As I'm sure you've heard us say many times before, we think mock exams are one of the most important pieces of preparation for the 11+ exam. They teach you about the format, the pressure, the time restrictions and how easy it is to make silly mistakes.
We keep our mock exams reasonably secret to make sure that children are seeing them for the first time. Although the same questions won't appear in the actual exam, we understand why parents want to go through the paper and work through any mistakes with their children. For this reason, we do provide a small sample of the easiest questions your child got wrong. We don't hand out the entire paper.
To compliment mock exams, we also highly recommend practice papers. As your child is completing these at home you can work through any mistakes to your heart's content. You can also observe them to see where they are going wrong. Perhaps they are not using their time wisely. Maybe they can't bring themselves to guess really hard questions. Perhaps they are doing too much in their heads. Maybe they are guessing blind rather than reading the question, ruling out silly answers and then guessing.
As we've also mentioned many times before, passing the 11+ is about your position rather than your percentage. The pass mark is set to pass (very approximately) half of the candidates. If your child gets 72% is this good enough? To help you understand and hopefully start to relax a little, we are offering to collate everybody's scores and let you know in what position you finished.
So in order to help you in this way, we've constructed a list of practice papers, that we are happy to standardise for you. At some point, we also hope to provide invigilator videos that will talk your child through the exams.
Although the quiet observation of your child's exam technique is probably the biggest advantage of a practice paper at home, you may like to make the experience more palatable for them, by getting a group of friends to sit an exam together and then celebrate with lunch afterwards.
We are also happy for you to use any of the recommended practice papers in one of our mock exams. We will purchase the papers for you, run the exam in the same way and provide the same reports, so there is no reduction in price (more details below).
GL Assessment have official practice papers and a couple of free ones. For BWS, we are using a subset of the same papers plus a non-verbal paper. Here is our list of recommended practice papers
Recommended papers for SWGS 11+
GL Assessment have asked tutors not to link to their free materials so I'm afraid you will just have to Google "GL Assessment familiarisation" and find them yourself. For the SWGS exam you need maths, English and Verbal.
Recommended papers for BWS 11+
Same as SWGS but a subset of the questions, arranged into two papers as detailed below. Paper 1 has two ten-minute non-verbal sections followed by a 25 minute maths section. Paper 2 has 25 minutes of English and 20 minutes of verbal reasoning. You can catch your breath between sections. During a section, you can't go back to completed sections or make a head-start on the next section.
GL Assessment have asked tutors not to link to their free materials so I'm afraid you will just have to Google "GL Assessment familiarisation" and find them yourself. For the BWS exam you will need non-verbal, maths, English and Verbal for FP1 and FP2. You will need "Verbal Skills" and "Non Verbal Reasoning and Maths" for FP3. If you are only doing one paper, do FP3 as it is arranged in the same way as the BWS 11+.
The cost
It is normally best (cheapest) to buy the practice papers yourself. The simplest way is probably by going via our Amazon shop. A pack of 3 papers are normally £10.50 (£3.50 a paper), but you will need maths, English and verbal packs for SWGS (£31.50) and the same but non-verbal as well for BWS (£42). This will give you three set of complete practice papers.
If you want to go crazy, you can get a mega bundle of all of their papers for about £112.12 (less than £10 a pack but including packs of non-verbal - not much of a saving for the SWGS exam, unless you can sell the 3 non-verbal packs to a friend for £15).
We are happy to buy unused practice papers from you. We will buy unused packs for £6 a pack or £2 per practice paper (with answer sheet and answers).
To help those that don't want to buy massive packs of papers, we are happy to sell individual papers for £4 e.g.
We can standardise scores on practice papers for you for free. Just submit your answers on the appropriate form and you will be e-mailed your percentage score and a standardised score. I'm afraid you can't just e-mail your score to us. (We do this for free as we can anonymously use your answers to provide insightful reports for an additional fee ...)
If you don't have time to submit the answer for each question, then send us some photos of the answer sheets and £5 and we have a team of mice on standby ready to submit them for you.
You can order a standard report showing how your child has done in each section and how all children have done in each section e.g. we think a score of 3 is the pass mark for Find Words Opposite in Meaning. You scored 1. Standard reports cost £10.
A detailed report shows details for every question e.g. 99% of people get Q2 correct. You got it wrong. Q2 was find the odd one out. Detailed reports cost £10. However, once you've paid for three detailed reports (either in mock exams or practice papers at home), we'll do any further detailed reports for no extra cost (provided you've ordered the standard report for the exam, of course).
You don't need to order reports in advance. You can wait and see how they've got on. You order these reports using the mock exam order form and select the 'No date' option at the bottom of the list of dates.
We generally try to encourage people not to buy Practice Papers 4, 5 and 6 as these are the papers we offer to buy for mock exam students who have already completed our five papers. The advantages of doing an official practice paper in a mock exam are:
Not living in Salisbury?
We use information from previous takers of the Salisbury 11+ to correlate scores in the practice papers with GL Assessment standard scores, which should still give comparable results wherever you live in the UK.
We keep our mock exams reasonably secret to make sure that children are seeing them for the first time. Although the same questions won't appear in the actual exam, we understand why parents want to go through the paper and work through any mistakes with their children. For this reason, we do provide a small sample of the easiest questions your child got wrong. We don't hand out the entire paper.
To compliment mock exams, we also highly recommend practice papers. As your child is completing these at home you can work through any mistakes to your heart's content. You can also observe them to see where they are going wrong. Perhaps they are not using their time wisely. Maybe they can't bring themselves to guess really hard questions. Perhaps they are doing too much in their heads. Maybe they are guessing blind rather than reading the question, ruling out silly answers and then guessing.
As we've also mentioned many times before, passing the 11+ is about your position rather than your percentage. The pass mark is set to pass (very approximately) half of the candidates. If your child gets 72% is this good enough? To help you understand and hopefully start to relax a little, we are offering to collate everybody's scores and let you know in what position you finished.
So in order to help you in this way, we've constructed a list of practice papers, that we are happy to standardise for you. At some point, we also hope to provide invigilator videos that will talk your child through the exams.
Although the quiet observation of your child's exam technique is probably the biggest advantage of a practice paper at home, you may like to make the experience more palatable for them, by getting a group of friends to sit an exam together and then celebrate with lunch afterwards.
We are also happy for you to use any of the recommended practice papers in one of our mock exams. We will purchase the papers for you, run the exam in the same way and provide the same reports, so there is no reduction in price (more details below).
GL Assessment have official practice papers and a couple of free ones. For BWS, we are using a subset of the same papers plus a non-verbal paper. Here is our list of recommended practice papers
Recommended papers for SWGS 11+
GL Assessment have asked tutors not to link to their free materials so I'm afraid you will just have to Google "GL Assessment familiarisation" and find them yourself. For the SWGS exam you need maths, English and Verbal.
- FP1 - GL Familiarisation Papers 1
- FP2 - GL Familiarisation Papers 2
- PP1 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 1: Maths, English and Verbal
- PP2 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 2: Maths, English and Verbal
- PP3- GL Assessment Practice Papers 3: Maths, English and Verbal
- PP4 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 4: Maths, English and Verbal
- PP5 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 5: Maths, English and Verbal
- PP6- GL Assessment Practice Papers 6: Maths, English and Verbal
- PP7 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 7: Maths, English and Verbal
- PP8 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 8: Maths, English and Verbal
- PP9 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 9: Maths, English and Verbal
Recommended papers for BWS 11+
Same as SWGS but a subset of the questions, arranged into two papers as detailed below. Paper 1 has two ten-minute non-verbal sections followed by a 25 minute maths section. Paper 2 has 25 minutes of English and 20 minutes of verbal reasoning. You can catch your breath between sections. During a section, you can't go back to completed sections or make a head-start on the next section.
GL Assessment have asked tutors not to link to their free materials so I'm afraid you will just have to Google "GL Assessment familiarisation" and find them yourself. For the BWS exam you will need non-verbal, maths, English and Verbal for FP1 and FP2. You will need "Verbal Skills" and "Non Verbal Reasoning and Maths" for FP3. If you are only doing one paper, do FP3 as it is arranged in the same way as the BWS 11+.
- FP1 - GL Assessment Familiarisation Paper 1: Download Maths, English, Verbal and Non-Verbal
Paper 1. Non-verbal: just Sections 1 and 2 not 3 and 4 (2 × 20Q, 2 × 10 mins), Maths: Q1-26 (25 mins).
Paper 2. English: Q1-Q21, Q29-Q46 (25 mins), Verbal: Q1-37 (20 mins). - FP2 - GL Assessment Familiarisation Paper 2: Download Maths, English, Verbal and Non-Verbal
Paper 1. Non-verbal: just Sections 1 and 2 not 3 and 4 (2 × 20Q, 2 × 10 mins), Maths: Q1-27 (25 mins).
Paper 2. English: Q1-36 (25 mins), Verbal: Q1-37 (20 mins). - FP3 - GL Assessment Familiarisation. Download Verbal Skills and Non-verbal reasoning and maths.
Paper 1. Non-verbal Reasoning and Maths Paper. Section 1 (non-verbal) - 10 minutes, Section 2 (non-verbal) - 10 minutes, Section 3 (maths) - 25 minutes.
Paper 2. Verbal Skills. Sections 1, 2 and 3 (English) - 25 minutes. Verbal Q27-58 - 20 minutes. - PP1 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 1: Maths, English, Verbal and Non-Verbal
Paper 1. Non-verbal: all questions (2 × 20Q, 2 × 10 mins), Maths: Q1-27 (25 mins).
Paper 2. English: Q1-32 (25 mins), Verbal: Q1-37 (20 mins). - PP2 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 2: Maths, English, Verbal and Non-Verbal
Paper 1. Non-verbal: all questions (2 × 20Q, 2 × 10 mins), Maths: Q1-27 (25 mins).
Paper 2. English: Q1-36 (25 mins), Verbal: Q1-37 (20 mins). - PP3 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 3: Maths, English, Verbal and Non-Verbal
Paper 1. Non-verbal: all questions (2 × 20Q, 2 × 10 mins), Maths: Q1-28 (25 mins).
Paper 2. English: Q1-20, Q33-44 (25 mins), Verbal: Q1-37 (20 mins). - PP4 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 4: Maths, English, Verbal and Non-Verbal
Paper 1. Non-verbal: all questions (2 × 20Q, 2 × 10 mins), Maths: Q1-25 (25 mins).
Paper 2. English: Q1-32 (25 mins), Verbal: Q38-80 (20 mins). - PP5 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 5: Maths, English, Verbal and Non-Verbal
Paper 1. Non-verbal: all questions (2 × 20Q, 2 × 10 mins), Maths: Q1-27 (25 mins).
Paper 2. English: Q1-36 (25 mins), Verbal: Q38-80 (20 mins). - PP6 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 6: Maths, English, Verbal and Non-Verbal
Paper 1. Non-verbal: all questions (2 × 20Q, 2 × 10 mins), Maths: Q1-27 (25 mins).
Paper 2. English: Q1-20, Q45-56 (25 mins), Verbal: Q38-80 (20 mins). - PP7 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 7: Maths, English, Verbal and Non-Verbal
Paper 1. Non-verbal: all questions (2 × 20Q, 2 × 10 mins), Maths: Q1-29 (25 mins).
Paper 2. English: Q1-20, Q33-44 (25 mins), Verbal: Q1-37 (20 mins). - PP8 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 8: Maths, English, Verbal and Non-Verbal
Paper 1. Non-verbal: all questions (2 × 20Q, 2 × 10 mins), Maths: Q1-27 (25 mins).
Paper 2. English: Q21-56 (25 mins), Verbal: Q1-37 (20 mins). - PP9 - GL Assessment Practice Papers 9: Maths, English, Verbal and Non-Verbal
Paper 1. Non-verbal: all questions (2 × 20Q, 2 × 10 mins), Maths: Q1-29 (25 mins).
Paper 2. English: Q1-32 (25 mins), Verbal: Q1-43 (20 mins).
The cost
It is normally best (cheapest) to buy the practice papers yourself. The simplest way is probably by going via our Amazon shop. A pack of 3 papers are normally £10.50 (£3.50 a paper), but you will need maths, English and verbal packs for SWGS (£31.50) and the same but non-verbal as well for BWS (£42). This will give you three set of complete practice papers.
If you want to go crazy, you can get a mega bundle of all of their papers for about £112.12 (less than £10 a pack but including packs of non-verbal - not much of a saving for the SWGS exam, unless you can sell the 3 non-verbal packs to a friend for £15).
We are happy to buy unused practice papers from you. We will buy unused packs for £6 a pack or £2 per practice paper (with answer sheet and answers).
To help those that don't want to buy massive packs of papers, we are happy to sell individual papers for £4 e.g.
- Maths Paper 1: £4,
- non-verbal Paper 2: £4
- a bundle of maths, English and verbal for £11.50.
We can standardise scores on practice papers for you for free. Just submit your answers on the appropriate form and you will be e-mailed your percentage score and a standardised score. I'm afraid you can't just e-mail your score to us. (We do this for free as we can anonymously use your answers to provide insightful reports for an additional fee ...)
If you don't have time to submit the answer for each question, then send us some photos of the answer sheets and £5 and we have a team of mice on standby ready to submit them for you.
You can order a standard report showing how your child has done in each section and how all children have done in each section e.g. we think a score of 3 is the pass mark for Find Words Opposite in Meaning. You scored 1. Standard reports cost £10.
A detailed report shows details for every question e.g. 99% of people get Q2 correct. You got it wrong. Q2 was find the odd one out. Detailed reports cost £10. However, once you've paid for three detailed reports (either in mock exams or practice papers at home), we'll do any further detailed reports for no extra cost (provided you've ordered the standard report for the exam, of course).
You don't need to order reports in advance. You can wait and see how they've got on. You order these reports using the mock exam order form and select the 'No date' option at the bottom of the list of dates.
We generally try to encourage people not to buy Practice Papers 4, 5 and 6 as these are the papers we offer to buy for mock exam students who have already completed our five papers. The advantages of doing an official practice paper in a mock exam are:
- You get to take the papers and answer sheets home to work through to your hearts desire. (We photograph the answer sheets to make the reports.)
- You are effectively only charged £10 for us buying the papers for you. (You can also provide your own papers and get £10 off)
- You get the usual exam environment (for £30 of the £50) - that can be paid for with childcare vouchers
- You get the same quality of standard reports (£10 of the £50) and detailed reports (£10 extra) that you get with our own papers.
Not living in Salisbury?
We use information from previous takers of the Salisbury 11+ to correlate scores in the practice papers with GL Assessment standard scores, which should still give comparable results wherever you live in the UK.
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