Most 11 plus revision timetables you'll find online are fantasy. Six 45-minute sessions a week, two timed papers at the weekend, vocabulary drills before bed. They look great on a Pinterest board. They survive about four days in a real family.
I built this one for my own son in Year 5, then tweaked it after talking to dozens of parents who'd tried something more ambitious and burned out by half term. It's not aspirational. It's what actually works when both parents are at work, the child has a football match on Saturday, and the school's set a project on the Victorians that has to be in by Friday.
Why most Year 5 timetables fail
The timetables fail because they're built around the parent's anxiety rather than the child's attention span. A Year 5 child can give you concentrated work for somewhere between 25 and 45 minutes before quality drops off a cliff. After that, you're not revising. You're filling time and starting an argument.
The other reason they fail is that they assume every evening will go to plan. They won't. Someone will be tired. Someone will have a music exam. The boiler will break. If your timetable can't survive one missed session, you'll abandon it the first week.
So the rule I work to is this. Aim for five short sessions on weekdays, one longer block at the weekend, and one full day off. Build it so that missing one session a week is normal, not a crisis.
What Year 5 children can actually sustain
Before I show you the week, here's the realistic time budget I'm working from. Year 5 children can usually do 25 minutes of focused practice on a school evening without it becoming a battle. By Easter of Year 5, you can push that to 35. Trying to do an hour on a Wednesday evening after a full school day and football training is how you teach your child to hate the 11+ before they've even sat it.
At the weekend, attention spans stretch. A 50-minute timed paper on a Saturday morning, while they're fresh, is fine. The same paper at 5pm on a Sunday after a swimming gala is not. Time of day matters as much as length.
The sample week, hour by hour
Here's a week that's worked for the families I've checked in with. Adjust it to your own rhythm, but keep the shape.
Monday after school is the warm-up. Twenty-five minutes of mental maths or short verbal reasoning questions. Nothing heavy. The goal is to get back into the habit after the weekend without breaking your child. Tuesday is a maths session, 30 minutes, working through one topic in depth: fractions one week, ratios the next, algebra the next. Wednesday is a rest day. Yes, a rest day on a school night. Children who do something every single evening get stale. They need a Wednesday where they can just be a ten-year-old.
Thursday is reading comprehension, 30 minutes. One passage and the questions that follow, done carefully. Friday is a short verbal reasoning or non-verbal reasoning session, 25 minutes, designed to feel like a puzzle rather than work. Friday night is also a good time to talk about anything that came up during the week: a topic they didn't understand, a question type that confused them.
Saturday morning is the main session of the week. One full-length timed paper, sat properly. Phone out of the room, table cleared, timer on the desk. Fifty minutes of focus, then a break, then marking it together. If your child is doing a sport on Saturday morning, move this to mid-morning Sunday. The principle is the same: one timed paper, done when the child is fresh, marked together with no telling-off.
Sunday is the rest day. No worksheets, no flash cards, no quiet "let's just have a look at this question". The whole point of a rest day is that nothing about the 11+ enters the conversation. If you can't do that, your child can't either.
How to handle the marking conversation
Marking the Saturday paper is where most parents go wrong. They sit down to mark and end up frustrated. The child gets defensive. By the end, both of you have ruined a Saturday.
Try this instead. Mark it together but spend more time on the questions they got right than the ones they got wrong. Why? Because a question they got right is a thinking pattern that's working. You want them to see what they did and do it again. The questions they got wrong are the ones they need to think about, but they don't need you piling on top of the embarrassment of getting it wrong. Ask what they think the answer should have been. Listen to their reasoning. Then explain.
Three or four questions discussed properly is more useful than every wrong answer dragged through one by one.
When to swap things around
The week above assumes a normal school week. If your child has a music lesson on Tuesday, move maths to Monday and warm-up to Tuesday. If Wednesday is parkrun training, swap the rest day. The shape matters more than the specific days. Five short weekday sessions, one longer weekend session, one full day off.
The thing to protect at all costs is the rest day. Parents who skip the rest day in week six are the same parents whose children are in tears in week nine.
What to drop when life gets in the way
Some weeks are going to fall apart. A child gets ill. You have to travel for work. There's a birthday party that eats Saturday. When that happens, drop sessions in this order.
Drop the Friday session first. It's the lightest, and missing it on a Friday won't hurt. Then drop Monday's warm-up. Keep Tuesday's maths and Thursday's comprehension if you can. Those are the two that build the most. The Saturday paper is the one to fight for. If you can keep one thing in a chaotic week, keep the Saturday timed paper.
If you've had a properly bad fortnight and missed almost everything, don't try to make it up. Just restart the normal week. Two weeks of missed practice in Year 5 won't sink your child. Three weeks of guilt-driven catch-up sessions might.
When to add a second timed paper
Round about January of Year 6, you can add a second timed paper on Sunday morning. Not before. The reason isn't capacity. It's that doing two papers a week during Year 5 just gets your child bored of papers. By the time the real exam comes, they're sick of the format. Save the second weekly paper for when it actually matters.
Until then, one paper a week is plenty. That's something like 30 papers between January of Year 5 and the September of Year 6. More than enough to teach your child what timing under pressure feels like.
How long does this need to go on?
Most families who do this well start in January of Year 5 and run it through to the test, which for most regions falls in September or October of Year 6. That's roughly 18 to 20 months of the pattern above. It looks like a long time on paper. In practice, it's around 100 hours of focused work across nearly two years. Compared to the amount of football, screen time and Lego your child will do in the same window, it's nothing.
If you're starting later, say Easter of Year 5, the same shape still works. You're just compressing the timeline. Don't be tempted to double the sessions to catch up. Five short ones a week is the limit either way.
FAQ
How many hours a week should a Year 5 child do for the 11 plus? Around two and a half to three hours a week of focused work is realistic. That's five short weekday sessions of around 25 to 30 minutes, plus one 50-minute timed paper at the weekend. More than that and quality starts dropping fast.
Should my Year 5 child do 11 plus revision in the school holidays? Yes, but less than you'd think. A half-hour session four days a week during a holiday is plenty. Holidays aren't catch-up time. They're recovery time. Use them to keep the habit ticking over, not to cram.
What's the best time of day for 11 plus practice? Straight after a snack and a wind-down following school works well for short weekday sessions. For weekend timed papers, mid-morning is best. Your child should be awake, fed and not tired from a swim or a football match.
Is it better to do little and often or longer weekend sessions only? Little and often, with one longer weekend slot. Children retain more from five 25-minute sessions across the week than from one two-hour Saturday session. The brain consolidates between short sessions. It just gets tired during long ones.
Want to know if your child's on track?
The hardest part of any revision timetable is knowing whether it's actually working. ReadyFor11 gives a free, honest readiness band based on a short timed paper your child can sit at home. No subscription, no email funnel, no upsell. Just a straight answer to the question every parent on this journey is really asking.
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