The last month before the 11+: what actually helps

Worth doing

Past papers, under time. If your board publishes them, this is the month for them. Not for learning content — for learning the clock. Most marks lost in the final weeks are lost to pacing, not knowledge: a child who knows the material and runs out of time scores the same as a child who did not know it.

Sit at least a few under genuine conditions. Timer on, no interruptions, no looking things up. It is uncomfortable and that is the point — the discomfort should happen at your kitchen table, not for the first time in a hall.

Going back over half-learned words. The words they nearly know are the cheapest marks available. They need one or two more encounters, not a first encounter. Reviewing fifty words they have already met beats learning ten new ones.

Sleep. Genuinely. A tired child underperforms in ways no revision compensates for, and the last fortnight is when bedtimes tend to slip because everyone is anxious.

Going over the mistakes they have already made. Their own wrong answers, from papers done weeks ago, are better revision material than anything new. The mistakes are diagnostic; new material is a lottery.

Not worth doing

New material. This is the hard one, because doing more feels responsible. A word or a technique met for the first time three weeks before the exam will not be reliably available on the day, and the hour it takes is an hour stolen from consolidating something they nearly know.

More hours. If your child is already doing focused work most days, adding to it produces diminishing returns and rising resentment. Two hours a night in the final month does not beat forty minutes done properly.

Comparing. Somebody in the class is doing more. Somebody is always doing more. It tells you nothing about your child.

The thing nobody says out loud

Tell them the exam is not the point.

Children can hear how much this matters to us — in what we ask about at dinner, in how we react to a practice score, in the things we have started not saying. A child who walks into a hall carrying the weight of not disappointing you is carrying something that does not help them.

So say it. Plainly, more than once, and early enough that it is believed: we are proud of you regardless, there are good schools either way, and this is one morning in a long life.

It costs nothing. It is also true, which is why it works.

A rough shape for the four weeks

• ●Week 4. Two timed papers. Review every mistake properly — that review is worth more than the papers. Vocabulary revision of words already met.
• ●Week 3. Two more papers. Start pulling back on volume. Fix bedtimes.
• ●Week 2. One paper. Mostly review. Practicalities: the route, the timings, what happens on the day, what they can take.
• ●Week 1. Almost nothing academic. Light vocabulary review if they want it: the 11+ word list has every meaning in one place. Sleep, ordinary life, and the conversation above.

And afterwards

They will come out and say it went badly. Most children do, including the ones who did well — they remember the questions they found hard and forget the forty they answered without noticing.

Do not interrogate them. Take them for chips.