11+ Maths is harder than the Maths your child is doing in class. That's not a criticism of schools; it's simply a structural reality. The national curriculum has its own timetable, and 11+ exams regularly test Year 6 content with children who are still in Year 5, sometimes Year 4. The exam also tests speed as much as accuracy: knowing how to do something is only part of what's required. Doing it correctly in thirty seconds is something else entirely.
The topics covered are broad. Fractions, percentages, and ratios appear in most papers. So do sequences, both number sequences and shape sequences, alongside word problems, area and perimeter, angles, and basic algebra. Negative numbers, Roman numerals, and data interpretation from tables and graphs are also common. None of this is beyond primary school children, but some of it will be unfamiliar to children who are working at the pace of their year group rather than ahead of it.
The gap between school Maths and 11+ Maths is widest for children who start preparing late. A child in Year 4 who begins working through 11+ material has time to let each topic settle before the exam. A child who starts in Year 6 September faces the same breadth of content in a fraction of the time. Neither situation is hopeless, but knowing where your child currently sits makes it much easier to plan what to focus on first.
Some topics cause a disproportionate number of mark losses. Word problems are one of the most common. The underlying Maths is rarely the issue; children rush or misread the question. Teaching your child to read word problems twice before writing anything, and to identify what is actually being asked rather than what looks like a familiar calculation, is a habit worth building early. Fractions and percentage conversions under time pressure catch out many children who understand them perfectly well when given space to think. Two-step problems, where one calculation feeds into another, are another consistent source of errors, particularly when children lose track of the intermediate step.
Sequences with non-obvious rules deserve special mention. Children who are comfortable with simple +3 or ×2 sequences can still stumble when the rule involves alternating steps, square numbers, or positional patterns. The only way through is exposure: seeing enough varied sequences that the less obvious patterns start to feel familiar rather than alarming.
How you structure practice matters as much as how much you do. Short daily sessions beat long infrequent ones by a considerable margin when it comes to retention. Twenty minutes on five days outperforms an hour and forty minutes on a single Saturday. Always review wrong answers for method rather than just noting the correct answer. Understanding why a particular approach failed is far more useful than simply being told the right number. Time pressure should be introduced gradually, ideally from Year 5 onwards, so that children build up to working at exam pace rather than being thrown into it.
Mental arithmetic is the foundation everything else rests on. Times tables need to be automatic, instant rather than effortful. Doubling and halving, percentage shortcuts (10% as a starting point, then building up or down), and quick fraction-to-decimal conversions all free up working memory for the harder parts of a problem. Every second your child spends calculating 7 × 8 is a second not spent on the actual question.
Onzely's adaptive Maths practice tracks which topics your child finds hardest and focuses automatically on those gaps. Wrong answers trigger AI explanations that walk through the method step by step, focusing on the reasoning behind it rather than just the correct answer. That kind of targeted, explained practice is considerably more efficient than working through a textbook from page one.
Onzely's adaptive maths practice automatically focuses on the topics your child finds hardest, with AI explanations for every wrong answer.
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