When to start preparing

The year it happens

Roughly, and confirm every date with your own local authority, because they vary:

• Spring or summer of Year 5. Registration opens and closes. This is the deadline families miss, and missing it usually costs the whole year.
• September of Year 6. The exam, in most areas, near the start of term.
• October of Year 6. Results, timed to arrive before applications close.
• 31 October. The national closing date for secondary school applications.
• 1 March. National offer day.

When to start working

Most families begin somewhere in Year 4 or Year 5, which gives a year or more of short, regular sessions rather than a sprint. That is the shape that works: twenty minutes several times a week beats two hours on a Sunday, because the exam rewards fluency, and fluency is built by frequency.

Before Year 4 there is very little to be gained from papers, and something to be lost. What helps a seven or eight year old is reading widely, talking about what they read, and getting genuinely comfortable with number bonds and times tables. All of that shows up later as marks and none of it looks like exam prep.

What to do first

Vocabulary, earlier than feels necessary. It is the slowest thing to build and the hardest to cram, it carries the English paper, and it quietly decides a lot of verbal reasoning too. A child who reads a great deal arrives with it. A child who does not needs it built deliberately, and that takes months rather than weeks.

After that, timed practice on the actual format, once you have confirmed what the format is. Doing this in the other order is how families end up with a shelf of books for the wrong exam.

"Have we left it too late?"

If it is the spring of Year 5 and you have not started, you are fine and you have not missed anything except possibly a registration date, which you should check today.

If it is the summer before the exam, you have weeks rather than months, and honesty helps more than optimism. Weeks are enough to teach exam technique: how to pace a section, when to move on, how to handle a question type they have not seen. Weeks are not enough to build reading age or arithmetic fluency, so put the time into technique and into the gaps you can actually close, and be realistic with your child about the rest.

What does not work at any stage is escalating. Children who are pushed hard in the final month tend to do worse, not better, and they carry the experience for a long time afterwards.