11 plus preparation: a guide for parents

The 11 plus is not a harder version of the work your child does at school. It samples four areas, and only two of them appear on a primary timetable under anything like the same name.

• 1English comprehensionReading an unseen passage and answering questions about it. The passage is usually older in style and longer than a ten-year-old expects, and the questions reward going back into the text rather than remembering it. A surprising share of the marks turn on vocabulary in the questions themselves, not in the passage.
• 2Verbal reasoningWord puzzles: codes, letter sequences, analogies, hidden words, odd ones out. Each type has a method that takes a few minutes to learn. The difficulty is that there are a lot of types, and every one of them collapses the moment a child meets a word they do not know.
• 3MathematicsFamiliar primary content asked faster and in more steps. Most of the arithmetic is work your child has already covered. What the test adds is the job of working out which operation is wanted, often twice in the same question, under a clock.
• 4Non-verbal and spatial reasoningShape and pattern work: rotations, reflections, sequences, matrices, nets and cubes. There is no reading and no arithmetic. There is only the ability to notice what changes from one figure to the next.

Two things are worth knowing before you plan around that list. Not every test uses all four areas, and where all four appear they are rarely weighted equally, so a child's weakest area is not automatically the one to pour time into. And the mechanics of the paper matter as much as the content: a child who has only ever written answers in a book can lose marks on a separate answer sheet purely by drifting a row out of alignment. That is not a knowledge gap. It is a rehearsal gap, and it is cheap to close.

Is the 11 plus the right choice for your child?

How are grammar school places actually offered?

Passing a test and being offered a place are two different events, and conflating them is the source of a great deal of avoidable distress in March.

Admission arrangements in England are not left to each school's preference. They are governed by statutory guidance: the Department for Education's School Admissions Code is described as guidance that schools must follow when carrying out their duties relating to admissions, and the current code has applied since 1 September 2021. That is why every school has to publish its arrangements rather than simply decide.

What those arrangements contain differs school by school. GOV.UK's summary of how places are offered lists the criteria schools commonly use, and passing an entrance exam, for selective schools such as grammar schools, sits in that list as one criterion among several. Distance, siblings, looked-after children and other published criteria sit alongside it.

Read that carefully, because the planning consequence is real. In a selective area the test usually decides who is eligible, and a separate published criterion decides who among the eligible children is offered a place. Two schools whose qualifying standards look similar can behave completely differently once the offers go out, because their tie-breakers differ. Before you settle a preference order, read the actual admission arrangements for the specific schools on your list, on those schools' own pages, for the year your child will enter. Nothing on a tutoring forum is a substitute for that document, and nothing on this page is either.

When do you have to register, and who decides?

The single most expensive mistake in 11 plus preparation has nothing to do with practice. It is missing the registration window, and it happens every year to families whose children were entirely ready.

Registration is separate from the ordinary secondary school application. In most selective areas a parent has to actively register the child for the test, months before the common application form is even open, and the registration window frequently closes before the summer holiday of Year 5. If nobody registers the child, there is no test to sit and no route back in, however well the preparation went.

We are not going to print a date here, and you should treat any site that does with suspicion unless it is the admissions authority's own. Deadlines, forms and eligibility rules are set locally, by the local authority, the school or the partnership of schools running the test, and they move. The School Admissions Code requires arrangements to be published; it does not make them the same everywhere. Your job is to find the published version for your own authority and the schools you care about.

Three practical habits, all of them cheap. In the spring term of Year 5, find the official registration page for every school on your list and put its opening and closing dates in a calendar with an alert a fortnight early. Check whether a separate supplementary form is required, because in some areas it is and the test registration alone is not enough. And register on the first day of the window rather than the last: the pages that carry these forms are not built for the traffic they get on a deadline evening.

Rather not build the study timetable yourself while you deal with all this? Start a free week of Pathway Eleven and the daily plan is set for you.

What happens if the answer is no?

Appeals exist, they are properly constituted, and they are not a plan.

The process is governed by its own statutory guidance. The Department for Education's School Admission Appeals Code sets out how schools should organise and run admission appeals, and a new code came into force on 1 October 2022, applying to appeals lodged on or after that date. Panels are independent, the process is prescribed, and a family that wants to appeal has a real right to be heard.

What the numbers say about the outcome is worth knowing before you build any hope on it. In its Admission appeals in England release published in August 2026, covering the 2025/26 academic year, the Department for Education recorded that 3.6% of secondary admissions went to an appeal heard by a panel, down from 3.9%, which the release counts as 27,100 appeals heard. Of those, 19.5% succeeded, down from 19.9%, or roughly 5,300. Primary appeals are rarer still, at 1.0% of admissions, and succeed less often, at 15.0%.

Read those two figures together. Appealing is uncommon, and roughly four in five appeals that are heard do not change the outcome. That is not an argument against appealing if you have real grounds. It is an argument for putting the family's effort where it can still move something, which is the test itself and the preference list, months before any of this arises. A carefully chosen second and third preference does more for your child than an appeal is statistically likely to.

In most selective areas the test sits at the very start of Year 6, which means the last uninterrupted block of preparation time is the summer holiday before it, and the decisive teaching year is Year 5. Everything below is built backwards from that.

The table is a ladder, not a schedule to catch up on. A family joining in Year 5 does not need to retrofit Year 3 and Year 4; they need to accept that the same ground is being covered in less time and plan the week accordingly.

Year 3: reading, number, and no papers at all

Year 3 is the easiest place to start and the easiest place to ruin. A seven-year-old given practice papers learns that reading is a test, and that lesson takes years to unlearn.

What genuinely belongs here is short and unglamorous. Reading slightly above the comfortable level, out loud, with someone who stops to ask what a word means. Number facts until they arrive without effort, because every later maths question is easier when the arithmetic is free. Jigsaws, tangrams, drawing symmetrical patterns and anything else that involves turning shapes in the head. Talking about words: where they come from, what the prefix does, why two words that look alike do not mean the same thing.

The word we would use for the whole year is exposure, not preparation. Our fuller notes on this are on the Year 3 page, and the honest summary is that most of the useful work in Year 3 does not look like schoolwork.

That is a little over an hour a week. It is enough, and a family that keeps it going for three years arrives at Year 5 with an advantage that cannot be bought later in the summer.

Year 4: meeting the formats before they matter

Year 4 has one job that Year 3 does not: introducing the two reasoning strands so that they are familiar rather than alarming when the real work starts.

The reason to do it now is specific. Verbal and non-verbal reasoning both have a large first-encounter cost. A child meeting a letter-code question for the first time is not being tested on reasoning, they are being tested on whether they have seen a letter-code question. Paying that cost across a relaxed year, a format at a time, removes a whole layer of panic from Year 5. It is also the year to notice, without saying anything, whether a child finds shape work easy and word work slow, or the reverse, because that shapes how you divide the time later.

What still does not belong: scores, comparisons, full sections, or any sentence that begins "if you want to get into". Our Year 4 guide goes further into where the line sits. If your child is in Year 3 or Year 4 and you are wondering whether you have left it too late, you have not, by a wide margin.

A little over an hour and a half a week, spread thinly. Notice what a Tuesday looks like: a single question type, taught before it is practised, and finished while your child still has attention left over.

Year 5: the year that decides most of it

If a family has one year to do this properly, this is the year. The test is at the start of Year 6, so Year 5 is the last full year of teaching time, and the summer that follows it is a top-up rather than a rescue.

The autumn term is for coverage and routine. Every question type met, every maths topic touched, the session at the same time on the same days so that it stops being a nightly decision. No clock yet: a child who is rushed before they are accurate simply gets faster at being wrong, and unpicking that in the spring costs more time than the rushing ever saved.

The spring term is for the gaps the autumn exposed, and for the first timed sections. Time a section, not a paper. The skill being learned is pacing inside a block of questions, and that is trainable in fifteen minutes at a time. The summer term is for registration admin, more timed work, and the first full paper sat properly, at a table, with a real answer sheet. Our Year 5 guide has the term-by-term version.

Around three hours across a week, and the largest single block is forty minutes. If your Year 5 week looks like two long sessions at the weekend instead, the same total is doing considerably less work than this one, for reasons the research section below makes concrete.

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The summer before Year 6

Six weeks with no school is the last block of uninterrupted time before the test, and it is where families make their two biggest errors in opposite directions.

The first is stopping completely. Reasoning skills are not knowledge; they fade with disuse faster than facts do, and a child who does nothing for six weeks spends the first fortnight of September recovering ground rather than gaining any. The second is treating the holiday as a training camp. Three hours a day in August produces a child who is thoroughly sick of the whole thing by the week that matters, and burnout in the last fortnight is not recoverable.

What works is a smaller version of the term routine, running on most days, with whole days and ideally a whole week genuinely off. Thirty to forty minutes on a working day is plenty. The one thing the holiday makes possible that term time does not is the full paper sat properly, so put two or three across the six weeks, spaced far enough apart that there is time to act on each. A paper sat on Monday and another on Wednesday measures a child twice and teaches them nothing.

Use the holiday for the slow things as well. Vocabulary built through a long book is worth more than a list. And if there is one topic that has been quietly avoided all year, this is the moment to teach it properly, because there will be no room for it in September.

The final weeks, and the morning itself

The last two or three weeks have one purpose: making familiar work feel automatic. Almost everything that goes wrong at this stage comes from trying to do something else.

Reduce the volume and keep the routine. A child who has been working five days a week should still be working five days a week, for less time. New content introduced now displaces something already secure, and the trade is almost always bad. If a topic is genuinely missing, teach it once, plainly, and then leave it alone rather than drilling it into the last week.

Rehearse the mechanics, not just the questions. Practise transferring answers to a separate sheet if that is what the test uses. Agree in advance what your child does when a question defeats them, so the decision is already made when their heart is going. A simple rule works: read it twice, make the best guess available, mark it, move on. Children lose more marks to a single question that ate four minutes than to any topic they never learned.

In the final week, sleep does more than practice. Move bedtime earlier rather than later, eat breakfast on the morning, and say nothing about the outcome in the car. Your child cannot revise on the way and can absolutely absorb your face. The last useful thing a parent can say is that you will be pleased with them either way, and it is worth saying it a few days early, when there is time for it to land.

Most advice about revision is folklore. There is, however, a serious body of work on which study techniques earn their time, and it is unusually relevant to a test sat by a ten-year-old with limited attention.

The best-known review is Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan and Willingham's Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest in 2013. The authors rated ten common techniques and concluded, in their words, that "practice testing and distributed practice received high utility assessments because they benefit learners of different ages and abilities and have been shown to boost students' performance across many criterion tasks".

Two things follow directly. Distributed practice means spreading the same total time across more occasions, which is the whole argument for a short daily session over a long weekend one. Practice testing means retrieving an answer rather than reviewing one: attempting the question, then checking, rather than reading a worked example and feeling that it made sense.

The same review rated the techniques most families default to, including rereading and highlighting, considerably lower. That is worth sitting with, because rereading a topic your child got wrong feels productive and is close to the least efficient thing available. Turning it around costs nothing. Instead of going back over the page on codes, ask your child to do two code questions cold, three days after they last saw one. If they can, it is learned. If they cannot, you have found something to teach, which is more than rereading would have told you.

English comprehension: the slow subject

Comprehension is the area that improves most slowly and keeps improving longest, which makes it the worst candidate for a late push and the best candidate for early attention.

It rests on three separate things: reading stamina, vocabulary, and the willingness to go back into the passage to check rather than answering from impression. The third is the one that is trainable in weeks rather than years, and it is where the quickest marks live. A child who underlines the line their answer came from is a child who stops losing marks to nearly-right recall.

The daily habit that helps most is not a comprehension exercise. It is reading something slightly harder than is comfortable and talking about it, because that is what builds the stamina and the vocabulary at the same time. Exercises then teach the technique: how to tell a retrieval question from an inference question, how to spot when a question is really asking about the author's choice of word, and how much of the answer to write when writing is required.

One habit to break early is answering in the order the questions appear when the passage does not support it. Questions about the closing lines are often quicker than questions about tone, and a child who works strictly top to bottom can run out of time with the easy marks unclaimed. Our guide to 11 plus English comprehension goes through the question types and the technique for each.

Verbal reasoning: many formats, one real obstacle

Verbal reasoning looks intimidating and is largely mechanical. Each type has a method, the methods are learnable in minutes, and a child who has met every type once is most of the way there.

The catch is the volume of types and the fact that published lists of them disagree with one another. Families buy a book organised around one naming scheme, work through it diligently, and meet a differently-labelled version of the same puzzle on the day. The defence is to learn what each puzzle is doing rather than what it is called: this one moves letters by a fixed step, that one asks which word can be made from parts of two others.

The real obstacle is vocabulary, and it does not announce itself. A child who knows the method for synonyms and antonyms perfectly still cannot answer a question containing four words they have never met. This is why verbal reasoning practice sometimes plateaus for months while nothing appears to be wrong with the technique.

Practise in small mixed sets rather than long blocks of one type. Identifying which puzzle you are looking at is part of the skill, and a page of twenty of the same thing removes exactly that part. Our verbal reasoning guide sets out every format with the method for each.

Mathematics: the content is not the problem

Almost all the mathematical content in an 11 plus paper is primary curriculum content your child will meet at school anyway. What the test adds is pace and the number of steps between the question and the answer, and those are separate things to train.

Pace comes from fluency in number facts. A child who has to work out seven eights is spending working memory on arithmetic rather than on the problem, and running out of it. Quick recall practice is dull and pays for itself faster than anything else in the subject. Multi-step word problems deserve their own slot, because the difficulty there is choosing the operation, not performing it, and that is a reading skill wearing a mathematical hat.

Fractions, decimals, percentages and ratio should be taught as one connected idea rather than four separate topics, because the test moves between them inside a single question and a child who has learned them as four unrelated procedures freezes when asked to convert mid-problem.

The other place marks disappear is unit and format errors: an answer in centimetres when the question asked for metres, or a remainder left in when the question wanted a decimal. These are not maths failures and they respond to a habit, which is rereading the question after solving it. Our 11 plus maths topics checklist lists what has to be secure before the test.

Non-verbal reasoning: fast gains, then a ceiling

Non-verbal reasoning has an unusual shape as a subject. Children typically improve quickly once they have seen enough of the puzzles, then flatten out, and further practice buys very little.

That shape should drive the planning. It makes non-verbal reasoning an efficient thing to work on early, in Year 4 and the first half of Year 5, and a poor thing to spend the last month on. Yet the last month is exactly when many families reach for it, because it looks strange and therefore feels urgent, while reading feels like something that is already happening. It is the wrong instinct, and it usually costs marks in areas that were still moving.

The teachable part is the search strategy. A child who scans a matrix asking one question at a time, does the shading change, does the count change, does anything rotate, gets to the rule faster than a child staring at the whole figure hoping it will resolve. Saying the rule out loud before choosing an answer is worth more than any amount of extra volume.

Watch for the specific weakness of paper practice here: rotations and reflections are much easier to judge with a physical object in the hand. If your child is guessing on cube nets, build one out of card before doing another page of them. Our non-verbal reasoning guide covers the question types.

Vocabulary, the ceiling nobody sees

Vocabulary deserves its own section because it is invisible in the results. It never appears as a topic on a report, and it silently caps performance in two of the four areas at once.

A child can have flawless comprehension technique and still lose marks because the question used a word they did not know. The same child can have every verbal reasoning method at their fingertips and be unable to use them. When a plateau appears across both English and verbal reasoning while the maths keeps improving, vocabulary is the first thing to suspect, and it is almost never the thing a family checks.

Word lists are the obvious response and the weak one. Words learned from a list are recognised in the shape of the list and often not in a sentence. Reading builds vocabulary far better because it supplies the context, the repetition and the grammar all at once, which is why the reading habit set up in Year 3 keeps paying out five years later.

What does help alongside reading is talking about word parts. A child who knows that "bene" tends to mean good and "mal" tends to mean bad has a working guess at a dozen words they have never met, and a working guess is exactly what a multiple-choice question rewards. Fifteen minutes a week on prefixes, roots and suffixes goes further than an hour on a list, and it is one of the few things in this guide that is genuinely pleasant to do together.

When should the clock appear, and what are mocks for?

Timing is added after accuracy, never before it, and this is the sequencing error we see most often. A child who is rushed while still making method errors gets faster at making them, and the habit is much harder to remove than it was to create.

The order that works: teach the method, practise it untimed until it is reliable, then time a section, then time a paper. Introduce the clock at the level of a section rather than a whole paper, because pacing inside a block of questions is the actual skill, and a fifteen-minute section trains it without costing a Saturday morning.

Mock tests do a different job. A mock is not a measurement of how a child will do; it is a rehearsal of the conditions, and its value is in the pattern it exposes rather than the number on the front. Look at where the answers stopped, whether accuracy fell away in the final quarter, which question types were skipped and never returned to, and whether the answer sheet matches the working. Any one of those tells you something you can change this week. The overall percentage tells you almost nothing.

Space them out, as the summer section above sets out. Mocks packed into the last fortnight leave no room to act on anything they show, which is the worst possible use of a genuinely useful tool. Our guide to 11 plus mock tests covers how to read a result without panic.

Marking that teaches something

These are not the obvious ones. Every family already knows not to leave it until the last minute. The expensive mistakes are the ones that look like good preparation while they are happening.

• 1Papers used as a substitute for teachingA practice paper measures; it does not teach. A child who sits paper after paper on a topic they were never taught simply produces a long record of the same gap. Papers are a diagnostic tool with a teaching step attached, and the teaching step is the part that is usually skipped because it is the part that takes an adult's time.
• 2Marking without diagnosisCovered above, and worth repeating because it is the most common of all. A score with no cause attached cannot change anything next week.
• 3Timing added before accuracySpeed is trained last. A child rushed too early becomes fast at their own mistakes, and the resulting habit is one of the hardest things to undo in the final term.
• 4Buying by the named-question-type listBooks and courses advertise the number of formats they cover, and families choose the longest list. Coverage is not the constraint; whether a child can recognise a type when it appears out of context is. A programme that mixes types well beats one that lists more of them.
• 5Reading a mock result as a predictionA mock is one morning, with one set of passages, one child's night of sleep behind it. Treating it as a forecast produces either false confidence or unnecessary despair, and both change parental behaviour for the worse for about a fortnight.
• 6Answer-sheet transcription errorsWhere a separate answer sheet is used, a child who slips a row can lose a long run of marks while getting the questions right. It is entirely preventable with a few rehearsals, and it is almost never rehearsed because it is not really a topic. The habit worth building is a checkpoint: every time your child turns a page, glance at the number on the sheet and the number on the paper.
• 7Silent vocabulary ceilingsTwo subjects stop improving, the technique looks fine, and nobody thinks to check whether the child knew the words. Months can pass like this.
• 8The parent becoming the fourth teacher of the dayA child who has been taught since nine in the morning does not have a great deal left at half past five, and a parent switching from parent to teacher at the kitchen table is asking both of them to do something difficult at the worst hour. Where the parent's role is protecting the slot and reading the outcome, families last the distance. Where the parent is also the one delivering four subjects, most plans collapse somewhere in the spring, and the collapse is usually read as a problem with the child.

Tutor, programme, or do it yourself?

An honest account of what a good tutor supplies: structure, marking, an outside eye, and a decision each week about what to do next. That is the whole list, and none of the four items requires a tutor specifically.

It is worth being clear about what makes tuition expensive, which is not the hour itself but the number of hours across two years. A weekly session through Year 5 and into Year 6 is a substantial commitment for most households, and the return depends heavily on whether the six days between sessions contain any work. A tutor who sets nothing between visits is being paid to mark. The published rates and annual totals are gathered on what tuition actually costs a year, and finding a tutor in the West Midlands covers what to ask before you book.

A tutor is genuinely the better answer in two situations. The first is where a child needs a relationship with a particular adult to stay motivated, which is a real and legitimate need. The second is where something specific needs diagnosing in person, such as a child whose reading is fine aloud but falls apart on paper.

Doing it yourself is entirely possible and costs almost nothing except your time and the books, but be honest about which of the four items you can supply every week for two years. Marking is usually the one that goes first. We have written this up properly in preparing for the 11 plus without a tutor, and there is a cost-by-cost comparison in tutor or online course. If you want to see what real material looks like before deciding anything, our free 11 plus practice papers are there to download.

Why does the advice change from one area to another?

Almost everything in this guide holds wherever you live, because reading, number fluency, spaced practice and honest marking are not regional. What does change, and changes enough to alter your weekly plan, is the format of the test itself.

Three things vary. The first is which areas appear: some tests use all four, others use fewer. The second is the weighting, and this is the one families most often miss. If English and verbal reasoning together carry half the result in your area, then a plan that spends most of its energy on shape puzzles is misallocated no matter how diligently it is followed. The third is the mechanics: multiple choice or written answers, one paper or two, answers in the booklet or on a separate sheet.

Work out those three things before you build the timetable, from the admissions authority's own published arrangements. Then let the weighting decide how the week is divided rather than letting your child's least favourite subject decide it.

Our own home ground is the West Midlands, where a group of grammar schools across Birmingham, Shropshire, Walsall, Wolverhampton and Warwickshire share a single entrance test, so a child sits it once for all of them. If that is your area, the West Midlands 11 plus entrance test sets out the papers, the weighting and the registration window in detail. If it is not, the timeline and the subject strategy above still apply; only the mix changes.

That shared test is set by GL Assessment, the assessment publisher the partnership uses rather than writing a paper of its own. Knowing who publishes the paper is more useful than it sounds, because format follows the publisher: the question types, the layout of the answer sheet and the rhythm of a timed section stay consistent across the areas that use the same one. It turns a vague question about whether practice material is any good into a precise one about whether it matches the format your child will actually sit, which is the difference between the right content in the wrong shape and practice that rehearses the real thing.

Pathway Eleven is an independent service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by GL Assessment.

Wellbeing, and knowing when to stop

Preparation that damages a child is not preparation, and it is worth agreeing in advance what would make you stop.

The signals of overload are behavioural before they are academic. Accuracy dropping on work that was previously secure is a common early one, and it is frequently misread as needing more practice, which makes it worse. Avoidance and stalling before sessions, tears at the end rather than the beginning, changes in sleep or appetite, and stomach aches that arrive with the practice book are the others. None of these means a child cannot cope with the 11 plus. They mean the current volume is wrong.

The response is to cut the volume and keep the routine, in that order. Stopping altogether turns a heavy fortnight into a restart from nothing, which is harder on everybody, whereas halving the session for two weeks usually resolves it without anyone having to make a decision about the whole plan.

There is also a quieter risk worth naming. Children absorb how much a parent is invested, and they will work hard to avoid disappointing you long past the point where they are enjoying any of it. If your child has stopped asking how they did, that is often not indifference. It is protection. Our page on 11 plus exam stress goes through what worry looks like at this age and what actually helps.

What is the parent's job, exactly?

The role that works is narrower than most parents assume, and the narrowness is what makes it sustainable across two years.

Protect the slot. The same time on the same days removes a nightly negotiation that nobody wins, and it converts the work from a decision into a habit. Notice the effort rather than the score, because the score is largely outside your child's control on any given evening and the effort is not. Read whatever record you keep, weekly rather than daily, and act on patterns rather than on individual bad sessions.

Plan the days off in advance. A routine with scheduled breaks is a routine; a routine that only breaks when somebody is too tired to argue is a source of guilt for everyone involved. Expect interruptions, because illness, clubs, school trips and flat weeks are normal, and the recovery move is to restart at the usual length rather than to make up the missed time.

And keep the teaching load off yourself where you can. This is not a counsel of laziness. A parent who is also the fourth teacher of the day is doing the hardest job in the house at the worst hour, and it is the reason most family-run plans fail in the spring rather than in September. If something else can carry the sequencing and the marking, your attention is better spent on the two things nothing else can do, which are protecting the slot and keeping the relationship intact.

Progress in the 11 plus is rarely a rising line of scores. Scores move slowly and jump around, particularly while the difficulty of the practice is also rising, and a family watching the weekly percentage will conclude that nothing is happening for months at a time.

The earlier signals are behavioural. Fewer careless errors on question types your child has met before. Faster starts on familiar formats, because recognition has become automatic. A willingness to attempt an unfamiliar question rather than skipping it. And the clearest one of all: the ability to explain a method rather than only produce an answer. A child who can explain it will still be able to do it in three weeks, and a child who cannot will not.

Watch the shape of the errors rather than the count. Errors moving from method to arithmetic is progress. Errors moving from all over the paper to the final quarter is a pacing problem, which is a different and easier fix. Errors clustering in one question type is a syllabus item. None of that is visible in a percentage, which is why the percentage is the least useful number you have.

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Where Pathway Eleven fits

Everything above works without us. If you have the time to sequence the work, mark it properly and decide each week what comes next, you do not need a programme, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

Pathway Eleven is an online 11 plus preparation service that gives each child a personalised daily plan of revision, guided teaching, timed practice and full mock papers, with every question reviewed and approved by a qualified teacher. In practice that means a Starting Assessment to find the level, daily revision that keeps all four areas moving while giving more attention to the weaker skills, Guided Practice that teaches without a countdown, Timed Drills for pace, full mock papers sat under real timings and returned as a report, and a PIN-protected parent area that keeps every completed session for you to read.

It runs from Year 3 through to the test rather than starting in Year 5, which is why the early years in this guide are not a separate product. One monthly price covers everything, with no per-subject upgrade and no long contract. Free for 7 days, then £49 a month. Cancel any time.

Sources

The claims about admissions, appeals and study technique on this page come from the following, all checked on 24 August 2026.

• Department for Education, School Admissions Code, statutory guidance schools must follow when carrying out admissions duties, applying from 1 September 2021.
• Department for Education, School Admission Appeals Code, statutory guidance on organising and running admission appeals, in force from 1 October 2022.
• Department for Education, Admission appeals in England, official statistics published August 2026, covering the 2025/26 academic year.
• GOV.UK, Schools admissions: how places are offered, on the criteria schools use to decide places.
• Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., and Willingham, D. T. (2013), Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques, Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

Where this guide describes registration windows, weightings or paper formats in general terms, that is deliberate. Those are set locally and change, and the only reliable version is the one your own admissions authority publishes for the year your child sits.