The first thing to understand is that the 11 plus is not a national curriculum test. It does not have a published syllabus in the way SATs or GCSEs do. What it has is a set of question types that recur year after year, and a level of difficulty pitched to identify roughly the top 20–25% of a year group.
That distinction matters. A child can be comfortably above average at school and still be caught out, because two of the four subjects — verbal and non-verbal reasoning — are essentially never taught in primary school.
Maths
The maths content is broadly Key Stage 2, but taken further and — crucially — applied under far more time pressure than school maths ever is. Expect:
- Number: the four operations with larger numbers, place value, negative numbers, rounding, factors, multiples, primes, square and cube numbers, HCF and LCM, BIDMAS.
- Fractions, decimals and percentages: converting between all three, fractions of amounts, percentage change, and reverse percentages.
- Ratio and proportion: simplifying, sharing in a ratio, scaling recipes, best-value comparisons.
- Measure and geometry: area and perimeter (including compound shapes and triangles), volume, angles on lines, in triangles and around a point, angles in parallel lines, properties of 2D and 3D shapes, symmetry and coordinates.
- Data: mean, median, mode and range; reading bar charts, line graphs, pie charts and tables.
- Algebra: simple equations, function machines, and sequences including the nth term in easier form.
- Applied: time and timetables, speed–distance–time, money and multi-step word problems.
The single biggest difference from school maths is speed. Many children can do the maths; far fewer can do it at roughly one question a minute while under pressure.
English
English divides into two halves that need quite different preparation.
Comprehension
A passage — fiction, non-fiction or occasionally poetry — followed by questions. These test retrieval (what does the text say), inference (what does it imply), vocabulary in context, and the effect of the writer's language choices. Older or more literary passages are common, which is why wide reading matters more than any workbook.
Technical English and vocabulary
- Synonyms and antonyms — the closest in meaning, or the exact opposite.
- Spelling, punctuation and grammar, including the "spot the mistake" format where a sentence is split into numbered sections and one may contain an error.
- Parts of speech — identifying nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions.
- Cloze — filling gaps in a passage with the right word.
Verbal reasoning
Logic puzzles built from words, letters and numbers. GL papers draw on a bank of around 21 recognised question types, including:
- Letter sequences and alphabet codes (if CAT is DCW, what is DOG?)
- Number sequences and number logic
- Word analogies, odd one out, and words with similar or opposite meanings
- Hidden words, compound words, letter-for-number substitution
- Short logic problems — who finished where, given a set of clues
Almost none of this appears in the primary curriculum. The good news is that each type has a method, and once a child knows the method the questions become fast rather than frightening.
Non-verbal reasoning
Pattern spotting with shapes and no words: sequences, matrices, analogies, odd one out, shape codes, and sometimes spatial reasoning such as nets, rotations and reflections. Not every region sets a non-verbal paper — check your school.
How the papers are scored
Raw marks are converted into an age-standardised score, adjusted so that a child born in August is not disadvantaged against one born in September. Scores usually centre on 100, with grammar school qualifying marks commonly falling somewhere between 111 and 121 depending on the area, and super-selective schools requiring considerably more.
Because the score depends on how the whole cohort performs, no tutor or app can promise a particular number. Be wary of any that do.
What to prioritise
- Vocabulary, because it feeds comprehension, synonyms, antonyms and analogies all at once.
- Reasoning question types, because they are unfamiliar and entirely learnable.
- Maths speed, because the content is usually known but the pace is not.
- Exam technique — pacing, skipping and returning, and answering every question, since GL papers carry no penalty for a wrong answer.