The Selective High School test, and how to prepare for it

What the test is

The Selective High School test is sat in Year 6, for Year 7 entry. It has four sections, each worth a quarter of the total:

• Reading: 45 minutes for 38 answers across 17 questions, three of which have more than one part.
• Thinking Skills: 40 questions in 40 minutes.
• Mathematical Reasoning: 35 questions in 40 minutes.
• Writing: one task in 30 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. 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, option counts and weightings are the Department's, published on its Selective High School 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.

How to use the app to prepare

Start each lesson with its Learn deck, not its practice round. The deck walks through the idea with a worked example before a single question is asked, so the round that follows is rehearsing something already understood rather than trying to work it out cold.

Keep practising a topic until its mastery bar moves, and read that bar for what it is: an estimate built from how much of the question bank has been seen and how well it went, allowed to fall as well as rise. A diagnostic that can only climb stops being able to tell you where to practise next.

Reach for a short Against the Clock section often and a full one rarely. The short version keeps the real pace and forces a decision about what to skip and come back to, which is most of what a timed section actually asks of a child, and it fits into an ordinary evening. The full version adds up to forty-five minutes of held concentration on top of that, which is worth rehearsing occasionally rather than every session.

A missed question goes onto a saved list rather than disappearing, so it comes back around instead of being marked wrong and forgotten. And treat the readiness ladder as a log, not a forecast: it reports rounds passed and sections sat, and nothing about a chance of a place.

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 claiming that as an endorsement of what we do. Short sessions repeated often, rather than long ones crammed in, is the shape the app is built around, and the app is free, teaches the skills underneath the questions, and says nothing about a child's chances of a place.

Writing

LearningKit will not mark your child's writing. Nothing can score a piece of prose honestly and automatically, and a number attached to a child's writing reads as a mark whatever it is called.

So the writing strand is two things side by side. Three lessons are being built: The Right Voice, on matching a form and a register to its audience, The Sentence Smith, on combining sentences, and The Blueprint, on how a piece of writing is put together. Each will carry practice questions with a right answer that can be scored, the same as every other lesson in the app. Beside them will sit a real writing task: a functional piece with a named audience, typed under the clock, kept on a shelf your child and you can both read, and handed back unmarked.

Against the Clock will run that writing task at the paper's own thirty minutes once those three lessons land. Until then it runs the other three sections, Reading, Thinking Skills and Mathematical Reasoning, at their full Selective length.