The single biggest mistake parents make with 11+ practice is treating each paper as a grade rather than a diagnostic. A paper marked 38/50 with no follow-up tells you almost nothing useful. The same paper marked 38/50, with the twelve missed questions sorted into "timing", "careless arithmetic", "vocabulary gap" and "topic confusion", tells you exactly what to do for the next fortnight.
Phase 1 — Baseline (early Year 5)
Pick one paper per subject your child will sit. Do not coach, do not warn, do not pre-teach. Sit each paper under realistic conditions — quiet room, full timing, no help. Mark them together a day later, calmly, and use the result purely to identify which subject most needs work. The baseline phase exists to tell you where to spend your time, not to predict an outcome.
Phase 2 — Targeted topic work (spring and summer of Year 5)
Identify the three weakest topic groups across your baseline papers and drill them — short, focused sessions, fifteen to twenty minutes a day, four days a week. Use topic-specific worksheets rather than full papers in this phase. Two children of equal ability who differ only in whether they did this targeted phase usually finish six months apart in test readiness.
Phase 3 — Timed papers (summer and early autumn of Year 5)
Now reintroduce full papers under exam conditions, one a fortnight. The off-week is for review, not for additional papers. The purpose of this phase is to build timing discipline and the stamina to concentrate for the full sitting length. Many children can answer questions correctly given unlimited time but lose marks because they freeze on a hard question and bleed minutes from the rest of the paper.
Phase 4 — Dress rehearsal (August of Year 6)
One or two papers in conditions as close to the real test as you can manage — the same time of morning the live test will be sat, the same desk, the same brand of pencil. Discuss with your child what to do if they don't know an answer (skip, mark, return), what to do if they finish early (re-check the answer transfer grid first, then the long-form questions), and what to do if they panic (one slow breath, then move to the next question).
Phase 5 — Wind down (the week before)
Counter-intuitively, the week before the test should contain almost no practice. By this point the work is done, and additional papers either reassure (if they go well) or destroy confidence (if they don't). A walk, a board game, an early night and a normal breakfast on the morning will do more than any final paper.
Marking and review — the part that actually matters
Mark the paper together the day after it is sat. For each missed question, ask three questions: did you understand what was being asked, did you have the technique to answer it, and did you have time to use the technique? Sort the missed questions into four buckets — timing, careless, knowledge gap, vocabulary — and use the buckets to plan the next fortnight. This single habit is the most important thing on this page.
What not to do
Do not sit two papers a week, do not let your child see their score before you have reviewed the paper together, do not compare scores between siblings or friends, do not move on to a new paper until the previous one's lessons have been actioned, and do not — please do not — let the 11+ become the dominant feature of family life for a year. Children who pass are usually children who continued to read for pleasure, see friends, and play sport throughout the run-up.