Buckinghamshire 11+ Maths

The maths in the 11+ is curriculum maths wearing unfamiliar clothes. There is very little in it your child will not have met at school; the difficulty is recognising which piece of that maths a question is asking for when the question does not announce itself, and then carrying out several steps without dropping one along the way.

On the GL Assessment Transfer Test used in Buckinghamshire, maths questions appear alongside English, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning rather than in a paper of their own, and the mix of topics changes from year to year. That is why we teach across the whole set rather than drilling a favoured few: the skill being tested is as much recognition as calculation.

Where the marks actually go

Most lost marks are not lost to a topic a child cannot do. They are lost between the steps of a question a child can do — a correct calculation carried into the wrong place, a unit dropped, an answer given for the part rather than the whole.

Word problems are where this shows most, which is why we teach pupils to say what the question is asking for before they pick up a pencil.

The ideas that keep changing costume

The other place marks go is the family of ideas that keep changing costume. Fractions, decimals, percentages and ratio are the same relationship asked four ways, and a child who has met them as four unrelated topics finds the 11+ much harder than one who has seen the connection.

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