How much 11+ practice is enough?

The short answer

Little and often. A short session on most days does more for a child of this age than a long session once or twice a week, because attention fades, tiredness turns into careless mistakes, and a long session is the one that gets resented. Our own default suggestion in the app is five sessions of about twenty minutes a week - that is BrightEleven's setting, chosen for frequency over minutes, not a figure from research, and the parent can change it.

The point of a session is not to fill the time. It is to meet a handful of question types, get some wrong, read the explanation, and stop while the child still has something left for tomorrow.

Why more is not better

Most children do their most accurate work in the first part of a session. After that, the error rate climbs and the errors stop being informative: a mistake made through tiredness tells neither of you anything about what the child understands. Long sessions also crowd out the things that quietly do the most for the test - reading, sleep, conversation, play - and they teach the child that the 11+ is the thing the household is for. Neither is worth an extra half hour of questions.

A child who dreads practice will practise less well, and a child who is fond of it will keep going. Keeping sessions short is the simplest way to stay on the right side of that line.

What a sensible week looks like

The app's default daily screen-time limit for a new child profile is 45 minutes, which the parent can raise or lower; it exists so that a session cannot quietly stretch into an evening. That figure is BrightEleven's own setting, not a recommendation about screens in general.

How to tell when it is too much

• Accuracy drops in the second half of a session, most days.
• The child starts guessing to get to the end.
• Practice is the first thing mentioned when a friend asks them round.
• Results are being checked by an adult more often than once a week.

If any of these ring true, shorten the sessions rather than dropping the routine. Ten focused minutes are worth more than twenty distracted ones.

How the run-up changes things

In the months before the test, timed mock papers join the routine, so that the timing and the answer sheet are familiar. They replace some ordinary sessions rather than adding to them, and one full paper in a sitting is plenty for a child of this age. In the last week, practice is light or absent: nothing new is introduced, and sleep is protected. Our exam-day guide covers the final stretch.

When a mock result comes in, read the topic breakdown before the total; our standardised-scores guide explains why the total on its own tells you little. For the question of when to begin at all, see when to start, and for the routine without a tutor, see preparing without a tutor.