The Opportunity Class test, and how to prepare for it
What the test contains, what LearningKit teaches for each of its sections, and a way of using the app that fits how the test is actually built.
What the test is
The Opportunity Class test is sat in Year 4, for Year 5 entry. It has three sections, each with its own length:
- Reading: 40 minutes for 33 answers across 14 questions, three of which have more than one part.
- Thinking Skills: 30 questions in 30 minutes.
- Mathematical Reasoning: 35 questions in 40 minutes.
Thinking Skills gives four options a question, and Mathematical Reasoning gives five. No calculator is allowed, and no dictionary. The test is sat on a computer supplied by the department, and paper is provided for working out. There is no Writing section. Nothing is deducted for a wrong answer, so no question is worth leaving blank: the practice papers tell a child so in their own instructions. None of that is our description of the test. The counts, timings and option counts are the Department's, published on its Opportunity Class practice tests page, which is also where those practice papers are free to download, and what happens on the day is on its placement test page.
What we teach for each section
Word Forge builds the vocabulary a passage assumes. Clue Hunter works inference, evidence and the trap answers that look right but are not. The Reading Room matches a statement to the short extract it belongs to. These and five more make up Reading.
Spot the Mistake finds exactly where someone's reasoning broke. The Argument Workshop works out what strengthens a claim and what sinks it. The Shape Shifter covers turning shapes, folding nets and lines of symmetry. These and four more make up Thinking Skills.
Fraction Kitchen covers equivalence, simplifying and fractions of an amount. Mystery Shapes finds an unknown from two clues without ever writing a letter for it. Fence & Field works the walk around versus the ground covered. These and eleven more make up Mathematical Reasoning.
Each of those three pages sets out that section's counts, timings and rules as the Department publishes them, one real question quoted from the app, and every lesson that covers it.
How to use the app to prepare
Open a lesson's Learn deck before its Practise round. The deck teaches the idea with worked examples first, and the questions that follow are there to use that idea rather than to discover it cold, so reading the deck is not a detour on the way to the questions: it is what makes them make sense.
Practise a topic until its mastery bar moves. That bar is an estimate, built from how much of the question bank has been seen and how well those questions went, and it is allowed to fall as well as rise, because a diagnostic that can only go up stops being able to say where to practise next. Treat it as a rough compass for where a child is soft, not as a score to chase to 100.
Run a short Against the Clock section often. A quarter-length section keeps the pace of the real paper and asks a child to triage, deciding what to skip and come back to, which is most of what a timed test actually demands, and it is short enough to fit into an ordinary weeknight. Run a full-length section rarely: what it adds beyond the short version is up to forty minutes of holding concentration, which is worth rehearsing occasionally rather than constantly.
When a question is missed, it is kept on a saved list rather than left behind, so it can be tried again later instead of simply being marked wrong and forgotten. And read the readiness ladder for what it is: a record of rounds passed and sections sat, not a forecast. It reports what has happened, never a chance of anything.
None of this is meant to be done intensively. The Department's own position is that coaching or tutoring for the placement test is not necessary, that it does not recommend or endorse coaching, and that too much coaching can harm a child's wellbeing. We are not going to dress that up as an endorsement of what we do. What we can say is what LearningKit is: free, built for short sessions rather than long ones, aimed at the skills underneath the questions rather than at the questions, and making no claim at all on a child's chances of a place.
What makes it different
- Every lesson teaches the idea before a single question is asked about it.
- Every question carries a hint that reframes the problem rather than doing the working, and an explanation that says why the tempting wrong answer was tempting, not just which one was right.
- Against the Clock runs a whole section at the paper's real pace, at either of two lengths, a short one for pace and triage and a full one for concentration.
- All of it, the lessons, the practice questions and Against the Clock, is free, works offline once opened, and needs no account.
Start with a lesson
Every lesson on the three section pages above is in the app now, free, offline, with no account.