Is my child actually on track for the 11+?

This is the question underneath every other 11+ question, and it is the hardest one to answer at home. School reports do not measure it, because schools do not teach to the 11+. Practice books do not measure it, because their scores are not comparable to anything. And the parents at the school gate are the least reliable source of all.

Here is what a score actually means, and what to look at instead.

Standardised scores, briefly

Grammar school results are not reported as raw marks. Raw marks are converted into a standardised score, which does two things: it puts different papers on a common scale, and it adjusts for age, so a child born in August is not quietly penalised against a classmate born the previous September.

The scale is built so that 100 is the average and most children land between roughly 69 and 141. What counts as a pass is set by each school, not by the scale, and it moves. Some schools publish a fixed qualifying score. Super-selective schools simply rank everyone and take the top scorers, so the effective pass mark changes every year with the strength of the cohort. There is more on how this feeds into offers in the application timeline.

The practical consequence: nobody can tell you in Year 5 what score your child needs, because it does not exist yet.

Why a practice paper percentage means so little

Your child scores 68% on a practice paper. Is that good?

There is no way to know, and here is why:

• Papers are not calibrated. Publishers write to wildly different difficulties, and none of them standardise against a real cohort.
• There is no age adjustment. A summer-born child sitting the same paper is being measured against an older child with an extra year of development, and the real test corrects for that while a practice book does not.
• Conditions were not the same. Half a percentage difference vanishes next to whether the room was quiet and whether anyone helped.

A percentage is useful for one thing only: comparing your child to your own child, on similar material, over time.

The three signals that do predict

Ignore the headline number. These three tell you far more.

1. The direction of travel within a topic. A child who was getting half of fractions questions right in March and is getting most of them right in June is on track, whatever the paper total says. Improvement inside a topic is the only clean measure of learning.

2. Speed at a fixed accuracy. Most children can be accurate or fast, and the 11+ needs both. Watch whether the time to complete a set falls while accuracy holds. If accuracy is falling as speed rises, the speed is not real yet.

3. Consistency across the four subjects. The score is limited by the weakest subject, not lifted by the strongest. A child at 80% in three subjects and 45% in verbal reasoning has one job for the next two months, and it is not more maths.

Add a fourth if you want an honest one: what happens on a bad day. The 11+ is sat once, and resilience through a hard question is worth more than the last few percent of any topic.

How to track this without a spreadsheet

Most families start a spreadsheet in Year 5 and abandon it by Easter. What actually needs recording is small: which topics were practised, how many were right, and how long it took. Three numbers a session.

(This is the part 11max keeps for you. Every answer is recorded as it is given, so the topic-level trend, the speed and the weakest-subject picture build themselves, and a weekly summary lands in your inbox with what improved, what did not and what to do next. Where enough children of the same year group are practising, it also shows how your child compares with them, which is the closest thing to a real benchmark available before the test itself.)

What to do when the answer is "not yet"

If the honest read is that your child is behind, the response depends entirely on when you are asking.

• A year out. Nothing dramatic. More time on the weakest subject, and start the reading habit today if it is not already running.
• Six months out. Narrow the focus. Two subjects, not four, until the gap closes.
• Six weeks out. Stop adding new material. Consolidate what is known, practise the format, and protect your child's confidence, which at that point is worth more marks than any topic.

And keep the whole thing in proportion. A qualifying score is one route into one kind of school, the preferences on the application form matter enormously, and every year plenty of children who looked borderline in June sit the test and pass it comfortably.