I often think half the problem with worded problems, is the name.  Being called 'problems' is so negative and leads children to believe the questions will be hard before they've even started!  At least the term Numerical Reasoning is more positive.  The second half of...

A few years ago we were assured that a new test being used in Gloucestershire schools would make the eleven plus tutorproof, that all the money being made from work books would disappear, and we would have a test that required the very minimum of preparation. Oh, how t...

I have always enjoyed school visits, although their usefulness is certainly up for debate.  Of course, we would all like to have individual tours, or be a fly-on-the-wall to get a real picture of these mysterious facilities (in many ways so different from when we were...

Comprehension is a key component of the Eleven Plus in Gloucestershire.  Those who do best, will be those that can use logical deduction skills to find inferred meanings for answers, rather than just relying upon finding information that is given explicitly.  By this w...

If you are thinking of hiring a private tutor for your child and for their eleven plus journey, it is important to find the right person. With no national data base of qualified tutors, it is on the parents' shoulders to ensure that anyone they employ is reputable.

Howe...

I often ask me how soon they should be preparing their child for grammar school entrance and what they should be doing. There's no easy answer to this one because every child is different, of course. 

It seems to be increasingly common for parents to start preparing the...

I was reading some comments from parents on a forum recently about their experience of eleven plus mock tests and how difficult they are.

There was some debate on whether this was a good thing or not, since some felt it made their children worried. Others thought that i...

Every so often newspapers like to publish 'typical' eleven plus questions to demonstrate how difficult they are.  It's hard to resist having a go to see how well we can do, but are these mini tests very representative of the real thing?

The short answer is probably no....

Verbal reasoning questions are not restricted to the eleven plus. Many puzzles and tests have verbal reasoning style tasks but what are they?

It's all about using logic using English to solve problems. Cloze tests (short for closure) are when missing components in a sen...

There are 164 grammar schools remaining in the UK, although there were around 1200 in the early 1960s. They were phased out in the late 1960 and 1970s but not in all places.  Thus the current distribution is very patchy, with some counties still largely selective and o...