You sit down with the practice paper and go through it together. They knew that one. And that one. So why is the score still low? Before you book an 11 plus tutor, try something tonight that costs nothing: watch your child do one timed section, and watch for three things. By the end you’ll know more about the score than the score does.
The short version
One timed section at the kitchen table, three things to watch for. Most children lose 11 plus points to habits you can see with your own eyes.
Tonight’s experiment
Set up one timed section of a practice paper. Say nothing while they work. Your only job is to watch how they work, not what they answer. That difference is the whole point: the score tells you what happened, watching tells you why.
Watch for this first: the double work
On word questions, does your child solve the whole thing every time? Here’s what that costs. Freya, one of our students, worked out the first letter of an answer had to be M. That left only two options. Then she got the second letter, and the answer was already certain. There was nothing left to work out. Before that lesson, she’d been solving every question in full, doing double the work, and running out of time at the end of every paper.
If your child never stops early, they don’t have a knowledge problem. They have a habit that a few weeks of coached practice can change. It’s one of the habits we work on in verbal reasoning, where the elimination trick pays off most.
Watch for this second: the question they can’t leave
Somewhere in the section there will be a question that’s too hard. Watch what happens. A child with good exam habits skips it and comes back. Most children sit on it until it beats them, then panic about the clock for the rest of the paper. Oscar held a pace of roughly a question a minute for the first time only after his tutor taught him that skipping is allowed. Nothing about his reasoning changed. His decision about where to spend a minute did.
Watch for this third: the misread word
When they get one wrong, ask them to read the question out loud. You may be surprised. Leela kept losing points on spatial questions, and the reason turned out to be a single word: she was reading “rotating” when the question said “overlapping”. She was answering a question nobody had asked. Her tutor made her underline the instruction word before looking at the shapes, and the problem disappeared.
Freya, Oscar and Leela aren’t their real names, and each child here blends a few we’ve taught. The habits are exactly what we see, week in, week out.
Why these three habits decide the result
Because the margin is brutal. St Olave’s Grammar School receives an average of eight applications for every Year 7 place, and schools like Queen Elizabeth’s in Barnet and The Henrietta Barnett School run at similar pressure. At that level of competition, the points lost to rushing are the difference between a place and a near miss. Your child doesn’t need to know more. They need to stop giving away points they’ve already earned.
“Please don’t worry about getting it wrong. Getting it wrong is good.”
George, 11 plus tutor
That line matters more than any worksheet, and it’s why the kitchen-table version only goes so far. A child who is frightened of a wrong answer in front of a parent will hurry even more. An 11 plus tutor is a stranger with no history, which is exactly what makes the fear easier to drop. Our tutors work to the exact papers your child is sitting, set timed practice between sessions, and send you a short written note after each one, so you can see the pace improving rather than guessing at it. If the rushing looks more like worry than habit, start with our guide to supporting a child through 11 plus stress.
Saw one of the three habits tonight?
Tell us which one. We’ll match your child with an 11 plus tutor who fixes exactly that.
Meet three of our 11 plus tutors
Murray
Murray prepares children for 11 plus admissions maths and teaches Maths, Chemistry and Physics up to A Level. He is warm with nervous children and very good at timed practice, because he treats pace as a skill to be coached rather than a personality trait.
Clemie
Clemie teaches both 11 plus Maths and 11 plus English, which means she sees the same rushing habit turn up in two very different papers. She is patient, calm, and firm about slowing down, and children tend to relax quickly with her.
Mirsab
Mirsab teaches 11 plus Maths and English alongside the sciences, and he works with children from KS2 all the way to A Level. He is especially good at getting a child to say their thinking out loud, which is how a rushed guess gets caught.
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Give your child a calmer exam
START WITH A TIMED LESSON
We watch how your child works, find the habit costing them points, and fix it before the exam.
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