How Often Should My Child Sit 11+ Mock Exams?

The Question Every Parent Asks

At some point in the preparation journey, almost every parent types some version of the same question into a search engine: how many mock exams should my child do before the 11+? The answers they find range from "one a week from Year 5" to "three a week in the final month." Neither extreme is right, and both can cause real harm.

Too few mocks and your child arrives at the exam having never experienced full-paper time pressure, never sat in silence for 25 minutes with a pencil, never felt the particular stress of a clock ticking. The exam format itself becomes an obstacle on exam day rather than a familiar experience.

Too many mocks and something more insidious happens. Your child becomes numb to them. They stop taking them seriously. Their performance flattens or even declines because every mock feels identical and meaningless. Worse, the relentless cycle of sitting and marking, sitting and marking, with no recovery time or genuine learning, leads to fatigue — and, in the worst cases, complete resistance to study.

The right answer sits in the middle, and it changes month by month as the exam approaches.

No Full-Paper Mocks Before Year 6

If your child is in Year 5, resist the urge to introduce full-paper timed mocks. Year 5 is the time to build the underlying skills — vocabulary, story structure, grammar, reading comprehension technique — not to test them under exam pressure before they are ready.

A Year 5 child who sits a full mock and scores poorly doesn't learn that they need to work harder. They learn that they are "bad at the 11+." That belief is far harder to shift than a gap in punctuation knowledge.

What Year 5 can include is short, low-pressure timed practice: a single comprehension passage with questions under a 15-minute timer, or a brief creative writing prompt with 20 minutes on the clock. These build familiarity with timed conditions without the full pressure of a mock exam format.

The Year 6 Mock Schedule

For most families, the 11+ exam falls between September and November of Year 6. The mock schedule below is built around that window. If your child's exam is at a different time of year — some independent school exams run in January or February — shift the schedule forward by the same number of months.

September (Exam Month for Many)

If your child's exam is in September, one mock in the final week of August (or first week of September) is enough. This is a confidence mock, not a diagnostic one — the time for major changes is past. Its purpose is to remind your child's body and mind what exam conditions feel like.

If your child's exam is in October or November, September is when full-paper mocks should begin. One mock in September is the right starting point. Follow it with a full review session (see our post-mock review guide), then a fortnight of targeted revision before the next one.

October

Two mocks in October — one in the first fortnight and one in the second — gives your child exposure to full-paper conditions while leaving enough time between them for genuine revision. Space them at least two weeks apart. A mock every weekend is too many; you need the weeks between to actually act on what the mock revealed.

November

Two mocks in November, again spaced across the month, brings the total to five or six full-paper mocks across the preparation period. This is enough for your child to feel genuinely familiar with exam conditions without becoming desensitised to them.

In the final two weeks before the exam, stop full-paper mocks entirely. Light, low-pressure timed practice is fine — a single section, a short creative writing piece — but the goal now is confidence maintenance, not new discovery. You don't want to sit a mock that reveals a gap three days before exam day when there is no time to address it.

Full-Paper Mocks vs Section Practice

A full-paper mock and a timed section practice serve different purposes, and parents often conflate them. Understanding the difference helps you plan more effectively.

A full-paper mock replicates the entire exam experience: same time limit, same format, no help, no interruptions, pencil and paper. It tells you how your child performs under realistic conditions. It is also tiring and should be treated as an event, not a routine exercise.

Section practice — sitting one comprehension passage, one writing task, or one reasoning section under timed conditions — is a training tool. It builds the specific skill that the section tests. It is less exhausting than a full mock and can happen more frequently.

A sensible plan uses section practice regularly (two or three times a week in focused preparation months) and full-paper mocks sparingly (five or six across the whole Year 6 preparation window). This ratio gives your child the benefits of timed pressure without the fatigue that comes from repeated full-exam simulations.

Warning Signs of Over-Testing

Some families, understandably anxious, run mocks far more frequently than is helpful. Here are the signs that your child is sitting too many:

• Flat or declining scores despite continued revision. Progress has stalled not because the learning has stopped but because the child has stopped engaging.
• Resistance before the mock. Complaining, stalling, or tears before sitting a practice paper suggests the association with mocks has become negative.
• Rushing through answers. A child who has sat twenty mocks sometimes starts racing to finish rather than working carefully — they've learned the pacing but lost the care.
• Loss of interest in other activities. When preparation has crowded out everything else, burnout is close. Keep at least one non-academic activity running throughout the preparation period.
• Discussing the exam constantly. When exam talk has spilled into every mealtime, car journey, and bedtime routine, the emotional weight has become too heavy.

A Sample Year 6 Mock Schedule

The schedule below assumes an exam in late October or early November. Adjust the dates to match your child's actual exam window.

Five full-paper mocks across two months is a solid, sustainable programme. The key is that each one is followed by a structured review and a targeted revision plan — not simply another mock the following weekend.