The 11+ calendar is strange, and it is strange in a specific way: everything happens earlier than the normal school admissions process trains you to expect. The test is sat within days of your child starting Year 6. Registration for it closes months before that, while your child is still in Year 5. A family that first thinks seriously about grammar schools in the autumn of Year 6 — a perfectly natural time to start thinking about secondary school — has already missed the test.

So read this timeline backwards, the way admissions teams design it: fixed points first, preparation fitted in behind them.

The fixed points, in reverse

  • 1 March, Year 6 — National Offer Day. Secondary school places for the whole country are released. Grammar offers arrive here, through the same system as every other school.
  • 31 October, Year 6 — the Common Application Form (CAF) deadline. You list up to six schools (fewer in some areas) in order of preference, on your local authority's form. This is the normal deadline every family faces, selective or not.
  • Mid-October, Year 6 — 11+ results. Most grammar areas release a score or a qualified/not-qualified decision a fortnight or so before the CAF deadline. That ordering is deliberate: you decide whether to name a grammar school with the result in hand.
  • Early September, Year 6 — the test. Most grammar-area tests are sat in the first weeks of the autumn term, sometimes on a Saturday. Your child walks in having been in Year 6 for days.
  • Summer term of Year 5 — registration. You must register your child for the test separately, directly with the local authority, consortium or school. Windows vary by area, commonly opening in the late spring or summer term of Year 5 and closing in the summer holidays — weeks before the test itself.

Independent schools run to their own, usually later, rhythm — registration deadlines in the autumn of Year 6 and exams around November to January are typical — but every school sets its own dates, so check each one directly.

Two consequences fall straight out of this structure. First, the decision to enter must be made in Year 5, while the child is nine or ten. Second, the whole preparation arc has a hard stop in early September of Year 6 — whatever you were planning to do "in the autumn" has to have already happened.

Year 4: the year of not preparing

It has become common for tutoring companies to recruit families in Year 4, and occasionally earlier. Our honest view: for most children, formal 11+ preparation in Year 4 is a mistake. The test is two years away; a nine-year-old cannot hold purpose over that horizon, and the main products of early drilling are boredom and a child who is thoroughly sick of reasoning papers before the year that counts.

What genuinely pays in Year 4 is indirect, and it looks like good parenting rather than exam preparation:

  • Daily reading, and being read to. Vocabulary breadth is the single biggest lever on verbal reasoning and comprehension, and it compounds over years, not weeks. This is the one investment that cannot be made late.
  • Times tables to the point of boredom. Instant recall, not worked-out answers. Every 11+ maths paper leans on it.
  • Puzzles as play. Logic puzzles, chess, pattern games — because they are fun, not as covert training.

If you do one administrative thing in Year 4, make it this: look up your target area's admissions pages once, note roughly when registration opens for current Year 5 families, and put a reminder in your calendar a year ahead.

Year 5, autumn term: quiet start

This is where structured preparation sensibly begins — gently.

  • Establish the habit, not the volume. Two or three short sessions a week — twenty minutes or so — beats a Saturday marathon. At this stage the content is mostly curriculum maths fluency and comprehension, plus meeting one or two reasoning question types casually, untimed.
  • Find out exactly what your area tests. Provider, subjects, format, threshold or rank-order. The map of how areas differ is the starting point; the admissions pages are the authority.
  • Look at schools with your feet. Open days for prospective Year 5 families run through the year. A child who has seen a school and liked it has a reason for the work that follows.

Year 5, spring term: the working months

  • Cover the question types systematically. By now the child should be meeting each family of verbal and non-verbal reasoning questions properly, still mostly untimed, with maths and English work continuing alongside.
  • Fix the gaps while there is time. A wobbly area found in February is a project; the same gap found in August is a crisis. This is the term for unhurried repair.
  • Keep the emotional temperature low. The test is "a thing we're having a go at", not the family's defining event. Children calibrate off their parents with terrifying accuracy.

Year 5, summer term and holidays: registration, timing, and the first mocks

  • Register. The moment the window opens. Everything else in this article is advice; this is an instruction.
  • Introduce the clock. Timed sections, then full timed papers, spaced out — not daily. The skill being built is pacing: moving on from a stuck question, returning if time allows, filling in the answer sheet accurately at speed.
  • A first mock exam, if you use them. One sat in early summer tells you far more than one sat in late August, because there is still time to act on what it shows. What mocks are for and how many make sense is its own question — the short version is: fewer than the mock industry would like, and read for information, not reassurance.
  • Protect the holiday. A little light practice through August keeps rhythm; a six-week boot camp delivers a stale, frayed child to a September test. Taper, don't ramp: the final week before the test should be the lightest of the summer.

Year 6, September: the test

The test comes almost absurdly early in the term — often before the child has settled into their new classroom. There is nothing meaningful left to add academically in the last days, and families who accept that have calmer mornings. Sleep, breakfast, and a parent radiating (or convincingly performing) calm are the actual performance-enhancers on the day. If your child is prone to freezing when the clock starts, that is a real and addressable thing — we have written about it separately — but the week of the test is not when you fix it.

Year 6, October: results and the application

The result arrives in mid-October, and then the decision: how to order the CAF. Two principles that admissions officers repeat every year, because every year some families ignore them at real cost:

  • List schools in genuine preference order. The national system is designed so you cannot lose your chance at a lower-preference school by aiming high above it — "wasting" a top spot on an ambitious choice is not how it works. Equal preference is the rule; tactical self-censorship mostly harms the family doing it.
  • Always include a banker. A school you would genuinely accept and are very likely to get. A qualified score does not guarantee a grammar place — distance and oversubscription criteria still apply, and in super-selective systems the ranking does the deciding.

Year 6, 1 March: offer day — and both of its outcomes

An offer: celebrate, accept by the stated deadline, done. Not the hoped-for offer: you have options — waiting lists move genuinely through the spring and summer, and there is a formal appeals process, which works in a minority of well-founded cases and which we have assessed realistically. But hold on to the thing that was true at the start: the 11+ was an option, not a verdict. A child who lands in a good non-selective school with their confidence intact has lost nothing that Year 7 will not give back.

FAQ

When should we start preparing for the 11+?

Structured preparation fits comfortably into Year 5 — roughly a school year of steady, low-volume work. Before that, the most valuable preparation is indirect: daily reading, secure times tables and unhurried curiosity. Very few children need drilling in Year 4, and starting formal practice too early mostly buys burnout.

When do you register for the 11+?

In most grammar areas, during Year 5 — commonly in a window over the summer term or early summer holidays, closing weeks before the September test. Registration is separate from the normal secondary school application and is not automatic. Check your area's exact window a year ahead; missing it is the one unrecoverable mistake.

When is the 11+ test taken?

Most grammar-area tests are sat early in the September of Year 6, so that results can reach parents before the 31 October deadline for the Common Application Form. Independent school 11+ exams often run later, typically in the November to January of Year 6.

When do 11+ results and school offers come out?

Most areas send a score or qualification decision in mid-October of Year 6, before the application deadline. The actual school place arrives with everyone else's on National Offer Day, 1 March of Year 6 — the test result alone does not guarantee a place at a particular school.

Duke Harewood runs aitutors.me and has a daughter in Year 8.