Essex 11+ · Planning
The test is sat three weeks into Year 6, so Year 5 is the preparation year. This is the order I use with my own students, with the reason for each stage. It assumes twenty to thirty minutes on most days rather than a long session at the weekend, because that is what works for ten year olds.
Updated 15 September 2026 · CSSE tuition · Free worksheets · The Year 4 article · Pass mark and scores
Autumn term
Nothing timed yet. The aim of the autumn is that the basic tools are reliable, so that everything in the spring is built on something solid.
Spring term
By Easter every topic on the paper has been met once. From here on it is practice, and the practice tells you where the gaps are.
Summer term
Start timed work in May. Not full papers yet: single sections against the clock, so that a mark a minute becomes familiar before it becomes frightening. Ten questions in ten minutes, then twenty in twenty.
Sit the first full paper in June. Under the real conditions: an hour, a quiet room, no help. The score does not matter. What matters is the list of things that went wrong, because that list is the plan for the summer.
Register. CSSE registration opens in May and closes in June. Missing it means missing the year. The dates page has the current deadlines.
The summer holiday
Six weeks is long enough to fix real gaps and short enough to keep a routine. Twenty minutes of maths and twenty minutes of English on five days a week, a full paper once a week, and the week before the test as light as possible. A tired child in the test hall has thrown away August.
This is also when a marked mock under exam conditions earns its place: not for the score, but because the written feedback tells you exactly what to do with the last three weeks, and because a child who has been in a hall with a clock before is calmer the second time.
Questions
Two to three, spread across most days, is plenty in Year 5. Twenty minutes a day beats two hours on Sunday, because ten year olds learn arithmetic by repetition rather than by effort.
No. Year 5 is the normal year to start and there is enough time to cover everything. Starting in Year 4 makes it calmer, not more likely.
Timed sections from May of Year 5, full papers from June, one a week through the summer. Before May, the arithmetic is not fast enough for timing to teach anything except panic.
Many children pass without one. A tutor earns their fee in three places: knowing what to prioritise, marking writing honestly, and noticing the arithmetic habits a parent has stopped seeing. My free 20-minute call is the honest way to find out whether you need that.
Not for the CSSE. It examines English and Maths only. If your child is also sitting a GL test elsewhere, that is a different paper; see CSSE or GL.
Book a free 20-minute call. I will ask about where they are, tell you honestly what I think, and you decide what to do next.
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