Ask most Year 5 parents what their child finds hardest about 11 plus maths and you'll hear the same answer. Not the times tables. Not the long division. It's the wordy questions. The ones with two trains, three baskets of fruit, and a 20 percent discount that compounds across two shops. Their child can do the maths. They just can't see the maths through the words.
That's a problem solving issue, not a maths issue. And it's the single biggest reason capable kids underperform on 11 plus papers. Once you understand that, the way you prep changes.
Why problem solving is the real test
Schools running selective entry don't actually want to know if your child can multiply 47 by 8. They want to know if your child can read a paragraph, work out which operation to use, do the calculation, and then check the answer makes sense in the real-world context. That's a four-step skill. Arithmetic is one of those steps. The other three are where most kids lose marks.
GL Assessment papers have leaned into this for years. CEM-style papers, where they still exist in some regions, push it further. Even the regional consortiums in Berkshire and Buckinghamshire are weighting their maths papers towards multi-step problems, not pure calculation. If you're prepping with a book that's mostly arithmetic drills, you're prepping for a paper that doesn't really exist anymore.
So what do you do instead?
Strategy one: read the question twice, no exceptions
This sounds patronising. It isn't. Watch a child sit a timed maths paper and you'll see them skim the question once, jump to the numbers, and start scribbling. Half the time they're solving the wrong problem.
Train your child to read every word problem twice before they pick up a pencil. The first read is to get the gist. The second is to underline the actual question being asked. Is it asking for the total? The difference? The amount left? The percentage? Most word problems contain numbers that aren't part of the answer. A child who skims will multiply everything they see and end up with nonsense.
I make my own son say the question back to me in his own words after the second read. If he can't, he hasn't understood it yet. That five-second check saves him five minutes of going down a wrong path.
Strategy two: draw it out
Visual representation is the most underused skill in 11 plus maths. If a question describes a garden split into three sections, draw the garden. If it describes a jug being poured into smaller cups, sketch the jug and cups. If it's about a journey with stops, draw a number line with the stops marked.
You'd be amazed how often a question that looks impossible becomes obvious the moment you sketch it. The bar model approach taught in primary schools is excellent for this. Two bars side by side showing how two quantities relate. A single bar broken into fractions. Children who learn to translate words into pictures consistently outperform children who try to hold the whole problem in their head.
You don't need fancy techniques. A scrap of paper and a pencil. The point is forcing the brain to externalise the problem so it can see the structure.
Strategy three: work backwards from the answer
Some of the trickiest 11 plus problems are easier when you start at the end. A question might say "after spending a third of her money, then half of what was left, Sarah had £6 remaining. How much did she start with?" Trying to work that forwards with x and y is brutal for a 10 year old. Working backwards is fast.
If she had £6 after spending half of what was left, she had £12 before that step. If £12 was two-thirds of her starting amount, she started with £18. Done in two steps. No algebra required.
This is a habit, not a trick. Drill it. When your child sees a problem that gives the end state and asks for the start state, the first move is to flip the problem on its head.
Strategy four: estimate before you calculate
Children rarely do this and they should. Before any calculation, get them to estimate the answer roughly. If a question asks how many minutes are in 7 hours and 23 minutes, the rough answer is "around 450." If they end up with 12 or 4,000 they know they've gone wrong somewhere.
Estimation does two things. It catches calculation errors fast. And it helps with multiple choice papers where the wrong answers are designed to look plausible. A child who knows the answer should be roughly 450 won't pick 45 just because it has a four and a five in it.
Get them in the habit of writing the rough estimate at the top of the working space. Two seconds of effort. Catches a stunning amount of mistakes.
Strategy five: know when to skip
In a 50-question maths paper, there are usually three or four genuine stinkers. Questions designed to take the strongest candidates four or five minutes. Spotting them early matters. A child who spends six minutes wrestling with question 14 and then runs out of time on the easier questions 40 to 50 has lost more marks than the question was worth.
Teach your child the 90-second rule. If a question hasn't shown them a route in 90 seconds, circle it, move on, come back at the end. Most kids resist this because they want to feel they've "solved" everything as they go. That's the wrong instinct in a timed paper. Get them to think of the paper as a marks-per-minute optimisation, not a series of personal challenges.
Common traps in 11 plus problem solving
A few traps come up again and again. Word problems that include extra information that isn't needed for the answer. Multi-step problems where the answer to the first step has to feed into the second. Questions where the units change halfway through, like minutes to hours, or pence to pounds. Questions phrased in the negative, like "which of these is not a multiple of 7."
A child who's seen these traps before in practice papers spots them quickly. A child who hasn't will lose marks they shouldn't be losing. The fix is exposure. Lots of varied practice papers, not the same publisher's set repeated.
How to practise problem solving at home
Daily mental maths is fine, but it doesn't build problem solving on its own. What works better is one or two word problems a day, talked through out loud. Get your child to explain what the question is asking. Get them to tell you their plan before they calculate. Get them to check the answer makes sense at the end.
This takes longer than just letting them do a sheet of arithmetic. It's also the actual skill the exam tests. So the time is well spent, even if it feels slower.
If you're in Reading or anywhere across Berkshire prepping for the consortium grammars, the maths paper is heavy on multi-step problems. The Slough and Eton paper especially rewards children who can plan their working before they calculate. Practise that out loud, weekly, and you'll see the difference within a month.
Want to know how strong your child's maths problem solving actually is right now? ReadyFor11 includes a maths section in its free benchmark, weighted towards the kind of multi-step problems that show up on real 11 plus papers. You'll get a band score so you know whether problem solving is your child's weak spot or whether they're already on track.
FAQs
My child is great at arithmetic but freezes on word problems. What do I do?
Stop drilling arithmetic and start drilling problem solving. Give them word problems where the calculation is easy but the structure is tricky. The skill they're missing isn't maths, it's translating words into operations. Practise that explicitly.
How many word problems should we do a week?
Quality beats quantity. Two or three properly worked through, with your child explaining their thinking out loud, is more useful than 20 done silently. Once they're confident, scale up to a mixed set under timed conditions.
Should I teach my Year 4 child algebra to help with problem solving?
No. Algebra at Year 4 just confuses things. Stick with bar models, drawing pictures, and working backwards. By Year 5 you can introduce simple letter-as-unknown thinking if they're ready, but most 11 plus problems don't need formal algebra to solve.
My child rushes and gets things wrong. How do I slow them down?
Make them write the estimate before the calculation, and the question being asked before the working. Both of those force a pause. If they still rush, run a few papers where you mark only the questions they got right at first attempt, no second-chance corrections. That tends to focus the mind.
Want a quick read on where your child stands with 11 plus maths right now? ReadyFor11 is a free benchmark test that scores your child across all four skill areas, including problem solving, in around 30 minutes. Take it at readyfor11.co.uk.