11 Plus: the last four weeks before the test

If your child is sitting the 11 Plus this autumn, you are now in the part of the year where most of the anxiety lives and, oddly, where the least new learning happens. That is as it should be. With four weeks to go, the children who do best are rarely the ones who learn the most in September; they are the ones who arrive knowing exactly what the paper looks like, how long each section takes, and what to do when a question stalls.

This is a guide to those four weeks. If you are earlier in the process, start with when to begin 11 Plus preparation and what is actually tested.

What the last month is for

Three things, in this order:

1. Familiarity. The format of the paper, the answer sheet, the instructions, the pace. Nothing should be new on the day.
2. Timing. Almost every child loses more marks to the clock than to difficulty. Practising under time is the single highest-value activity left.
3. Confidence. A child who believes the paper is beatable reads questions more carefully and recovers from a bad one faster.

What the last month is not for is new topics. If a whole area of maths is untouched, a tutor can triage it — but trying to learn it from scratch now costs more in confidence than it earns in marks.

Week by week

Four weeks out. One full practice paper, untimed, to find out where the marks are going. Look for patterns, not scores: rushing the early questions, running out of time on the last section, misreading what was asked. Fix the reading before anything else.

Three weeks out. Timed sections, not whole papers. Fifteen minutes of verbal reasoning, twenty of maths, on separate days. Short and frequent beats long and rare — a child's attention has an honest limit, and practice past it teaches bad habits.

Two weeks out. Two full papers, timed, on different days, with a proper break between. Mark them together and talk about why an answer was wrong, not that it was wrong. This is the week a good tutor earns their fee: an experienced teacher can see the reasoning behind a mistake in seconds and correct the method, not just the answer.

The final week. One light paper early in the week, then stop. Sleep, food, and an ordinary routine matter more now than another paper. Pack what is needed the night before. Say something true and simple on the morning — that they are ready, and that one test does not decide a life.

When a tutor helps most

Not every child needs a tutor for the 11 Plus, and a good one will tell you so. Where they make a real difference in the final month is with a child who knows the content but loses marks under time, or who has one specific weakness — non-verbal reasoning is the usual one — that a parent finds hard to teach. Two or three well-aimed lessons can move a borderline child across the line.

Every 11 Plus tutor on Teachers Delivered is a qualified, DBS-checked teacher, most of them with years of Year 5 and Year 6 classrooms behind them. Lessons are an hour, online or face-to-face, and you can book a single session rather than committing to a course.

Whatever happens in October, the preparation is not wasted. The reasoning, the timing and the habit of sitting a paper calmly are all things your child keeps.