

Do you want your child to have their very best chance of passing the 11 plus? Of course you do. In which case, the truth is YOU need to get your act together. When you take your children through the 11 plus, there are two KEY things that you learn: parental involvement is a HUGE factor in 11 plus success or failure. Plus there’s an enormous amount that other parents don’t tell you. This Guide was born from these two truths.

Inside, we’ll give you detailed, step by step guidance on how your child can do their best and score maximum marks in English, Maths, Verbal and Non-Verbal Reasoning exams, how good preparation is all – and the role that YOU as parent need to play. We’ll show you why just leaving it to a tutor will put your child at a disadvantage, what you need to do to help them, how, and when.

We’ve put this Guide together based on our own experiences of taking our kids through the 11 plus. As two mums and best friends, we’ve drawn on parental obsession (!), professional expertise in the education sector and journalistic training that made us simply very good at asking questions, to nail what you need to do when, subject by subject, term by term, to give your kids their best chance of success. We’ll show you what a big difference parents can make, what constitutes good support, what the 11 plus examiners are looking for in the various papers your child will sit, how to teach your child to get more marks wherever possible, and a host of other insights we had NO idea we were going to need when we started out.

There are some firmly held beliefs underpinning the Guide. First of all, we’d like to help parents through the secrecy that surrounds the 11 plus. Sometimes it can feel like you are trying to do the equivalent of breaking into the Bank of England. In some ways this is understandable. With globalisation and a recession, the sense that we have to do the very best for our children is becoming a national obsession. And what you and your Dear Child are about to go through has become unbelievably competitive. More children than ever are sitting the 11 plus for our remaining Grammar Schools. And oddly despite the recession, more children than ever seem to be sitting 11 plus entrance for Private Schools too, both bursaries and full-fees. Last year in our area of the country, applications went up again right across the board.

Unfortunately, this competitive pressure can produce a kind of collective insanity. Formerly lovely mums and friendly dads clam up when it comes to sharing the phone number of top local tutors. Some claim they don’t do a thing at home. Past papers from favourite target schools or intelligence about previous interview questions is all closely guarded. Otherwise highly decent families lie blatantly about whether they are tutoring, and which schools they have in their sights.

We were unbelievably lucky in that we were already good friends before we started our 11 plus saga – it kept us sane, as well as allowing us to swap intelligence in a way that other people seemed shockingly reluctant to do.

Fundamentally you have to know that preparation IS important, and that most people will be lying about how much they are doing. We don’t necessarily mean that shelling out for an expensive after-school tutor is essential. We firmly believe it’s eminently possible for you to prepare your child yourself, if you want to, or can’t get a good tutor, or financial circumstances mean the fees are a bit daunting. The bottom line is that tutors can be jolly useful (we’ve regularly used them ourselves) - but they are absolutely no substitute for the involved parent. Never mind the kids, YOU getting stuck in is your child’s best chance of 11 plus success. So if getting them into the right school really matters to you, that’s what you need to do. Our Guide shows how that is perfectly possible and much easier than you might think.