11+ Mock Exam Schedule: How Many to Sit and When
· 9 min read
A practical mock-exam plan for the 11+: how many mocks to sit, when to start, how to debrief, and how to avoid the most common mistake parents make in the final months before the test.
The short answer
For most children aiming at September Year 6 grammar-school tests, the right shape is roughly: one or two diagnostic mocks late in Year 4 to identify weak areas, three to five paced mocks across Year 5 to build exam stamina, and four to six full timed mocks in the summer break and the first weeks of Year 6 to sharpen pacing and confidence. That is twelve to thirteen mocks across two academic years — not the twenty-plus that some intensive tutoring programmes recommend, and not the two or three that a casual approach delivers. The point of a mock is not the score itself. It is the debrief that follows. A mock with no review is one third of a mock — you got the exam-condition rehearsal but you missed the diagnostic and the correction. A mock with a careful review, where you and your child walk through each wrong answer and identify whether it was a content gap, a pacing problem, or a misread, is worth three mocks done at speed with no review. Plan time for the debrief into your calendar before you book the mock.
Year 4: one or two diagnostic mocks, not more
Mock exams in Year 4 are easy to overdo. Your child has not yet covered the curriculum the test will assess, has not yet built exam stamina, and most of the time pressure-testing them produces is anxiety rather than improvement. The role of a Year 4 mock is purely diagnostic: where are the content gaps, where is the question-type unfamiliarity, where does fatigue start to bite. Two short, targeted mocks across the year — one in spring after a term of structured reasoning work, one in summer — is enough. Choose papers at the lower end of the expected difficulty band, and frame them with your child as practice rather than performance. If your child is enjoying preparation in Year 4 and asks for more mocks, that is fine — but do not impose them as a requirement. The risk of burnout from over-mocking in Year 4 is much higher than the risk of under-preparation.
Year 5: three to five mocks to build stamina
Year 5 is where mock exams start to do real work. By the autumn of Year 5, your child should be doing one short mock per term — full papers under timed conditions, in a reasonably quiet room, without parental help. Build from one paper at a time in the autumn to multi-paper mocks by spring. By the summer of Year 5, your child should be able to complete a full mock — all three or four papers in a single sitting with short breaks — in roughly the same shape as the real test in their region. The goal of these mocks is two-fold. First, exam stamina: most Year 5 children can answer questions accurately for forty minutes but lose concentration at sixty or ninety. Mocks are the only way to build that stamina before the real test. Second, pacing: knowing when to skip a stuck question and move on, knowing how long to spend on long-form questions, knowing how to use any remaining time at the end. These are learnable skills that no amount of question-bank practice teaches as effectively as a real timed mock.
Summer of Year 5 to test day: four to six final mocks
The summer of Year 5 and the first weeks of Year 6 are the high-leverage window for mocks. By now your child should know the content well enough that mocks are a sharpening exercise rather than a knowledge-coverage check. Aim for four to six full mocks across this window — roughly one per week from late July through the start of September. Vary the conditions between mocks: try one in the morning (matching test time), one after a normal school day to test resilience, one with a longer warm-up, one with a shorter warm-up. The variation builds robustness to the small variables on test day. The single most important thing in this window is the debrief discipline. Build a simple errors log: each wrong answer goes into the log with a one-line note on what went wrong — 'misread the question', 'forgot the order-of-operations rule', 'panicked and guessed'. By the third or fourth mock, patterns emerge. Those patterns are the highest-leverage things to work on in the remaining time. For a wider picture of the September-November sequence and how mocks fit into school registration and offer day, see our 11+ preparation guide for 2027. And if you're not sure your child is ready for full mock-paper length yet, our free diagnostic assessment gives a baseline across the four 11+ subjects in 15 minutes.
What counts as a 'mock' — and what doesn't
A mock exam is not a workbook exercise done at the kitchen table while you are cooking. It is a full paper sat in conditions that approximate the real test: timed strictly, no help from a parent, no breaks except those the real test would allow, no looking up answers afterwards before the score is recorded. If you can manage exam conditions at home — a quiet room, a timer, a separate answer sheet for multiple-choice papers — your home mocks are valuable. If you cannot, paid mock-exam services (Bond, Athey, in-person mock days run by schools) are worth the cost for two or three of the high-stakes mocks in the final summer. What absolutely does not count is timed practice that gets paused. The whole point of a mock is the simulation of the real exam's continuous time pressure. A child who pauses every time they want to ask you something does not get the pacing-and-stamina benefit of the mock. Be a strict invigilator. If your child asks a question during the mock, write it down and address it during the debrief.
Region-specific calibration: not all mocks transfer
Match the mock format to the test your child is sitting. A child preparing for the Kent Test does not benefit from sitting CSSE-style writing mocks — the formats are different enough that the practice rarely transfers. A child preparing for the Essex CSSE needs writing-task mocks that pure GL question-bank practice does not deliver. A child preparing for the Bucks 11+ needs the specific two-paper combined-subject pacing rather than the three-paper Kent format. Mock packages from GL Assessment and CGP are general; the published past papers from CSSE and from individual super-selective schools (Reading, Kendrick, Sutton) are specific. Use the published papers where they exist for your target region — they are the single best mocks money can buy. For non-published regions (Kent, Bucks, Bexley etc.), commercial GL-style mocks plus the practice papers each test provider sells are the next-best option. If your child is also sitting a writing task — Medway, CSSE, Kendrick Stage 2 — book at least two timed writing mocks in the final summer.
When more mocks hurt rather than help
Beyond about fifteen mocks across Year 5 and the summer of Year 6, more mocks rarely help. By that point, the diagnostic value of each new mock has plateaued — you have seen most of the question types and most of the failure modes. What more mocks deliver instead is fatigue and confidence erosion. A child who has sat twenty mocks by the time the real test arrives in September often feels like the real test is just another mock, which on average is good for nerves but bad for the final week's focus. The signal that a child is over-mocked is usually one of: scores plateauing or dropping across the final three or four mocks (often a fatigue indicator, not a regression); growing reluctance to start a new mock (a motivation problem mocks cannot solve); or scores that swing widely up and down between mocks for no obvious reason (a concentration problem that more mocks make worse). When you see any of these signals, stop mocking and switch back to short topic-specific practice for two or three weeks, then return to mocks if there is still time before the test.
The debrief that turns mocks into improvement
A good mock debrief looks like this. Within twenty-four hours of the mock, sit with your child for thirty to forty-five minutes. Mark the paper together, but do not focus on the score. Take each wrong answer in turn and ask, 'what happened here'. Categorise the answer into one of: a content gap (didn't know the rule or topic), a question-type unfamiliarity (didn't recognise the format), a pacing error (ran out of time and guessed), or a careless mistake (knew the rule, misread the question). The category matters more than the score because it tells you what to do next. Content gaps are addressed by topic-specific practice. Question-type unfamiliarity is addressed by a few examples of that type. Pacing errors are addressed by more timed mocks. Careless mistakes are addressed by reading the question twice before answering — a habit that takes weeks to form. Update your errors log. Identify the top three categories and shape the next week of practice around them. By the third or fourth mock, the errors log becomes your child's personal preparation plan. By the sixth or seventh, the plan should look almost exhausted — which is the signal that you are close to ready for test day.