Buckinghamshire 11+ English

English in the 11+ is comprehension, vocabulary and technical accuracy. Wide reading helps enormously and there is no substitute for it — but reading alone is not enough, because a great many marks turn on knowing precisely what a question is asking for. What happened and how do you know are different questions, and they want different answers.

On the GL Assessment Transfer Test used in Buckinghamshire, English questions appear alongside maths, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning rather than in a paper of their own, and the mix of question types changes from year to year. So we teach the whole set, and we teach the asking as carefully as the answering.

The type that costs pupils most

Inference — the question that asks how your child knows something.

Children are often right and still lose the mark, because they can feel the answer in the passage but cannot point at the words that gave it to them.

The quick marks, and the ones that reward routine

Retrieval questions, by contrast, are quick marks once a child learns to go back to the text rather than trust memory.

And the technical types — spelling patterns, punctuation, word classes — reward short, regular practice more than any amount of reading.

Every one of these types has a lesson page of its own. They are all listed on the English page.