The 90-Day 11 Plus Game Plan
How to Structure the Final 3 Months
Forget 45 minutes a day. This is the aggressive, practical, week-by-week plan that actually moves scores — covering June, July and August in full detail.
What's in this guide
Three months sounds like a lot until you count the actual days — 90 days, minus two weeks of holiday, minus school sports day, minus the days your child is just too tired. In reality, you have around 70 usable preparation days. Every one of them matters.
This guide does not give you a comfortable plan. It gives you the plan that works — including the hours, the subjects, the mock cadence, and exactly what GLECTA's Summer Courses, Crash Courses and Cohort Analysis Reports are there to do during this window.
The reality check nobody tells you
Most families discover this too late. We are telling you now so you can do something about it.
The 11 Plus is not just a knowledge test. It is a speed test. Grammar school papers are deliberately designed so that the average child does not finish comfortably — and the children who score in the top 10% are not necessarily the cleverest in the room. They are the ones who have practised under pressure so many times that the exam itself feels routine.
Completing one practice paper a week at home, at your own pace, with Mum or Dad nearby — that is not preparation for this exam. That is practice for a very different exam. Real preparation means volume, pressure, analysis, and consistent daily work across all four subjects.
The other thing families underestimate is how much the non-Maths subjects matter. We see it every year: a child with strong Maths who has spent the entire summer on Maths, and who then loses 18 marks on NVR — a subject they barely touched. The 11 Plus is won and lost across all four subjects. You cannot afford to neglect any of them.
Speed is a skill, not a talent
Children who finish papers comfortably in September have practised timed conditions hundreds of times before then. It does not happen by itself.
Four subjects, not one
Maths, English, VR and NVR all count. A child who is brilliant at Maths but weak at NVR will be beaten by a balanced child who is solid at everything.
Scores plateau without analysis
Children who repeat papers without reviewing mistakes in depth rarely improve beyond a certain ceiling. The debrief is where the improvement actually happens.
Exam day is a performance
Knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. A child who freezes, panics, or runs out of time will underperform their actual ability. Composure is trained, not inherited.
How many hours you actually need
This is the part most tutors soften. We are not going to soften it — because the families who follow this honestly are the ones whose children get offers.
Forty-five minutes a day is a maintenance plan. It keeps skills from decaying. It does not build the depth, speed and stamina that competitive grammar school papers require from Year 6 children. The preparation volume needs to escalate through the summer, not stay flat — and by August you should be running conditions that closely mirror what the real exam day will feel like.
These hours are only sustainable if they are structured into focused sessions with clear breaks. A child who sits at a desk for three hours half-heartedly is doing less useful work than a child who does two focused 75-minute sessions with a 20-minute break between them. Use a timer. When the session ends, it ends. No drifting, no half-revision while watching TV. Sharp in, sharp out.
Also protect one full day off per week throughout the summer — ideally Sunday or a day your child genuinely looks forward to. A child who has something to look forward to revises better on every other day.
Do not give equal time to all subjects every day. Instead, rotate subject focus across the week, giving the most time to the weakest subjects. A rough starting split: Maths 35%, English 30%, Verbal Reasoning 20%, Non-Verbal Reasoning 15% — adjusted each fortnight based on mock paper analysis and your child's own progress data.
June — Diagnose and Build Foundations
2 to 2.5 hours on weekdays. 3 to 3.5 hours on weekends. The objective is not to cover everything — it is to find out exactly what is broken and fix the most important things first.
The biggest mistake families make in June is starting straight into revision without a proper diagnostic. They pick up the nearest practice paper, do it at home without strict timing, mark it roughly, and decide "she's not bad at Maths." That is not a diagnostic. That is guesswork with a pen.
A proper diagnostic is a full paper, sat under real conditions — stopwatch running, no help, no retrying questions — followed by a structured analysis of every wrong answer. Not just "she got the ratio questions wrong." Which ratio questions? Was it the method she didn't know, or did she misread the question? Did she run out of time on that section specifically? These are the questions that tell you where to spend June.
Every day you delay the diagnostic is a day of preparation spent in the wrong place. Even a rough first diagnostic gives you enormously more information than intuition alone. If your child is registered for GLECTA's weekly mock series, the first mock paper and CAR report effectively serves as your diagnostic — with the added benefit of cohort benchmarking to show how your child compares against others on the same paper.
June — week by week
Week 1 & 2 — Run the diagnostic, build the plan
- Day 1–3: full timed diagnostic mock under real conditions, no assistance
- Day 4: thorough analysis of every wrong answer — careless / gap / confusion
- Day 5: rank all weak topics by frequency across subjects
- Day 6 onwards: targeted teaching on the top three weaknesses only
- Begin vocabulary learning — 8 to 10 words daily, every single day
- Establish the daily session structure: two blocks with a break between
Week 3 & 4 — Systematic gap filling
- Work through identified knowledge gaps subject by subject — Maths first
- NVR: if technique teaching has not happened yet, start it now — not July
- VR: drill the specific code types your child finds slowest or least reliable
- English: one full timed comprehension passage every other day with full question analysis
- End of Week 4: second full mock paper to measure progress vs. diagnostic
- Update your weakness ranking based on this second mock
June daily session structure (2–2.5 hrs weekday)
| Block | Duration | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Block 1 | 75 mins | Main subject focus for the day. Timed topic drills, then check and correct. No drifting — set a stopwatch, work until it rings. |
| Break | 20 mins | Completely away from the desk. Outside if possible. Snack. No screens. |
| Block 2 | 45 mins | Vocabulary (15 mins) then second subject — usually English comprehension or VR drills. End with updating the mistake journal. |
| Block | Duration | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Morning | 2 hrs (Sunday) | Full mock paper under real exam conditions — stopwatch, desk, silence. No looking up answers mid-paper. |
| Break | 30 mins | Full rest. Fresh air. Let the brain decompress before debrief. |
| Debrief | 90 mins | Every wrong answer: identify exactly why it went wrong, write correct method into mistake journal, flag recurring patterns. |
Non-Verbal Reasoning is the subject most families push to August. By August, there is not enough time to build it properly. NVR technique — rotation, reflection, series, matrices — takes four to six weeks of regular practice to feel automatic. Start in June, drill it consistently, and by July it becomes one of your child's fastest-improving subjects. Leave it to August and you will spend the final month patching a hole that could have been closed in June.
The mistake journal — do this every day
This is not optional. Every tutor at GLECTA insists on it. A mistake journal is a dedicated notebook where every wrong answer from every mock, every drill, every practice paper is recorded, categorised and revisited. Over six weeks, patterns emerge that are invisible to parents who only look at scores. Most children discover that 60 to 70 per cent of their lost marks come from the same handful of weakness types — and fixing those weaknesses produces score jumps that feel almost miraculous.
July — Exam Strength and Speed
2.5 to 3 hours on weekdays. 4 to 4.5 hours on weekends (mock plus full debrief). The gap filling is largely done. Now you are training a performer, not a student.
Something shifts in July. The children who have done the June work properly start to feel it — the papers become less frightening, the methods start coming automatically, the timing stops being a crisis. July is where that shift accelerates.
The temptation in July is to keep doing what worked in June — more practice, more topic work, more new content. Resist it. July is not about learning new things. It is about making what is already learned fast, reliable and pressure-proof. Method consistency, speed under the clock, and composure when the questions get hard — these are the July objectives.
With school finished and the exam approaching, structured teaching during July produces results that self-study simply cannot replicate. GLECTA's Summer Mastery sessions cover the highest-value topics in all four subjects — taught by tutors who have seen every version of every GL, CEM and independent school paper. Children receive live feedback on their technique, immediate corrections to their method, and exam strategies that make mock paper debriefs significantly more productive.
July — week by week
Week 5 & 6 — Introduce the pressure
- All topic drills now timed without exception — use a stopwatch, not an estimate
- Introduce the "skip and return" rule: 90 seconds max on any one question, then move on
- Two full mock papers this fortnight — both under real conditions, both with full debrief
- Start tracking trends across consecutive mocks, not individual scores
- VR: all code types should now be being drilled for speed, not just accuracy
- Maths: timed 20-question mental arithmetic drills every other day
Week 7 & 8 — Raise the ceiling
- Two to three full mocks this fortnight — every one with a full written debrief
- Sit at least one mock in genuinely difficult conditions: unfamiliar desk, timer, no distractions
- English: move from single comprehension passages to full English papers under time
- Review every mistake journal entry from June — which errors have truly disappeared?
- Vocabulary: expand to 10 new words daily, plus weekly review of all previous batches
- Identify the one subject still showing the weakest trend and double its time allocation
July daily session structure (2.5–3 hrs weekday)
| Block | Duration | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Block 1 | 80 mins | Main subject — timed full-section practice (not individual questions). Replicate exam conditions within the session. |
| Break | 20 mins | Outside, snack, no screens. Brain needs genuine rest between blocks to absorb what was just practised. |
| Block 2 | 60 mins | Second subject plus vocabulary (15 mins). End every session with 5 minutes updating the mistake journal. |
July subject-by-subject focus
| Subject | Key July focus | What good July progress looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Maths | Multi-step word problems, ratio and proportion, data handling and percentages — all under the clock. No method shortcuts. | Completing the maths section within time with under 3 careless errors consistently |
| English | Full comprehension passages every session. Inference, vocabulary in context, author intent. Learn to find evidence first, then write the answer. | Inference and "how does the writer" questions no longer losing the most marks |
| Verbal Reasoning | All code types drilled for speed. Hidden words, analogies, letter patterns, word connections — automatic recognition is the target. | Finishing a VR section with 3–5 minutes to spare for checking |
| Non-Verbal Reasoning | Rotation, reflection, series, matrix questions — time per question dropping from 60 seconds toward 35 to 40 seconds. | NVR accuracy holding above 80% under strict timed conditions |
| Mock Tests | Two full papers per week minimum. Every paper with a full written debrief. Update mistake journal after every one. | Upward trend across any four-paper window, regardless of week-to-week fluctuation |
A child who scores 61%, then 58%, then 65%, then 67% across four July mocks is making excellent progress. The 58% in week two is noise — it happens because papers vary in difficulty, because children have bad days, because sometimes the comprehension passage is on a topic they find dull. What matters is whether the four-paper average is moving in the right direction. Parents who react to individual scores emotionally create anxiety without producing useful preparation decisions.
August — Simulate, Peak and Arrive Ready
2.5 to 3 hours weekdays (early August), tapering to 1.5 to 2 hours in the final 12 days. The mission shifts: from building ability to expressing it under pressure.
August is the month families most commonly get wrong. There are two failure modes: cramming right up to exam week and arriving exhausted, or easing off too early and losing the sharpness that June and July built. Neither extreme works.
The right approach is a two-phase August. Early August maintains the July intensity — full mock papers, targeted drilling, subject balance. Then around the two-week mark before the exam, the plan deliberately de-escalates: sessions shorten, no new material whatsoever, confidence activities increase. The brain consolidates learning during rest. A well-rested child on exam day will outperform an equally capable but exhausted one.
Early August (Days 61–76) — Sustain and refine
- Maintain 2.5 to 3 hours weekdays and a full mock paper with debrief every weekend
- Review all mistake journal entries from June and July — which patterns are still there?
- Build a "final weak spots" list of 5 to 8 specific question types still losing marks
- Drill each weak spot twice per week until it stops appearing in the journal
- Practise exam logistics: packing a pencil case, reading every instruction before starting
- Consider a GLECTA Crash Course if a single subject is still significantly behind
Final 12 Days (Days 77–90) — Intelligent wind-down
- Reduce sessions to 1.5 to 2 hours maximum — quality only, no grinding
- Mock papers every other day, not daily — no full papers in the final 4 days
- Absolutely no new material. Not a single new topic, word type or technique
- Sleep is the priority above everything else — earlier bedtimes from day 80
- Do something your child genuinely enjoys every single day — sport, art, friends
- The night before: favourite meal, light reading, in bed by 9pm. No revision.
A Crash Course is most effective in the first two weeks of August, when there is still enough time for the techniques to embed before exam day. If you book one in the final week, a child who is already anxious gets even more new input just as they need to be settling. The sweet spot is early August: identify the weakness from your July mock data, book the Crash Course, then spend the remaining weeks consolidating what was taught.
Crash Courses are particularly effective for NVR (children who have not had proper technique teaching), Maths problem-solving (children who know the methods but freeze on multi-step word problems), and VR code types (children who are slow but not inaccurate — speed can be built rapidly in a focused session).
Sleep directly affects how quickly a child retrieves information, how well they sustain concentration across a 45-minute paper, and how their working memory performs under the pressure of a timed exam. From around day 80, protect sleep above everything. If the choice is between 30 more minutes of revision and 30 more minutes of sleep — take the sleep. Every time.
The full week — what each day looks like
This is the structure to follow across all three months, adjusted each fortnight based on mock paper data. The subjects rotate; the structure stays consistent.
| Day | Main focus | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Maths | Block 1: timed topic drills on your current weak area. Block 2: mental arithmetic speed drills (20 questions, 10 minutes, strict). Update mistake journal. |
| Tuesday | English | Block 1: full timed comprehension passage — every question attempted, every answer checked against mark scheme. Block 2: vocabulary (10 words, write sentences for all), creative writing response practice. |
| Wednesday | Verbal Reasoning | Block 1: two specific VR code types — accuracy first, then same questions again for speed. Block 2: weakest subject of the week (use mistake journal to decide). |
| Thursday | NVR + weak spots | Block 1: NVR timed drills — rotation, reflection, series — with stopwatch. Block 2: mistake journal review. Reattempt three flagged entries from scratch. |
| Friday | Mixed review | Block 1: one timed section from each of the four subjects (10–15 questions each). Block 2: vocabulary review — revisit previous two weeks' batches. Lighter pace intentionally. |
| Saturday | Targeted drilling | The top two entries in the current mistake journal. Find similar questions, attempt under time, check, correct, add new errors to journal. Two to three focused drills, no more. |
| Sunday | Full mock + debrief | Morning: full paper, real conditions, stopwatch, silence. Break. Afternoon: full written debrief — every wrong answer, categorise it, update journal. This session should take 3.5 to 4 hours in total including the break. |
Review the schedule every two weeks based on your mock paper data and your child's mistake journal. If Maths is no longer in the top three weaknesses by mid-July, reduce its block time and give that time to whichever subject now needs it most. The schedule is a structure, not a contract. What never changes: the daily session format, the vocabulary commitment, and the Sunday mock with debrief.
How GLECTA accelerates progress in the final 3 months
Independent preparation gets children a significant part of the way. Structured teaching, expert feedback and benchmarked data get them the rest of the way — and often faster than families expect.
Summer Mastery Courses
Intensive weekly sessions across July and August, structured around the topics that appear most frequently in grammar school entrance papers. Every session covers exam-relevant content with live technique coaching — not generic teaching. Children receive immediate feedback on their method, not just a mark. Results compound quickly when session content is applied directly to mock papers the following Sunday.
Explore Intensive Courses →Crash Courses
For children who have a single subject that is significantly behind — or a specific topic within a subject that keeps appearing in the mistake journal. A Crash Course compresses weeks of self-study into a focused intensive block. The tutor identifies exactly where the method is breaking down, teaches the correct approach, and drills it until it is automatic. Most effective in early August, booked after the July mock data is clear.
Book a Crash Course →Weekly Mock Tests
Standardised papers sat in real exam conditions — proper desk, stopwatch, silence, no help. Mirrors the style and difficulty of GL Assessment, CEM, HBS, CSSE and leading independent school formats. Unlike home practice papers, GLECTA mocks give your child the experience of exam pressure before the real day. Results include per-topic breakdown and the Cohort Analysis Report every parent needs to make smart preparation decisions.
Book Mock Tests →Cohort Analysis Reports
A raw score tells you the percentage. A CAR report tells you what it means — how your child performed against the full cohort, which topics lost the most marks, and whether improvement is on track across consecutive papers. Families with CAR data make dramatically better preparation decisions than those guessing from scores alone. See the dedicated section below for a real example of what a CAR report reveals.
Learn about CAR →Mastery Courses
GLECTA's main programme — structured weekly small-group teaching that covers the full 11 Plus curriculum in sequence. Children joining in June are placed based on their diagnostic, ensuring sessions pick up exactly where preparation most needs to go. Mastery Courses combine expert teaching with home practice materials and regular progress tracking — the most complete preparation system available for the June-September window.
Join Mastery Course →Vocabulary Booster
Vocabulary is one of the strongest predictors of 11 Plus performance across English, comprehension and VR — yet most families leave it to chance. GLECTA's Vocabulary Booster provides structured weekly batches, synonym and antonym drilling, and context sentence practice. Many students use it alongside their main preparation programme to systematically build the word range that top-scoring papers require without leaving it to ad-hoc reading alone.
Explore Vocabulary →Why mock tests are non-negotiable — and how to use them properly
A practice paper completed at the kitchen table is useful. A mock paper sat under real conditions, followed by a proper debrief, is a different thing entirely. One prepares a child for a calm exercise. The other prepares them for an exam.
The 11 Plus examination room is a specific environment — unfamiliar desk, other children around, a clock on the wall, a stranger handing out papers, no ability to ask questions or check answers with a parent. Children who have never experienced anything like that in their preparation will experience it for the first time in September. Children who have sat ten to fifteen mocks under proper conditions will find it completely familiar.
Familiarity is the antidote to exam anxiety. Not reassurance. Not telling your child it will be fine. Actual repeated exposure to the conditions they will face, until those conditions feel routine.
Builds genuine exam stamina
Sustaining full concentration across a 45-minute paper is a physical and mental capacity that must be trained over weeks, not assumed.
Trains time management under pressure
The skip-and-return strategy only becomes instinctive when a child has practised it under time pressure many times. Talking about it is not enough.
Creates a data trail
Without regular mocks, you are making preparation decisions based on opinion. With them, you have actual data showing which topics are improving and which are not.
Reduces anxiety through familiarity
A child who has sat the same style of paper a dozen times before September will feel calm walking into the real examination. That calm is worth marks.
Clear desk. No phone in the room. Timer set to the exact paper duration. Parent leaves the room. Child reads instructions before starting — just as they will in the real exam. When the timer rings, pencils down immediately. If your child cannot do these conditions at home, that is useful information: it means they need the experience of sitting mocks in a proper environment outside the house, which is exactly what GLECTA's weekly mock series provides.
Cohort Analysis Reports — what they show and why they matter
A score of 68% sounds encouraging. A score of 68% when the cohort median is 72% tells you something very different. Without cohort data, a percentage is almost meaningless.
This is the problem with home practice papers. A child who scores 70% on a paper at home has no idea whether that performance would place them in the top 20% or the bottom 40% of children applying to the same school. The paper difficulty varies, the marking varies, and there is no comparison group.
GLECTA's Cohort Analysis Reports solve this. Every child sitting a GLECTA weekly mock is measured against the full cohort sitting the same paper on the same day. The report shows not just the overall score but the per-topic breakdown compared to cohort averages — so families can see immediately whether a weakness is specific to their child or whether it is a hard question that most children found difficult.
A child scores 63% on a GLECTA mock. Without the CAR report, the family spends the next two weeks doing general revision across all subjects. The CAR report shows that the cohort median was 60% — so this child is actually in the upper half. More usefully, the report shows that 16 of their 22 errors were on ratio and proportion questions specifically. The child actually scored above cohort average on Maths overall — except for ratio, where they were significantly below. The family now spends the next two weeks entirely on ratio and proportion. The following mock: 71%. That is what CAR data does.
Cohort comparison
Know whether a score is genuinely strong or whether it looks good because the paper was easy — and vice versa.
Topic-by-topic breakdown
See which specific topics are losing marks, separated from the overall score that masks them.
Progress tracking
Across multiple mocks, CAR data shows whether the preparation trajectory is heading toward the target band or needs recalibrating.
Revision action plan
Each CAR report effectively writes the next fortnight's preparation plan for you — which topics, in which subjects, in which order.
Vocabulary — the subject nobody budgets time for
Most families treat vocabulary as a background activity — something that gets done through reading. It is not. In the final three months, vocabulary needs daily structured attention alongside the four core subjects.
A child with a strong vocabulary reads comprehension passages faster, makes stronger inferences, handles synonym and antonym questions in VR confidently, avoids misreading question stems, and writes more precise creative writing responses. Vocabulary touches every part of every paper. Yet it is the area most consistently under-prepared in the summer months.
The reason is that vocabulary improvement is slow and invisible until suddenly it is not. A child who has been learning 8 to 10 words a day from June will have encountered over 700 new words by September — and those words will start appearing in the papers. The child who did not do this will encounter exactly the same words and have no idea what they mean.
How to build vocabulary properly across 90 days
Five preparation mistakes families make in these 3 months
These are the patterns our tutors see every year — in families who are working hard, who care deeply, and who still end up in the wrong place in September because of these avoidable errors.
Treating NVR and VR as secondary subjects
In the majority of grammar school entrance exams, NVR and VR together account for 40 to 50 per cent of the total marks available. A child who spends 80 per cent of their summer on Maths and English and 20 per cent on NVR and VR is preparing for a different exam. Balance the time allocation from June. If your child is weak at NVR — which many are, because it is not taught in primary school — that subject needs more time, not less.
Marking papers and moving on without a debrief
A practice paper without a debrief is half a revision session. The mark tells you the score. The debrief tells you what to do next. Many families mark a paper, register the score, and move on — leaving every piece of actionable information in that paper unclaimed. Fifteen wrong answers contain fifteen pieces of data about what to revise. A debrief that takes a quarter of the time the paper took will produce more score improvement than another paper taken without analysis.
Comparing scores with other children
Your child is not competing with their classmates in June. They are competing with the full cohort of children applying to the same school — most of whom you will never meet. A classmate's score on a home practice paper tells you almost nothing useful. It may have been a different paper, a different timing, different marking. The only meaningful data is your child's own improvement trend across standardised mocks. Everything else is noise that tends to produce anxiety rather than preparation.
Introducing new material in August
The last two weeks before the exam are not the time to teach a new method, introduce a new topic, or attempt a new type of paper the child has not seen before. New material in this window adds anxiety without adding marks — a child who is still trying to process a new technique on exam day will be slower and less confident on every question type, including the ones they already know well. Freeze the content list by the end of July. August is for consolidating and performing, not learning.
Prioritising revision over sleep in the final two weeks
Sleep is not a reward for finishing revision. Sleep is part of the preparation. A child who gets 8 to 9 hours of sleep per night in the two weeks before the exam will retrieve information faster, sustain concentration longer, and manage exam anxiety more effectively than a child who stays up later revising. This is not a matter of opinion — the neuroscience is clear. From around two weeks before the exam, protect sleep above almost everything else. If it comes to a choice between 30 more minutes of revision or 30 more minutes of sleep, the answer is always sleep.
Frequently asked questions
Ready to Start Your Child's 90-Day Plan?
GLECTA's Summer Mastery Courses, Crash Courses, Weekly Mock Tests and Cohort Analysis Reports are designed to maximise improvement across June, July and August — giving every preparation week a clear direction and measurable result.