Most grammar schools test in early to mid September. Which means the six weeks of summer holiday are the last proper stretch of prep your child gets before the real thing. No school, no homework, just time. And that's exactly why so many parents get it wrong.
I've watched families turn July and August into a boot camp. Two hours of papers a day, every day, the child resentful by the second week and exhausted by the exam. I've also watched parents do nothing at all, then panic in late August. Neither works. So what does?
How much should they actually do?
Here's the honest answer. Less than you think, but more consistently than you'd like.
Six weeks is long enough that you don't need to cram. Picture two children. One does forty-five minutes of focused work, five days a week. The other does a frantic three-hour session every Sunday. The first child will be in a far better place by September. The brain holds onto little and often. It dumps the contents of a marathon.
So the shape of a good summer is short daily sessions with proper breaks. Take a few full days off completely, especially around any holiday or trip. Your child has been working since September. They're allowed to be a kid in July.
If your child is sitting a super-selective in Kent, or one of the Sutton schools in Surrey, the bar is higher and the competition fiercer. The daily session might stretch a bit. But the principle holds. Tired children don't learn. They just sit there resenting you.
Start with a proper diagnostic
Before you plan anything, find out where your child actually stands. Not where you hope they are. Where they are.
Sit them down at the start of the holidays and do one timed paper across each subject they'll be tested on. Maths, English, verbal reasoning, and non-verbal reasoning if your area uses it. Mark it honestly. The point isn't the score. The point is the pattern. Are they losing marks on a particular question type? Running out of time? Making careless slips when they rush?
That single afternoon tells you what the summer should focus on. Without it, you're guessing, and most parents guess wrong. We tend to drill the things our child is already good at because it feels productive and the marks look nice. The gains hide in the stuff they're avoiding.
Build the plan around weak spots, not everything
Once you know the gaps, the summer plan writes itself. If non-verbal reasoning is the weak link, that's where the early weeks go. If your child reads beautifully but falls apart on comprehension under time pressure, that's the target.
Resist the urge to cover all four subjects every single day. It's better to spend a week getting genuinely better at fractions than to skim across six topics and improve at none of them. Rotate the focus. Maybe maths and verbal reasoning in the first half of the week, English and non-verbal in the second.
Keep the things they're already strong at ticking over with one paper a week, just so the skill doesn't go rusty. The heavy lifting goes on the weak spots.
Don't forget reading. Actual reading.
This is the bit parents skip, and it's the bit that pays off most over a long summer. Six weeks of regular reading does more for comprehension and vocabulary than any workbook.
Your child doesn't need to read classics. They need to read widely and often. A chunky novel they actually enjoy, a couple of newspaper articles a week, maybe something non-fiction about a topic they love. The vocabulary they soak up in July is the vocabulary that helps them decode a tricky comprehension passage in September.
Twenty minutes of reading a day, on top of the practice work, is the quiet engine of a good summer. It never feels like 11+ prep. It just works like it.
Timed practice in the back half
The first few weeks are for learning and fixing gaps. The last two or three weeks shift gear. This is when timed, full-length papers earn their place.
By August, your child should be sitting complete papers under exam conditions. Phone away, timer on, no interruptions, no popping out for a snack halfway through. The skill you're building here isn't knowledge. It's stamina and timing. Plenty of able children fail the 11+ not because they couldn't do the questions but because they ran out of time on the ones they could.
Do a couple of these a week in the run-up. Mark them together, talk through what went wrong, and let the rest of the day be free. You want them walking into that September exam hall having done the thing a dozen times before, so it feels familiar rather than terrifying.
Keep them human
Can I be straight with you? The single biggest risk over summer isn't under-preparation. It's burnout.
A child who arrives at the exam tired, anxious and sick of the sight of practice papers will underperform whatever their ability. Protect the holiday. Let them have proper days out, time with friends, the trampoline park, the beach, the whole point of being ten or eleven in the summer.
Watch for the warning signs. Tears over a paper they'd normally find easy. Stomach aches on practice mornings. A flat refusal to start. Those aren't laziness. They're a child telling you they've had enough for now. Back off, take a couple of days, and come back lighter. The work will still be there.
The families who get this right treat the summer as a marathon with rest stops, not a sprint with a whip. Forty-five minutes, five days a week, real reading, a diagnostic at the start, timed papers at the end, and a genuinely free summer wrapped around it. That's the whole plan.
Frequently asked questions
Should I get a tutor just for the summer?
You can, but you don't have to. A tutor is most useful if you've found a specific gap you can't explain yourself, like non-verbal reasoning. They also help if your child works better for someone who isn't their parent. For most families, a clear plan and good practice materials do the job. Spend the money on a tutor only if you know what you're buying.
My child is summer-born and behind. Is it worth bothering?
Yes. The 11+ uses age weighting, so younger children get a small upward adjustment to their standardised score. A focused summer can close more of the gap than you'd expect at this age. Don't write them off in July.
How many practice papers should we get through?
There's no magic number, and quantity isn't the goal. A child who does fifteen papers and reviews every mistake will beat one who races through forty and never looks back. Mark each paper, understand the errors, and move on. Reviewing is where the learning happens.
What if we've done almost nothing so far?
Then this summer matters more, but don't panic into a boot camp. Start with the diagnostic, pick the two biggest weak spots, and work steadily. Six consistent weeks can shift a child a long way. A frantic fortnight in late August can't.
Where to go from here
If you want to know exactly where your child stands before you plan the summer, that's the whole reason I built ReadyFor11. It's a free, honest benchmark across the subjects your child will be tested on, so you can see the real gaps instead of guessing. Run it at the start of the holidays, use the results to shape your six weeks, and run it again before September to check what's changed.
Have a look at readyfor11.co.uk and start your summer with a clear picture rather than a worried one.