Which 11 Plus will my child sit?

The short answer

There is no national 11 Plus. Each selective area, and sometimes each school, decides what its own test looks like. Kent runs the Kent Test and Medway the Medway Test. Essex has its own board, the CSSE. Some individual schools set their own paper entirely.

What differs between them is which papers appear, how long they last, whether answers are multiple choice or written out, and how much weight sits on verbal against non-verbal reasoning. That is a real difference and it is worth preparing for.

What does not change

Underneath the packaging, every version is testing the same handful of abilities: working with number, using language precisely, spotting patterns in words, and spotting patterns in shapes. A child who can find the odd one out in a set of shapes can find it whether the paper gives them five options or asks them to write the answer on a line.

That is why practice is not wasted when you do not yet know the format. The thinking transfers. The layout is something you can show a child in an afternoon once you know it.

How to find out which one you are facing

• Ask the schools you are applying to, directly. They will tell you, and it is the only answer that is definitely right for your year.
• Check the county council's admissions pages, which publish the arrangements for each admissions round.
• Look for familiarisation material from the board itself. Where a test is run by an established provider, free familiarisation booklets usually exist, and they show the answer sheet and the instructions rather than teaching anything.

Arrangements change between years, so a forum post from three years ago about your county is not a safe source. Neither are we: we deliberately do not publish a list of which area uses what, because being confidently wrong about a parent's own county is worse than sending them to the school that knows.

On "real" past papers, since everybody asks

The boards that run these tests do not publish their live papers, and never have. The same questions get reused across sittings and areas, so releasing them would end their usefulness. Free familiarisation material is published; practice papers are sold. Neither is a real test.

So no app, book, tutor or website has the actual questions, whatever the wording on the cover implies. Everything on the market is written to resemble the real thing, and that includes ours. Anyone telling you otherwise is either describing familiarisation material under a more exciting name, or making it up.

One genuine exception is worth knowing. Independent schools often do publish their own past entrance papers, because they set them themselves. State grammar boards do not. If somebody tells you they downloaded the actual paper, that is usually what they mean, and it is a different exam from the one your child may be sitting.

What we do about it

Because the questions cannot be the real ones, the thing worth putting effort into is not whether an answer is marked right, but whether a child understands why it is right. Every question in the app shows its working, not just its answer. That is the part that carries over to a paper nobody has seen before, which is the paper your child will actually sit.

The practice is organised by skill rather than by area: maths, English, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning, at two difficulty levels. So it applies wherever you are, and it does not pretend to be tailored to a county whose arrangements we have not checked.