11+ exam preparation online: free practice, booklets and what works

The parent sitting opposite Aiden in a school consultation evening described her daughter as "brilliant at everything except the clock." The child could solve any verbal reasoning problem she was shown. In a timed 11+ mock, she left the final eight questions blank. She took the exam in September. She passed. But it took fourteen months of weekly practice — not to learn the content, but to learn to work fast enough.

That pattern, a capable child undone by pacing rather than knowledge, appears every preparation season. It is why the volume of free online practice papers matters far less than how those papers are used.

What the 11+ actually tests

Before choosing any resource, it helps to be precise about the exam. The 11+ is not a school curriculum test. It does not assess what a child has been taught in Year 5 or Year 6. It assesses reasoning ability under time pressure — particularly verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning and, in many papers, non-verbal reasoning (pattern recognition).

Two main exam boards produce most 11+ papers in England. GL Assessment is used widely by selective schools in Kent, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and parts of the South East. CEM, produced by Durham University, is used in areas including Birmingham, Coventry, Wiltshire and some grammar schools in Yorkshire. The formats are structurally different: GL Assessment separates subjects into distinct papers with question types that are well-documented and coachable; CEM papers blend verbal and numerical ability within each test and change format without announcement to reduce the coaching advantage.

The first practical step before downloading any online resource: identify which exam your child's target school uses. Most schools state this on their admissions pages. If they do not, their admissions office will confirm it.

When to start 11+ preparation online

There is no single right answer, but there is a common mistake: starting too late and compensating with high volume.

Year 4 (age 8-9)

At this stage, content support — particularly mathematics and vocabulary — is more useful than timed exam practice. A child who enters Year 5 with strong arithmetic, a wide reading vocabulary and comfort with basic spatial reasoning is well-positioned. Free online 11+ resources are least useful this early because most are designed for format familiarity, not foundational skills.

Year 5 (age 9-10): where structured practice begins

September of Year 5 is the natural starting point for format-specific preparation. One paper per week, mostly untimed in the first term, moving to timed from January. The goal in Year 5 is not speed — it is pattern recognition: learning what a verbal analogy question looks like, how a number matrix is structured, what "find the missing letter" is actually testing.

For students who need targeted subject support alongside exam preparation, Year 5 maths tutoring and Year 5 English support can accelerate the familiarity phase and pinpoint the reasoning types a child consistently misses before those gaps become embedded habits.

Year 6 (age 10-11): exam simulation

From September of Year 6, most children are preparing for an exam that sits in October or November. The window is short. Online practice at this stage should be timed, paper-complete and followed by detailed error analysis. Volume increases, but the ratio of practice-to-review should remain at least 1:1 throughout.

Free 11+ practice resources that are worth using

GL Assessment format

The 11+ Forum (elevenplusforum.co.uk) is the largest free repository of GL Assessment-style papers. The site is run by parents, not affiliated with any exam board, so quality varies — but the volume is substantial and the papers are organised by region. The forum's regional boards are also a useful source of local intelligence: which grammar school changed its pass mark, how many children sat in a particular year, what the multiple-choice layout looked like last September.

GL Assessment publishes its own free sample materials directly on its website. These are produced by the same organisation that writes the real exam, which makes them the most accurate indication of formatting, difficulty level and timing.

CEM format

CEM deliberately does not publish its papers after use, and third-party reproduction is restricted. This makes genuinely accurate free CEM practice harder to find. Bond 11+ offers digital free samples for CEM-style preparation, and its paid range is among the best for CEM-structure familiarity. CGP's CEM Practice Papers are inexpensive and closely structured. For free online adaptive practice, Atom Learning offers a free trial with CEM-style questions that adjust difficulty based on response patterns — closer to how CEM papers operate than static worksheets.

Verbal reasoning specifically

The most practised 11+ question type across both formats is verbal reasoning: synonyms, analogies, codes, missing words, odd-one-out. Free worksheet databases at Primaryleap.co.uk and Education Quizzes (educationquizzes.com) cover verbal reasoning at varying difficulty levels, searchable by question type. These work well for targeted drilling of specific types a child consistently misses, separate from full paper practice.

For a complete breakdown of preparation across the full Year 5 to Year 6 period, including resource scheduling by term, the 11+ exam preparation timeline guide covers the planning layer in detail.

How to use online practice papers effectively

Timed versus untimed

Most families begin timed practice too early. A child still learning what a spatial reasoning question requires will spend exam time figuring out format rather than practising the skill the format tests. The sequence that works better: two or three papers untimed in the first month, establishing what each question type looks like and what the strategy for each is. Then timed conditions from the second month onward.

When moving to timed practice, use the official time allocation for the target exam. GL Assessment Mathematics allows 50 minutes for 50 questions. Verbal Reasoning allows 50 minutes for 80 questions. CEM timings vary by format and can change year to year. Training to a different time allocation trains the wrong pace.

Error analysis routine

This is where most home preparation loses effectiveness. A child completes a paper, marks it, sees a score and moves to the next paper. That sequence develops test endurance but not test accuracy.

A more productive pattern: after each paper, before checking answers, ask the child to flag every question they guessed, every question they found slow and every question they found straightforward. Then check answers. For every incorrect answer: identify exactly where the error occurred (not the category — the specific step), then reproduce one similar question from a worksheet bank before moving on.

This takes longer than sitting another paper. It produces faster gains.

Free 11+ preparation booklets

Several publishers make booklet-format materials available free for download.

CGP offers a free 11+ Starter Kit on their website, covering familiarisation exercises across the four main subjects and aimed at Year 5 parents who have not yet started preparation. It is limited in scope but useful as an initial benchmark: sit the child through it without prior preparation, see where they are, and the result tells you whether the main gap is speed, content knowledge or format familiarity.

The Good School Guide and several regional parent organisations publish free guides to 11+ preparation, typically structured as admissions advice rather than practice papers. These cover the applications timeline and school selection process but are not useful for the preparation itself.

For families using a booklet from a preparation course, the key is not to move to the next section until the current section's error rate is below ten percent on two consecutive sittings. Moving faster than consolidation allows is the most common single cause of stalling preparation.

What online preparation cannot replace

Speed work can be trained with free online resources. Format familiarity can be built with them. Error pattern identification is harder to do reliably without experienced oversight.

The question type most children find hardest to self-diagnose is non-verbal reasoning, specifically cube folding, pattern rotation and spatial sequences. A child can look at a wrong answer, see the correct one and still not understand why their reasoning was incorrect. That confusion repeats across multiple sessions because the child has not identified the underlying spatial principle their reasoning is missing. A tutoring session specifically targeting that gap resolves more error repetition than twenty additional practice papers.

The other component online practice cannot replicate reliably is exam-day pacing strategy: knowing to skip a question and return to it, managing the answer sheet correctly when skipping, and recognising when a question type in the paper is harder than expected and adjusting time allocation accordingly. These are procedural skills that benefit from practice in conditions that simulate exam pressure. A mock exam environment, either at a preparation centre or structured by a tutor at home under strict conditions, comes closer to replicating that than solo practice at a desk without a time constraint.

Families who find persistent gaps in specific reasoning areas, or who want structured progress tracking across the preparation period, can find subject-specific support through the EduBoost online tutoring platform, which covers both GL Assessment and CEM formats.

The decision most families delay

The most consistent thing Aiden hears from families whose children did not perform as well as expected: they started full timed practice too late, typically July or August before a September exam. By that point there is time to complete many papers but not enough time to work through the error pattern that would have most improved performance.

A child who begins timed weekly practice in January of Year 5, reviews errors methodically, and scales volume only in the six weeks before the exam, is better prepared than a child who completes three papers daily in August. The preparation calendar matters more than the preparation intensity.

The free resources are there. The approach that uses them well is the less visible variable.