The first time my son brought home a cloze question, he just stared at it. A sentence with a chunk hacked out of the middle, three letters missing, and somehow he was meant to fill the gap so that the sentence worked and the three letters spelled a real word on their own. He looked at me like I'd handed him a crossword written in another language.
If your child has had the same reaction, you're not dealing with a slow learner. Cloze is genuinely one of the more confusing things on the 11+, and a lot of parents have never seen anything like it themselves. So let's pull it apart properly and give your child a way of approaching it that actually works.
What a cloze test actually is
A cloze test gives your child a sentence or short passage with words or letters removed, and asks them to fill the gaps so everything reads correctly. It's measuring three things at once: vocabulary, spelling, and the ability to read context and work out what fits. That's a lot to ask of a ten-year-old in a few seconds per question, which is why these come up so often in parents' worried messages to me.
You'll see cloze most in verbal reasoning, and sometimes in the English paper too. It turns up in both GL and CEM-style exams, though CEM tends to lean on it harder and in more varied forms. If your child is sitting in Kent, Bucks or one of the Berkshire grammars, they'll meet a GL flavour. Reading School's newer papers and a few others have been moving towards cloze-heavy formats as well, so it's not something you can safely ignore.
The three types your child will meet
Cloze isn't one question type. It's three, and they feel quite different in the moment, so it helps your child to recognise which one they're looking at.
The first is the missing-letters type. A passage has letters knocked out of several words, usually shown as gaps or dashes, and your child completes each word so the passage makes sense. Something like "The dog b_rk_d loudly" where they need to see "barked." Reading the whole sentence first is the only way this works.
The second is the partial-word type, and this is the one that floored my son. A word in the sentence has three letters removed, and those three missing letters must themselves spell a complete word. So you're solving two problems at once. The sentence tells you roughly what word you need, and then the answer has to be a real three-letter word hiding inside it. It's fiddly, and it rewards children who slow down rather than guess.
The third is the word-bank type. Several words have been lifted out of a passage and listed separately, and your child slots each one back into the right gap. This feels easier because the answers are in front of them. The trap is that two options often look plausible in the same gap, so it tests whether your child can read carefully rather than just pattern-match.
A technique that actually works
Here's the order I taught my son, and it's the same one I'd give any parent.
Read the whole sentence first, every time, before touching the gap. Children want to dive at the missing bit straight away. That's the single biggest mistake. The answer almost always lives in the words around the gap, not the gap itself. If your child reads "She was so ___ after the long walk that she fell asleep on the sofa," the words "long walk" and "fell asleep" are doing the work. The answer is tired or exhausted, and you only see that by reading the lot.
For partial-word questions, get your child to say the sentence out loud in their head and decide what word should be there before worrying about the three letters. Once they know the word is "scared," for instance, the missing "car" almost falls out on its own. Working backwards from the gap is much harder than working forwards from the meaning.
For word banks, teach the rule of elimination. Place the words you're certain about first, cross them off the bank, and you'll find the tricky gaps get easier because there's less to choose from. Has your child ever filled in the obvious blanks on a form and found the rest sorted itself out? Same idea.
And in all three types, reread the finished sentence. A cloze answer that's grammatically wrong is wrong even if the vocabulary is right. "He runned quickly" fails, however confident your child felt. That final check catches more marks than almost anything else.
Why vocabulary sits underneath all of it
You can drill technique all you like, and technique does help, but cloze has a hard floor. If your child doesn't know the word, no amount of method will conjure it. That's the uncomfortable truth about these questions. They reward children who read widely and have done for years.
This is why I'm wary of parents who think they can fix cloze in a six-week sprint before the exam. You can sharpen the approach in that time. You can't build a vocabulary in it. A child who's been reading proper books since Year 3 walks into cloze with an enormous advantage, and it shows. If you've got time on your side, reading beats worksheets every single week.
That said, don't despair if you're closer to the exam. Targeted practice on the question types still moves the needle, and recognising the three formats so your child isn't thrown on the day is worth real marks. Familiarity removes the panic, and panic loses more cloze questions than ignorance does.
How to practise cloze at home without it becoming a battle
Short and regular beats long and miserable. Ten minutes of cloze a few times a week keeps it ticking over without turning your kitchen table into a war zone. Mix the three types so your child gets used to switching between them, because the real paper won't be neatly sorted.
Talk through the wrong answers, not just the right ones. When your child gets one wrong, ask them what made them choose it. Half the time they've spotted a word that fits the gap but ignored the grammar, and naming that out loud fixes it faster than any correction from you.
And read together, still. Even in Year 6. A child who meets new words in stories absorbs them in a way that no vocabulary list can match, and cloze is really just a test of how many words your child has quietly collected over the years.
Frequently asked questions
Are cloze tests in GL or CEM exams? Both, though they show up differently. CEM-style papers use cloze more heavily and in more varied forms, including filling in whole missing words. GL papers include cloze as one of their published verbal reasoning types. Check which board your target school uses, as it shapes how much cloze practice matters.
My child is good at maths but struggles with cloze. Is that normal? Completely normal. Cloze leans on vocabulary and reading, not logic, so a strong mathematician can find it the hardest part of the paper. The fix is reading volume over time, plus practice on the specific question types so the format stops being a surprise.
How many cloze questions are on the exam? It varies by region and board, and schools don't always publish the exact breakdown. In a GL verbal reasoning paper, cloze is one of several question types sharing the time. In CEM-style papers it can take up a larger share. Treat it as a meaningful chunk worth practising, not a side issue.
At what age should we start cloze practice? The technique can wait until Year 5. The vocabulary that underpins it can't. The best preparation for cloze is years of reading that started long before anyone mentioned the 11+, so if your child is younger, books matter far more than worksheets right now.
Cloze rewards the long game more than almost any other 11+ question type. If you want to see where your child actually stands on this kind of question, without paying for a tutor to tell you, you can get an honest free assessment at readyfor11.co.uk. It'll show you the gaps while there's still time to close them.
Sources: GL Assessment 11+ free materials, Atom Learning — Cloze tests in the 11 plus, 11 Plus Guru — Cloze Tests, Collins — What are Cloze tests?