The 11+
What we cover for the 11+ — maths, English, Verbal and Non-Verbal Reasoning, vocabulary decks — and the gaps we tell you about plainly.
On this page
The 11+ capability is part of PRO — there is no separate pack to buy. Set the exam and the date on Exam prep and everything below switches on for that child.
You can set any of the common tests as the target: the ISEB Common Pre-Tests, GL Assessment, CSSE (Essex), the London 11+ Consortium, and a school's own papers among them. The tutors read which one it is — the subjects examined differ between them.
Maths and English
The topics the 11+ leans on hardest — ratio, sequences, worded multi-step problems, comprehension and inference — are tutored Socratically by the same professors who teach the rest of the product, on the KS3 curriculum maps. Timed maths speed sets add the against-the-clock fluency the exam actually demands; every question is generated from a rule, so the answer key is computed rather than copied from a paper.
Verbal Reasoning
We cover twenty of the twenty-one commonly listed GL question types. Verbal Reasoning is voiced by Mentor, not a professor, and it runs as a method drill with a four-rung ladder:
- Name the type — your child says what kind of question this is.
- State the rule — what does this type always ask you to do?
- Apply it to one element — the rule, used once, on one piece of the question.
- Work a similar problem — Mentor works a fully similar question, then your child redoes their own.
The tutor never gives the answer to your child's own question — the same rule that holds across the whole product. Every item is generated fresh, so what gets practised is the method, not a memorised paper.
The twenty-first type is left out on purpose: too many of its possible questions have more than one defensible answer, and a question with two defensible answers is a bad thing to drill a child on.
Three sittings is the plateau
After about three full Verbal Reasoning sets, the tutors will say so: familiarity gains level off, and vocabulary and reading will move the score more than more VR papers. This is a rule in the product, not a suggestion.
Non-Verbal Reasoning
We generate fourteen question families, including the rotation-versus-reflection discrimination the papers really turn on. The diagrams are drawn here, by our own code — so every option in every question is checked to be sure exactly one of them fits the rule.
Six families are deliberately not generated — paper folding, cube nets and block counting among them. Each needs a physical model of a folded or solid object, or an exhaustive search to prove a shape is not hidden in a picture, and a guessed model means a wrong answer key. We would rather leave them out than mark them wrongly; for those families, a specialist practice platform still serves you better.
The reasoning flashcard decks
Seven ready-made decks — five Verbal Reasoning, two Non-Verbal — sit in the flashcard Atlas: rule cards and vocabulary, with most of the Non-Verbal cards illustrated. They teach the method — the rules the drills apply — and a generated practice item is never turned into a card. Reviewed on the same daily spaced schedule as every other deck.
Year 5–6 children
A Year 5 or Year 6 child can be recorded on PRO and gets their own 11+ home: the exam countdown, today's timed set, and a place to go over mistakes.
The honest gap is content. We have no KS2 dataset, so a Year 5–6 child works on the KS3 maps — which is exactly where the hardest 11+ maths lives, so for a strong child stretching upward this works well. What it does not cover is Year 4–5 arithmetic foundations: a child who still needs those built is not yet served here, and we would rather say so than pretend.
Bringing back the mocks
Whatever your child sits elsewhere — a school mock, a paper from a tutor centre — comes to Paper Review as a list of mistakes, gets sorted into the five categories, and closes gap by gap. We never need or reproduce the paper itself.
For what the 11+ is — the regions, the registration deadlines families miss, and what the research says raises scores — see the open guide at aitutors.me/11-plus.
How exam prep works · The 13+ & Common Entrance · Flashcards · The KS3 curriculum map