11+ maths: the topics that come up most, and how to build speed

Maths is the 11+ paper parents feel most equipped to help with, and the one where help most often goes wrong. The instinct is to push ahead into harder topics. The marks are usually somewhere else entirely: in speed, in reading the question, and in the three or four topics that appear on every single paper.

What is actually on it

The syllabus is the national curriculum up to the end of Year 5, plus a little Year 6, because children sit the test weeks into Year 6. It is not an advanced maths paper. It is a Year 5 paper sat quickly, under pressure, with the questions phrased less kindly than at school.

The topics that appear on nearly every paper:

• The four operations, including long multiplication and division, with numbers big enough to punish shaky method
• Fractions, decimals and percentages, and converting between them
• Ratio and proportion, usually inside a word problem about recipes, money or sharing
• Measures and unit conversion: millilitres to litres, grams to kilograms, minutes to hours
• Time: timetables, durations, the 24-hour clock
• Perimeter, area and volume of rectangles and compound shapes
• Averages: mean above all, with mode, median and range close behind
• Sequences and number patterns, including the "find the rule" phrasing
• Basic algebra: a missing number written as a letter
• Data: reading bar charts, line graphs and tables carefully

Higher-tier and independent school papers add a little more (indices, simple probability, more algebra), but the bulk stays the same.

Speed is a separate skill

This catches almost everyone out. A child can know every topic on that list and still finish half a paper, because 11+ maths papers are deliberately tight on time. Speed is trained separately from understanding, and it comes from three things:

1. Times tables to instant recall, up to twelve. Not "can work it out", but answers arriving without a pause. Every fraction, ratio, area and long division question sits on top of them, and a child who computes 7 × 8 from scratch pays that tax fifty times a paper.
2. Mental strategies instead of written method. Doubling and halving, adding to the next ten, multiplying by ten then adjusting. Children taught only the column method write out everything, and that is where the minutes go.
3. Knowing when to stop. Two minutes into a hard question, the right move is to leave it and come back. Children rarely do this unless it has been explicitly practised.

Word problems are a reading skill

Most lost marks in 11+ maths are not maths errors. A child who can do the arithmetic perfectly still loses marks by answering a slightly different question from the one asked.

What helps, in order of impact:

• Underline what the question wants before doing anything. How many are left, not how many there were.
• Check the units. Answers in metres when the question said centimetres are one of the most common careless losses on the paper.
• Estimate first. A rough answer catches a decimal point in the wrong place, which is the error that turns a small slip into a zero.
• Re-read the question after answering. Five seconds, and it catches most of the rest.

This is also where wide reading quietly helps a maths score, which surprises people. See why reading matters so much.

A practice routine that works

Fifteen or twenty minutes, most days, is enough, in line with the wider home practice routine. What goes in it matters more than the length:

• Start with two minutes of tables. Every session. It compounds.
• Practise the weakest topic, not the favourite one. Children who like maths will happily do the operations they already own.
• Mixed sets, not topic blocks, once the topic is understood. Real papers do not tell you which topic a question belongs to, and picking the method is half the skill.
• Full timed papers only in the last couple of months. Before that they teach speed at the cost of accuracy, and accuracy is harder to get back. There is a whole post on when to start timed papers.

(The awkward part of all this is the diagnosis: knowing whether a wrong answer was a gap in fractions, a misread question or a slip. 11max does that part, marking every answer as it is given, explaining the mistake while the child still remembers their reasoning, and pushing the next questions towards whatever is currently weakest rather than whatever comes next in the book.)

What not to do

Do not race ahead into Year 7 content. It appears on no 11+ paper, and the time is far better spent making Year 5 material fast and automatic.

And do not correct in real time while your child works. Interrupting a calculation trains hesitation, and the whole game in 11+ maths is a child who can commit to a method, execute it quickly, and check it afterwards.