The 11+ English paper tests comprehension, vocabulary and technical accuracy, and it is usually tighter for time than children expect. Practice needs to build speed as well as accuracy.
Comprehension is the largest component, and the most common problem is not reading ability but answering technique. Children lose marks by answering from memory rather than returning to the passage, by giving one-word answers where the mark allocation signals more, and by explaining what a character did rather than what the question actually asked.
Vocabulary rewards long-term reading far more than last-minute lists, but the technical elements — spelling rules, homophones, punctuation and word classes — are genuinely learnable in a few weeks and are worth targeting directly.
These notes cover comprehension technique, figurative language, word classes, punctuation, spelling rules and homophones. Work through them alongside timed practice papers, since the skill being tested is applying this under time pressure.
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