How to Use the 11+ Mastery Books at Home

1. Getting the book

Nothing arrives in the post and nothing downloads. The book opens in your web browser.

When you pay, a login for my.11pluscourse.co.uk is emailed to you within a few minutes. Sign in on a laptop, tablet or phone and the book is there, page by page, in a reader that works like a book on a screen. It cannot be downloaded, printed or forwarded, which is how we keep the books out of the hands of people who copy them and how we keep the price where it is.

Each book is licensed to one named child. If you are preparing for grammar school, access lasts until 31 December of the year your child sits the test; for independent schools, until the following 31 January. That covers the exam season with room to spare, and the date is shown before you pay.

One login, every book. If you buy more books later, they appear under the same login. A second child needs their own copy, so that each has their own full three passes through the material.

2. Setting up at home

Go and buy two empty notebooks and an exercise book. That is the whole kit.

The child does not write in the book. They work in an exercise book alongside the screen. This is how we teach in class too: it means the three passes through each book are three fresh attempts, not one attempt over old pencil marks.

Notebook one: the mistakes bookEvery question the child gets wrong is written out again here, with the correct working underneath. This book becomes the single most useful object in the house. It is what the child revises from, because it contains only the things they do not yet know.

Notebook two: the vocabulary diaryFour columns: the word, a baby word for it, synonyms, antonyms. The child picks the words and writes them by hand. For the English books this is where vocabulary is actually learned; the book is where it is met.

Then protect the conditions. Same place every time, materials already on the table, phone in another room. The point is to remove the nightly decision. Nobody negotiates brushing their teeth; the aim is for the session to become that ordinary.

3. The Mastery Cycle

Every 11+ question is a type, and every type has a method. The books are built around one loop, repeated.

Learn the methodEvery maths topic opens with a rules page; every VR and NVR course book opens each type with a technique guide and worked examples. The child reads it with you, then explains it back.

Practise, harder each timeQuestions climb from accessible to demanding inside every topic. Ordered progression beats random past papers because the child always knows which step just got harder.

Self-correctThe child marks their own work against the answer key, which shows the working. They find the broken step themselves. This is the independence engine: help that works to remove itself.

Master, then moveA topic is finished when it clears the standard on a cold return. Then the loop turns to the next type. Mastered types come back on rotation, so nothing fades.

A parent's role in this is installer and guardian, not substitute teacher. You set up the loop, hold the standard, and let the material and the self-marking do the teaching. You do not need to be good at maths. You need to be consistent.

4. What one session looks like

Thirty to forty-five minutes. Little and often beats long and rare.

Warm up (5 minutes). Two or three questions from the mistakes book, or a vocabulary page from the diary. This is spaced review and it is where retention is built.
Work (20 to 30 minutes). One topic, one type. The child reads the rules page or technique guide, then attempts the questions unaided. No hints mid-question. Struggle is the rep.
Self-mark (5 to 10 minutes). Against the key, with the working. Every wrong answer goes into the mistakes book with the correct method written out. Score goes on the progress chart in the back of the book.
Close (2 minutes). Say what was learned, put the kit away. Done.

All four subjects run every week, never one at a time. A typical week has one session each of maths, English, VR and NVR, with Sunday kept for review of the week's mistakes. The pace ceiling is firm: no more than two books finished in any month. Faster than that and the material has not been kept.

5. The 90% Standard

A topic is not mastered until the child scores 90% on it, and 90% is the floor, not the target.

Practice is not performance. Every child drops under exam pressure; nobody rises. So we train towards full marks, with 90% as the line below which a topic is not allowed to be called finished. A child trained to 100% who has a bad morning lands at 85, and 85 passes. A child trained to 70 who has the same bad morning does not.

The standard applies to the second attempt, after the child has gone through their mistakes, not to the first. The first attempt is information. The second attempt is the measure.

“Wrong answers are an opportunity for growth. Go through them and you end up cleverer than you were before the test.”

The standard is also a rule about when to stop. Eight out of ten is not the bar. Come back tomorrow, cold, and clear ten out of ten. Then move on. A child who reaches 90% late in their preparation can still pass; the value is in striving for the line, every week, not in hitting the number on a particular Tuesday.

6. Three passes through every book

Every book is designed to be worked three times. After three, scores plateau, so three is the number.

Pass one: learn. The child meets every topic and every question type, works through them in order, and the mistakes book fills up. Scores are often low. That is the point of pass one.
Pass two: find what did not stick. Weeks later, the child redoes the topics that scored under 90%, revising from the mistakes book first. Most topics clear on this pass.
Pass three: prove it is still there. A cold return, no revision beforehand, weeks after pass two. This is the pass that tells you whether the child owns the material or remembered the answers. It reliably pushes mastery above 95%.

This is why the child works in an exercise book and not in the book itself, and why a licence lasts the whole exam season.

7. Reading progress

Every book has a progress chart. Fill it in after every session. A few things to expect when you read it:

Early scores dip before they climb. The first pass through harder material always looks worse than the child is.
Slow starters do not finish badly. Over a decade we have never seen the first month predict the last.
The mistakes book getting thinner between passes is the clearest signal of all. If it is not getting thinner, the warm-up is being skipped.
Once a month, spend ten minutes with the chart and the mistakes book together. That is the whole review. Do not do it weekly; weekly reviews turn into weekly worry.

8. Bad days

Wobbles are normal. A bad evening is weather, not climate, unless your reaction turns it into climate.

Your calm is the child's weather. The most useful thing a parent can do on a bad night is to be the thermostat and not the thermometer. Do not teach through tears. Shrink the session or stop it; a ten-year relationship matters more than a ten-minute battle.

Protect the belief, not the session. The real risk on a bad day is not a missed topic, it is a child deciding they are not clever. When you hear “I can't do this”, the word that matters is yet. A missed session costs almost nothing. A child deciding they are stupid costs everything.

Ordinary tirednessSlower than usual, a few sighs, wants it over. Shorten the session, do the warm-up only, finish on a question they can do, and come back tomorrow. This is most bad days.

Real refusalRefusal alongside disrespect, repeated over days. That is a different conversation, had calmly, away from the table: at the start you agreed together to become the best version of yourself, and that means doing the hard thing here. Then put the work down for the night.

Rewards matter, and the currency children actually want is attention. Time with you, something they chose to watch, something they are allowed to be bad at. Not money, and not a lecture.

9. The run-up to the exam

Calibrate the last stretch against what came before. If the year has been intense, make the final two weeks light: an occasional test, the mistakes book, a full practice paper done once under the clock and once more after review. Only increase the tempo in the last month if you have been going lightly all year. The single most important thing in the final fortnight is not to make the child carry your nerves.

And if the result is not the one you wanted: the 11+ is not the be-all and end-all. Children who complete this work and miss a grammar place by a couple of marks enter their secondary schools among the strongest in the year, because the habit they built is the thing that was never about the exam.

10. What not to do

Do not count papers. The stack of finished papers is countable and soothing, and it measures nothing. What a child covers once evaporates. What they keep is what passes the exam.
Do not add a second tutor because you feel behind. It burns the child out, takes away the only free time they had, and builds dependency on the very help the method is removing.
Do not do the work for them. The night a parent writes the homework is the night the child learns that struggle is something to be rescued from.
Do not give hints mid-question. Let the question be hard. The answer key, afterwards, is the hint.
Do not review the chart weekly. Monthly, ten minutes, done.

Pick a book and start this weekend.

Every book page says which year and term it is written for. A Year 4 child starts at Book 1 of each series; a Year 5 child starts at the first Year 5 book.

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