Kent Test Practice: What to Expect and How to Prepare

The Kent Test (also called the Kent 11+) is the name parents in that area will see on their council's and their schools' own admissions pages. What it involves - who sets it, what format the papers take, when registration closes, when it is sat and when results arrive - is for those pages to tell you rather than us. Those details change from one year to the next, and a summary here would be out of date before you needed it.

So ask which subjects the papers actually cover before you plan anything. If the answer includes verbal and non-verbal reasoning as well as English and Maths, a plan built only around the two core school subjects is leaving out a whole kind of question - and reasoning is usually the part a child has never met at school, so it is the part that benefits most from steady exposure.

A realistic timeline starts about a year out: light, low-pressure exposure to each kind of question the papers turn out to contain, building up to focused, timed practice in the months immediately before the sitting, whenever the official page says that is. Cramming reasoning in the final few weeks rarely works as well as steady exposure over a school year.

Whatever platform or tutor you use, timed mock papers in the last few months are worth the effort - not to predict a score, but so that the shape of the thing is familiar: working against a clock, transferring answers to whatever the answer paper turns out to be, and meeting a mix of question types in one sitting. The surprise on the day should not be the format.