Most families decide they're "doing the 11+" sometime in the second half of Year 5. They've heard from another parent that the exam is in early Year 6, the holiday is approaching, and there's a sudden scramble for tutors, workbooks, and apps. The children who pass comfortably are, almost without exception, the ones whose families made the decision at least a year earlier.
This is a staged plan. What to do in each year — and crucially, what NOT to do. The biggest failure mode in 11+ preparation isn't doing too little. It's doing the wrong thing too soon, burning the child out, and then having no usable practice runway in the final six months.
11+ exams cover four areas, depending on the region and school:
The wedge to understand: verbal and non-verbal reasoning are specific skills you have to practise on their own. A child who's strong in school maths and English can still fail the 11+ because the reasoning question types are unfamiliar. The single most effective change a family can make is to start reasoning practice early, even just five minutes a week.
Year 3 is too early for formal 11+ preparation. The child is still securing place value, basic multiplication, and reading fluency. Skip 11+ workbooks. Skip tutors.
What you can do at Year 3 — and it matters — is read with the child every day. Vocabulary is the single biggest predictor of later 11+ performance, and reading with a parent (where unfamiliar words get explained in context) builds vocabulary faster than any other intervention. Audiobooks count. Above-age books that you read aloud, even when the child can't read them alone, count especially.
If you're going to do the 11+, this is when you start. Not full preparation. Not past papers. Not a tutor. Just two specific things:
Times tables to automaticity. Every primary curriculum requires times tables to 12 × 12 by end of Year 4 — the Multiplication Tables Check in June makes this official. Most 11+ maths sections assume this fluency. A child who can't recall 7 × 8 in under two seconds will run out of time on the exam, regardless of how well they understand the harder topics. Drill them daily. There is no shortcut.
Introducing verbal and non-verbal reasoning, very lightly. Five minutes a week, on alternate weeks, just so the child gets used to the question types. The point isn't accuracy — it's familiarity. By the end of Year 4 the child should not be surprised by what a "missing letter" puzzle looks like.
Do not start past papers. Do not start a tutor. Do not commit to a daily-practice routine. Year 4 is foundation-building, and burning the child out a year before the exam is the most common 11+ mistake.
Year 5 is the year of structured practice. The exam is around 12 months away. The skills your child needs are now known and finite.
Daily verbal reasoning, daily non-verbal reasoning. Ten to fifteen minutes each, six days a week. This is the most under-appreciated part of 11+ prep — these are skills like times tables, in that pure exposure-over-time produces the recall and pattern recognition that timed practice tests reward.
Weekly comprehension. Pick a passage at or slightly above the child's reading level, work through the questions together once a week. The skill is reading the question carefully, finding the evidence in the passage, and writing a clear answer — none of which is automatic.
Maths above year-group level. Year 5 maths is the floor; 11+ maths sometimes reaches into Year 6. Solid Year 5 fluency plus exposure to early Year 6 topics (ratio, basic algebra, fractions × fractions) is the right level.
Bring in past papers in the spring — March or April of Year 5, after enough reasoning practice that the question types are familiar. Two papers a month, with relaxed marking and conversation afterwards about which question types tripped the child up. Don't time them yet.
By September of Year 6, the exam is two to four months away depending on region. The work is now refinement, not expansion. New material introduced in Year 6 has too little time to consolidate.
Timed past papers, weekly. One full paper per week, marked properly. The exam is timed and the timing matters. Most children who fail the 11+ run out of time before they run out of skill.
Targeted drilling of identified weak areas. By now, weak topics are visible. If non-verbal reasoning rotation questions are 40% accurate, that's the topic. If the child loses marks on fractions of amounts, that's the topic. Specific, not general.
Stop adding new material after October. The final 6–8 weeks before the exam should be pure familiarity work. Past papers, weak-spot drills, exam technique. Introducing new topics in November destabilises a child who needs to feel they already know the work.
Stop revising 48 hours before. The neurology research on cramming is unambiguous — late-stage cramming actually reduces retrieval performance compared to a calm evening before. The child needs sleep and confidence on exam morning, not last-minute panic.
Walk the child to a normal Saturday breakfast on exam day. Make it boring. Tell them the result genuinely doesn't change how much they're loved, and that you're proud of the work they've already done. Whatever they score, you'll know more about the right next school than you did the day before.
For verbal and non-verbal reasoning, the volume needed is high — multiple hundreds of questions across the year. Workbooks (Bond, CGP, Letts) remain the established option. Apps cover the same content with adaptive difficulty and instant marking; Cognithix is BFG's option, covering all four 11+ subject areas including the LAT, on-device, one-time purchase. Atom Learning is the higher-priced subscription competitor with a richer feature set. Most families end up using both an app and a workbook, switching for variety.
For past papers, buy them direct from the relevant exam board (GL or CEM) or use the school's own past-paper packs if available. Avoid the free PDFs floating around — many are mis-aligned with the current exam style.
For comprehension, the school will set books. Don't replace them — supplement with something the child genuinely wants to read.
Year 4: zero. The reading-aloud, times-tables drill, and light reasoning exposure don't need paid tools.
Year 5 and Year 6: a workbook set is £40–60. An app like Cognithix is around £4.99 once, or £40+ per month for the subscription alternatives. A tutor is £40–70 per session, weekly, for 12–18 months — typically £2,500–6,000 across the full prep window.
The big variable is whether to use a tutor at all. Tutors help most for children who struggle with self-directed practice or who need pace-setting. They help less for self-motivated children with engaged parents — for those families, a structured app plus weekly past papers does the same work for a tenth of the cost.