When Should My Child Start Preparing for the 11+?
Parents usually ask this expecting an age in reply — Year 4, or the summer before Year 5, or whenever the neighbours started. It is the wrong question, and the honest answer is more useful: it depends on whether your child is ready, and readiness is not something you can judge from a school report.
What the timetable forces
Work backwards from the exam. The test is sat on a Saturday in September, a few days into Year 6. Registration closes the previous June. So whatever your child knows when they walk into that hall, they learned in Year 5 or earlier — the first weeks of Year 6 change nothing at all.
That single fact settles more than it looks. A child who starts in Year 5 has one year, and it is a year that also contains the registration deadline, the decision about which schools to name, and the exam itself. A child who starts in Year 3 has the same ground to cover spread across three.
It is a lot of ground
The test covers four subjects, each carrying 25% of the marks: English comprehension, verbal reasoning, maths and non-verbal reasoning. Two of those — verbal and non-verbal reasoning — are barely touched by the primary curriculum. Most children meet them for the first time in 11+ preparation.
Comprehension is the slowest of the four to build, because it rests on vocabulary and reading, and neither responds to cramming. It is the subject where the difference between three years of steady reading and one year of intensive work is most visible.
Why starting early usually helps
When a child is ready for it, beginning earlier tends to produce three things:
- Less pressure. The same content spread over three years is a calm weekly routine. Compressed into one, it becomes a scramble that the child feels.
- Stronger foundations. There is time to fix gaps properly rather than paper over them, and time for reading to do its slow work.
- A better outcome. Not because early starters are cleverer, but because they arrive at the exam having practised calmly for years rather than revised frantically for months.
Note the condition at the front of that. Starting early helps a child who is ready. Starting early with a child who is not ready achieves nothing good, and can do real harm to how they feel about school work.
So how do you know if your child is ready?
You book a free assessment, and we tell you.
We always recommend that Year 3 children come for one. It costs nothing, it takes a Saturday morning, and it answers the question properly rather than by guesswork. It is not a timed exam. We look at a sample of all four 11+ subjects to find where your child is strong and where the gaps are, and we are measuring more than a score. What we are really judging is how much room there is to improve towards grammar school entrance level.
From that we can confirm whether your child is ready to start the course. If they are, you begin with three years of runway. If they are not yet, you have lost nothing but a morning, and you know where things actually stand rather than wondering.
And if your child is already in Year 5?
Then you start now, and you start with clear eyes. A year is enough for many children. It is tighter, the weekly workload is higher, and there is less time to master all areas — but it is not too late, and we would tell you if we thought it was.
What we would not do is take your money and let you find out in September. The assessment works the same way whatever year group your child is in: an honest read on where they stand, including when the honest answer is that grammar school may not be the right route for them.
Book an assessment
Free, at our Edgbaston centre, on set Saturday dates. Book a free assessment, or read about the Year 3, Year 4 and Year 5 programmes.
You may also want our guides to how hard each of the eight schools is to get into, what is on the paper and the deadlines that catch parents out.