11 plus English explained

English at 11 plus is four things wearing one name. Reading comprehension of a passage the child has never seen. Spelling. Punctuation and grammar. And vocabulary, which is not a separate section so much as the thing every other part quietly depends on.

In the West Midlands the English content is examined alongside verbal reasoning inside a shared regional test. The King Edward VI Foundation publishes that candidates sit two papers, each approximately sixty minutes long including instructions and example questions, and that each paper is divided into smaller individually timed sections that test English comprehension, verbal reasoning, mathematics and non-verbal or spatial reasoning. Every question is multiple choice and answers go on a separate answer sheet. The same page states that the shared test “is provided by GL Assessment”. Pathway Eleven is an independent service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by GL Assessment.

The single most useful published sentence for a parent is this one: there are no sections of writing within the test. No story, no letter, no descriptive piece. That is true of the shared consortium test; it is not true of every independent school in the region, and the difference is set out on the creative writing page.

If that is the question you came here with, the short form of the answer is this. In the shared regional test a child chooses answers rather than composing them, so there is nothing to plan, draft or hand-write beyond marking the answer sheet, and time spent rehearsing timed story writing buys nothing on this particular paper. Independent schools are a separate matter entirely, because each sets its own assessment: Solihull School, for one, publishes an English paper with a creative, descriptive or original writing task in it alongside a comprehension exercise. Writing at home still earns its place, though, because a child who writes regularly reads more sharply, and that shows up in the comprehension marks that are on the paper.

Because the published weighting says so. The consortium publishes the weighting of the test result as 50% for English and verbal reasoning, 25% for non-verbal reasoning and 25% for mathematics. English and verbal reasoning together are worth as much as maths and non-verbal reasoning combined.

Most families put their effort the other way round. Maths feels measurable, non-verbal reasoning looks alien and therefore urgent, and reading feels like something already happening in the background. It is the wrong instinct, and it is the most expensive one on this page. Vocabulary and comprehension move slowly, keep moving for years, and carry twice the weight of anything a family is tempted to start with instead.

Four parts, one weighting, and only so many evenings. Start your free week: the Starting Assessment says which of the four to spend the next month on, and the daily plan follows from it.

A child reads a passage they have never seen, under time, and answers questions about it. The passages are usually literary fiction or narrative non-fiction. In our own reading of published and practice material the writing is often older than a child's usual reading, and the vocabulary in it sits a little above what a ten-year-old meets in a school reading book. That is our observation rather than anything the test administrator publishes.

The questions come in recognisable kinds. Retrieval questions ask for something stated in the text, and are nearly free marks if a child goes back and looks. Inference questions ask for something the text implies but never says, and are where the paper is won and lost. Vocabulary-in-context questions ask what a particular word means here, in this sentence, which is often not its most common meaning. Author's-purpose and summary questions ask what the writer was doing and what the passage was mostly about.

The technique that saves the most marks is unglamorous: go back to the passage for every single answer, including the ones that feel obvious. Children under time pressure answer from memory of the passage rather than from the passage, and memory of a text read ninety seconds ago is far worse than anybody expects. The full method, question type by question type, is on the 11 plus English comprehension page.

The published section is English comprehension, so spelling, punctuation and grammar are not a named part of the paper. They still earn their place, because vocabulary, word building and grammatical precision run through comprehension and through verbal reasoning, and because the rules are finite, which makes this the cheapest ground on the whole preparation to make secure. What follows from that is a limit as well as a licence: do not spend more time here than on reading.

The recurring ground is narrow. Homophones, which in our experience cost a child more marks than any other spelling pattern. Apostrophes, in both jobs, possession and omission. Commas in lists, after subordinate clauses and around parenthesis. Speech punctuation. Word classes, so that a child can say what a word is doing rather than only what it means. Tense agreement and subject-verb agreement. Plurals and the spelling changes that come with suffixes.

Short daily repetition works far better than a weekend of it. A brief look each day at a running list of the words and rules your own child has actually got wrong will beat a long weekly session on a generic list, because the generic list spends most of its time on things they already know. Keep the list, and retire an item only after three correct sightings a week apart.

Because it is the one thing that pays into both halves of the heaviest-weighted 50%. A wider vocabulary lifts comprehension, because fewer unknown words means less guessing at meaning under time. It also lifts verbal reasoning directly, since synonym, antonym, odd-one-out and analogy questions are vocabulary questions wearing a puzzle costume.

It is also the slowest thing on this page to move, which is the argument for starting early rather than the argument for despairing. A child who reads widely from Year 3 or Year 4 arrives at the test with an advantage that cannot be bought back in a single summer, and no amount of technique substitutes for it.

What actually works is a weekly method rather than a word list to memorise: read something slightly hard, collect the words that stopped you, meet each of them again several times across the following week, and learn the roots and prefixes that unlock families of words at once. That method, plus a starter list of two hundred words grouped by theme and a printable version of it, is on the 11 plus vocabulary page.

Comprehension is the one part of this that cannot be practised in the abstract, so we will send you the fuller pack of practice papers, answer sheets and worked answers included, along with the occasional preparation email. Each one carries an unseen passage with the question types set out above, so you can watch which kind your own child stalls on.

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Year 3. Reading, and being read to, above the level the child can comfortably read alone. Talk about words rather than test them. Start the running spelling list. Nothing timed, nothing that looks like a paper. The whole job of this year is that reading stays something the child chooses to do.

Year 4. Meet the question types. A short comprehension every week or two, discussed rather than marked out of ten, so that the child learns what an inference question is asking for. Punctuation and grammar rules taught deliberately, one at a time. Vocabulary collection becomes a habit. Timing stays generous.

Year 5. Pace and technique. Comprehension under a clock, with the going-back-to-the-passage habit enforced rather than encouraged. Grammar and spelling finished off, since the rules are finite. Vocabulary work continues all year because it never stops paying. By the middle of Year 5 a child should be reading a passage and answering at close to the rate the real paper requires.

The full plans are on the Year 3, Year 4 and Year 5 pages, and the checkpoints that tell you whether it is working are on is my child on track.

Pathway Eleven turns that shape into a daily plan. A Starting Assessment finds the level first, so a child who reads well and punctuates badly gets a different plan from one where it is the other way round, and every question is reviewed and approved by a qualified teacher before a child sees it. Full mock rehearsals are part of full membership rather than the trial, and they unlock from Year 4. Forty-nine pounds a month covers English alongside the other three areas rather than pricing them separately, and nothing is charged in the first week.

What we read, and when

Every outside fact on this page was read at its own published address on 5 September 2026. Where a source is quoted, it is quoted from the page itself and not from anybody's summary of it.

• King Edward VI Foundation, Grammar Schools: Entrance Test Information. Two papers of approximately sixty minutes each, individually timed sections that test English comprehension, verbal reasoning, mathematics and non-verbal or spatial reasoning, the statement that the test “is provided by GL Assessment”, and the published statement that there are no sections of writing within the test. Checked 5 September 2026, and re-read for the provider wording on 6 September 2026.
• West Midlands Grammar Schools, The entrance test. The four areas tested, the multiple-choice format, and the published weighting of 50% English and verbal reasoning, 25% non-verbal reasoning and 25% mathematics. Checked 5 September 2026.
• Solihull School, Entrance assessment. An example of an independent school whose own English paper does set a creative or descriptive writing task alongside a comprehension exercise. Checked 5 September 2026.