Essex 11+ · CSSE and GL · Year 4
Your child is eight or nine and the test is two years away, in the first weeks of Year 6. That is the comfortable amount of time, if it is spent on the things that move the score at this age and not on the things that only look like preparation.
Updated 19 September 2026 · The Year 5 plan · CSSE or GL? · Free Year 4 worksheets
The short answer
Everything the 11+ tests sits on four things a child either has or does not by the end of Year 5: they read easily and widely, their arithmetic is automatic, they know a lot of words, and they can write a page without fuss. Papers and question types are the top layer, and they go on in Year 5. Year 4 is for the four things underneath.
The CSSE test is sat on a Saturday in mid September of Year 6, and GL tests for most Essex-bordering areas fall in September or October of Year 6 too. Registration for the CSSE opens in May of Year 5 and closes in June. So the last useful term of preparation is the summer of Year 5, and a child starting Year 4 now has six terms, two of which are the ones that count.
Six terms is enough for anything except a child who cannot yet read fluently or who counts on fingers. Those two are the things to find out about now, because they are slow to fix and everything else waits on them.
In the September 2025 CSSE test the average child scored 35 out of 60 in English and 27 out of 60 in Maths, and an English mark moved the total by more than a Maths mark. Read that as: the English paper is where careless marks are expensive, and the Maths paper is hard enough that a child who is quick and accurate with the basics is already ahead of half the field. Neither of those is a technique. Both are built in Year 4.
How the score works is in the pass mark article; what the schools need is in the schools article.
What to do
Twenty minutes of reading a day, on the sofa, with a parent nearby, is the single most valuable thing a Year 4 child can do for the 11+ and it costs nothing. Both papers are reading papers: the CSSE comprehension is on an unseen passage of real prose, and half the GL English marks turn on understanding what a text says and suggests. Vocabulary, sentence sense, spelling and the stamina to hold a page in the head all come from reading, and none of them comes from anything else as well.
Talk about the book. "Why did she do that?" and "what do you think happens next?" are the inference questions of Year 6, asked two years early with no marks attached. A child who has had that conversation five hundred times does not need to be taught inference.
Times tables to 12, and the division facts that go with them, so that 7 × 8 and 56 ÷ 7 come back in under two seconds without working. Then adding and subtracting three-digit numbers in columns, and the number bonds that make it quick. The CSSE Maths paper is sixty marks in sixty minutes with no calculator; a child who is still counting up in Year 6 runs out of time on questions they could do.
Five minutes a day is enough, and a game beats a worksheet at this age. The free Year 4 worksheets cover the written methods, and the Year 4 quizzes on the same page mark themselves.
The GL verbal reasoning paper asks for synonyms, antonyms and the odd one out directly; the CSSE asks what a word means in the passage; both English papers turn on the child knowing the word in front of them. Words are collected, not learned: a child who reads meets them, and a child who is asked "what does that mean?" and then hears it used twice more that week keeps them.
A notebook of new words with a sentence each, five a week, is the whole of the vocabulary programme in Year 4. Our vocabulary book is pitched at Year 5; in Year 4 the source should be the books they are reading.
The CSSE English paper ends with a writing task, and children lose most of its marks not on ideas but on full stops, capitals and spelling the words they use every day. A short piece a week, a paragraph or a page, with the child reading it back for a fixed list of faults before anyone else sees it, builds the checking habit that earns those marks. Handwriting matters too: the CSSE is handwritten and marked by a person, and a page that is hard to read is marked less kindly.
GL families can go lighter here, since the GL English paper is multiple choice, but the habit still pays in the reading marks.
What not to do
A paper measures; it does not teach. At eight the measurement is mostly of reading speed and stamina, both of which change on their own over the next two years, so the score means little and the experience is unpleasant. Worse, a child who has done twenty papers by Year 5 has nothing left to learn from the format and has learned to dislike it. Papers start in Year 5, timed ones in the summer term of Year 5.
The CSSE and GL both publish free familiarisation papers. They are excellent, and there is one of each. Used in Year 4 they are used up: by the time the child needs to see the real format, the autumn of Year 5, there is nothing unseen left. Keep them for then.
A tutor earns their fee in Year 5, when technique, method and timing come in and a child needs someone who has seen a thousand papers. In Year 4 the same money buys a lot of books. The exception is a real gap the school has noticed, in reading or in number: that is worth fixing early, and it is teaching, not 11+ preparation. The free 20-minute call will tell you honestly which it is.
A Year 4 child does not need to know the word "percentile". The published cut-offs are for Year 6 children in September of Year 6, standardised against each other; they say nothing about a child two years younger. Parents who set a number in Year 4 tend to test towards it, which is the first mistake again. Set the habits now and the number in Year 5, from a marked paper.
CSSE or GL
The four foundations are the same for both. The one difference worth acting on in Year 4 is reasoning.
There is no reasoning paper. The CSSE is written Maths and written English, with a writing task, and it rewards exactly the four things above. Do not buy verbal or non-verbal reasoning books for a CSSE child; the time goes on reading, arithmetic and writing. If you are not sure which exam your child will sit, CSSE or GL settles it by school.
Verbal and non-verbal reasoning are half the marks and neither is taught at school. They are also the parts that respond fastest to being shown the method, which is why they can wait until Year 5. In Year 4 the only reasoning worth doing is the playful kind: word games, codes, puzzles, spot-the-pattern, ten minutes at the weekend. The GL guides teach the twenty-three verbal and twelve non-verbal types properly, from the start of Year 5.
The plan
Twenty minutes a day, five days a week. The point is habits that hold for two years, so nothing here should feel like work to the child.
How you will know it is working. By the end of Year 4 the child reads for pleasure without being asked, answers a tables question before you have finished asking it, uses a word at dinner that they got from a book, and writes a page with full stops in it. That child will find Year 5 straightforward. The scores follow.
Questions
Too early for papers, not too early for the things papers measure. Two years spent on reading, arithmetic, vocabulary and a writing habit is the comfortable amount; two years of timed tests produces a tired child who has seen the format and learned nothing from it.
It is most of it. A child who is doing well in Year 4 at a good primary school is doing 11+ preparation five days a week already; the home part is the reading, the tables and the words, which schools do not have time to drill. Ask the teacher two questions at parents' evening: is the reading age ahead of the actual age, and are the number facts secure. Those are the two things the test will find.
Speed on the 11+ is mostly automaticity: a child who has to work out 7 × 8 is slow at every question that contains it. Fix the facts in Year 4 and much of the slowness goes. The rest is practised in Year 5, with the clock introduced gently and late. Do not introduce it in Year 4.
For tables and number facts, a good one is fine and often better than a parent with flashcards. For reading, no: the point of reading is the book. For anything that gives a Year 4 child a percentile, see "chasing a score" above.
The start of Year 5. It is a forty-minute paper for a Year 4 child, sat on screen and marked the moment it finishes, that shows where the gaps are before the year's work is planned, and it is more use once the Year 4 foundations are in. If you want one at the end of Year 4 to plan the summer, that is reasonable; it is the twenty papers in between that are not.
Book a free 20-minute call. I will ask about the reading and the number facts, tell you honestly whether there is a gap worth fixing now, and you decide what to do next.
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