When should you start preparing for the 11 plus?

Ask five parents when to start preparing for the 11 plus and you will get five answers, all of them confident.

Here is the fact that settles most of it, and it surprises almost everybody the first time they hear it.

The exam is sat about a week into Year 6.

Not at the end of Year 6. Not in the spring term. In the first days of September, before the new school year has really begun. You can check it yourself — every grammar school publishes its test date on its admissions page.

What that actually means

It means Year 6 is not the preparation year. Year 6 is the exam.

So everything a parent thinks of as "Year 6 maths" has to be learned during Year 5, and in practice finished by about Easter, so there is time to get comfortable with it before September.

That is not a scare tactic. It is a calendar, and it is the same calendar for everybody. But it moves the whole timetable back a year from where most families assume it sits, and that is why so many people feel behind in the spring of Year 5 without quite knowing why.

If your child is in Year 5

This is the year. There is no softer way to say it, and no need for one — a year is a long time.

The useful thing to know is that it is not one long push. The content your child needs is being taught to them anyway, in school and by whoever is helping. What decides how September goes is not how much they were taught. It is how much of it is still there by the time they sit down.

Those are different things, and the gap between them is bigger than most people expect.

If your child is in Year 4

Here the honest answer is more interesting, because the obvious one is wrong.

The obvious answer is "start everything now, you have two years." Do that and you will run into something unpleasant within a fortnight: most of the maths on an 11 plus paper is Year 5 and Year 6 content. Ratio, percentages, averages, probability — a great deal of it simply has not been taught yet.

Hand a Year 4 a full paper and much of it is not hard. It is unmet. And a child who cannot do most of a paper does not conclude "I have not been taught this yet". They conclude something much worse and much stickier about themselves.

So for a Year 4, starting means something quite specific:

• Work on what Year 4 has actually covered. Addition and subtraction, place value, times tables, measurement, the beginnings of decimals. These are the foundations everything else is built on, and they are the ones that can genuinely be made solid now.
• Let the rest arrive when it is taught. Percentages in Year 4 is not ambition, it is a contradiction.
• Fix things while there is no pressure. A gap found in Year 4 costs nothing to close. The same gap found in Year 5 has a queue of new topics behind it.

That is a two-year plan that does not burn anybody out, and it is genuinely better preparation than two years of papers that are mostly out of reach.

If your child is already in Year 6

Then it is done, or nearly. The job is not to learn new topics — there is no time to learn a topic properly, and attempting it takes attention away from the marks that are actually available.

The job is to find what has quietly gone, and put those specific things back. That is a smaller, calmer piece of work than most families expect at that point, and it is the one that still pays.

The mistake at both ends

Starting too late is the one everybody worries about, and it is real.

Starting too early is the one nobody warns you about, and it does a different kind of damage. A nine-year-old given work aimed at eleven-year-olds does not learn the work. They learn that maths is the thing they are not good at. That belief takes far longer to undo than any topic.

The difference between the two is not how early you begin. It is what you begin with.

So what does "starting" mean?

Not more practice papers. Almost every family arrives at papers eventually, and they have their place, but a paper is a measurement — it tells you a score, and a score is a number with no instructions attached.

Starting well means knowing which specific things are solid and which are not, so that the time you do spend goes somewhere useful. Everything else follows from that.

A topic taught in October and understood in October is not the same as a topic still standing in March. Nothing has gone wrong when it fades — that is simply what happens to anything learned once and then left alone. It just fades differently for every child, which is exactly what makes it so hard to see from the outside.

The short version

Your child is in	The honest answer
Year 4	Start, but only on what has been taught. Two years is a gift — do not spend it on content they have not met
Year 5	This is the year. What matters is not how much is taught, but how much is still there in the spring
Year 6	The exam is days away. Find what has gone and put it back; do not start anything new

None of this tells you whether your child will get a place, and nobody honestly can. What it tells you is where the next hour is best spent — which is the only part any of us actually controls.