Embarking upon the Eleven Plus with your child, one of the first things you are likely to hear about is how important it is to have an extensive vocabulary.  It is very true; weakness in vocabulary can affect not only vocabulary-based questions, but also comprehension...

All the joy and excitement of this special time of year is upon us.  Do we really need to be preparing our children for the Eleven Plus now?

To this we would suggest it’s time to change things up.   This is our 'no guilt' approach to preparation over the break. Eleven...

Before deciding to embark upon an Eleven Plus preparation journey with your child, be sure to visit any school you are considering. Speak with your child, to see if it is something they would like to do and if they are prepared to put in some extra work. If you rely on...

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...