Nature of the 11 Plus test in Kingston

Both Tiffin School and The Tiffin Girls’ School have GL Maths and English Tests (Stage 1) together with a school written paper covering Maths and English (Stage 2).

GL Maths.

These tests are straightforward and use a mix of calculation based shorter questions and longer worded questions or questions about graphs, data or angles. Children will be asked to work quickly and so for this reason there is a real focus on having absolutely rock solid core skills. Children who have forged too far ahead and who are working on topics beyond KS2 risk having done so at the expense of not having the core skills required. There’s absolutely no point in going beyond KS2 during the preparation phase. The difference between the good and the excellent in this test tends to be marked by an ability to work both quickly and accurately, a faultless grasp of tables and the four operations is essential. To find out more about the GL Maths test go to our page covering it in more detail.

GL English

English papers set by GL contain a number of different sections. These include comprehension, spelling, grammar and punctuation. The comprehension is not normally a difficult classic text but children may find unfamiliar vocabulary within it. The comprehension will be about 1000-1500 words long and children will then have answer 20-30 questions. These are classic comprehension questions that ask the children factual questions where the answer is in the text and inference questions where children will need to apply logic. The Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation elements do not go beyond KS2 and any child doing well at primary school and predicted a high level 5 should be able to cope well.

School written Maths and English papers.

The Maths paper will include a mix of calculation based questions and  worded maths problems together with some two or three step problems that require children to find missing information before they can work out the answer. In English the paper may include comprehension, vocabulary and questions on grammar, spelling and punctuation.

Kingston Grammar School has both GL Maths and English the same as above, along with Verbal Reasoning.

GL Verbal Reasoning

Uses the 21 known verbal reasoning question types but these can change at any time and the schools are under no requirement to notify parents. It is our belief that GL will at some stage introduce less publicised question types into their mix without warning. Parents whose children have prepared properly for this and who have a wide vocabulary and have tried different formats of test should not be overly concerned. In the meantime GL continues to use the 21 question types plus variants. If you would like to find out more about this test go our page on GL Verbal Reasoning. The GL Verbal Reasoning test will reward those pupils with an in-depth knowledge of the different questions but most work should be focussed on building a wide vocabulary as it is this aspect which normally separates the good from the excellent.

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