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There was a family with three schools on their list, and a diary with three separate sets of test dates in it.Then they ...
21/09/2026

There was a family with three schools on their list, and a diary with three separate sets of test dates in it.

Then they discovered that two of the schools shared a single pre-test. The whole autumn rearranged itself in one afternoon.

Their daughter sat it in November, in a room at her own school, and was finished by lunchtime. The relief was enormous.

The part nobody had warned them about was the middle of the paper. The questions got harder, because that is how the test is built, and she walked out certain she had done badly.

She had scored in the top band.

Adaptive tests work that way. They push until they find the ceiling, so every single child meets something they cannot do. A steady child who expects that and moves on will beat a quick child who panics at question ten.

Her mother said afterwards that the only thing that had really needed preparing was her daughter's expectation of what a hard test feels like.

Has your child ever come out of a test certain they had done badly, and been completely wrong?

Most of the schools on your shortlist may never set their own first test.Half of the leading London independent schools ...
21/09/2026

Most of the schools on your shortlist may never set their own first test.

Half of the leading London independent schools use the same online assessment to begin the process — the ISEB Common Pre-Test.

It is four papers: English, maths, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning. Your child sits it once, and the results are shared with every school that uses it. No four journeys, no four different papers, no four separate mornings.

Two things surprise families.

The first is that it is adaptive, which means the questions get harder or easier depending on how your child is doing. Almost every child will meet questions they cannot answer. That is the test finding the edge of what they can do — not your child failing.

The second is that it happens on a screen, with no writing and no paper to look back over. A child who has only ever worked on paper can lose marks to the format rather than the questions.

Practical step for this week: find out which schools on your list use the pre-test and which sit their own papers. Open evenings are where that conversation happens — King's College School holds theirs on Wednesday.

Which of your schools use the pre-test, and which set their own?

If you are reading this on a Sunday evening with a full week ahead and no idea where prep will fit, I want to say someth...
20/09/2026

If you are reading this on a Sunday evening with a full week ahead and no idea where prep will fit, I want to say something plainly: you do not need a lot of time. You need a small amount of time that is not negotiable.

The families who find this hardest are usually not the busy ones. They are the ones trying to do it generously — an hour here, two hours there, whenever there is a gap — because a long variable session has to be won every single time. A short fixed one just happens.

So make it smaller than feels respectable. Twenty minutes. Same time. Same place. Everything on the table before you sit down. If it goes well, still stop at twenty.

Choose the slot by looking at the week you actually have, not the week you would like to have. For some families that is the morning. For others it is after homework, before supper. For a few it is genuinely the last half hour of the day, and that works too.

Then protect it the way you would protect a piano lesson. That is the whole secret, and it is a much smaller promise than the one you have been making yourself.

Which twenty minutes could you protect this week if you stopped waiting for a free hour?

There was a house where preparation had become the worst hour of the day.Dinner, then the argument. Every evening, the s...
20/09/2026

There was a house where preparation had become the worst hour of the day.

Dinner, then the argument. Every evening, the same shape: a boy who did not want to start, a mother who could not understand why, twenty minutes of negotiating, forty minutes of sullen work, and two people going to bed upset. She told me she dreaded six o'clock.

The work itself was not the problem. He was doing more than enough. It was that the whole thing had become a nightly test of their relationship, and he was winning it by making it unbearable.

So we changed the shape of the evening, not the amount.

Prep moved to the morning. Ten minutes after breakfast, at the table, before school, with everything already out. No negotiation, no transition from dinner, no screens anywhere in the picture. Twenty minutes, twice on weekdays and once at the weekend.

The first week he was suspicious. The second week he stopped arguing, because there was nothing to argue with. By half term they were doing it without her having to ask, and she had her evenings back.

The hour had not been the problem. Six o'clock had been.

What time of day is the most peaceful one in your house?

Twenty focused minutes on a Tuesday evening will do more for your child than two hours on a Sunday afternoon.That is not...
20/09/2026

Twenty focused minutes on a Tuesday evening will do more for your child than two hours on a Sunday afternoon.

That is not a motivational line. It is how learning works. Little and often beats long and occasional, every time, because remembering is a process of going back to something after a gap rather than staying at it.

The routine matters more than the material. Four things, and nothing else:

Same time each evening — after homework, before screens, not at bedtime.

One focus only. One passage, or one topic, or one set of ten questions. Not a sweep of everything.

Phone in another room. For both of you.

End on something your child can do. Not the thing they got wrong. The last question of the session should be winnable, so the evening finishes on competence rather than on correction.

That is it. Some evenings will be flat and that is fine — flat and consistent is the whole point.

If you could protect twenty minutes, at what time of day would it actually happen in your house?

What I want for every child who sits at my table is not a school place. It is a sentence they can say to themselves when...
19/09/2026

What I want for every child who sits at my table is not a school place. It is a sentence they can say to themselves when the paper gets hard.

Something like: "I do not know this yet, and I usually get there." That sentence is worth more than any technique I could teach, because it is the thing that keeps a child working when the timer is running and the room is silent.

Building it is mostly about the words used around them. Praise what they did, not what they are. Make the second attempt sound normal. Let them hear you say you found something difficult today.

And be patient with the process, because it does not move at the speed of a school year. A child who has spent ten years hearing "you're so clever" will take a few months to believe that being stuck is not a verdict.

It is the least fashionable part of preparation, and it is the part that lasts longest.

What did the grown-ups around you praise you for when you were eleven?

Being on both sides of this has changed how I teach.As a mother, I have walked through the selective school process with...
19/09/2026

Being on both sides of this has changed how I teach.

As a mother, I have walked through the selective school process with my own children and sat in the same waiting rooms with the same quiet dread. As a tutor, I have watched hundreds of families do the same thing.

The moment that stays with me is a small one. I was working with a girl in a session at our table, and she had just solved something she had been stuck on for two weeks. She was glowing. And the sentence that came out of my mouth, on reflex, was "You're so clever."

Her face closed, very slightly. Not because she was upset. Because the thing that had just happened for her had been a fortnight of small, boring, unglamorous effort, and I had just turned it into a compliment about a quality she was born with.

She still got the answer right. But I do not think she took the credit for it. I had taken it off her.

Since then, the sentence I use in that moment is different. "Look how long you kept going." It is far less warm to say. It gives her something to keep.

What do you want your child to hear in their own head when a question is hard?

"You're so clever" is the sentence most of us say without thinking. It is meant as warmth, and it lands as a label.Decad...
19/09/2026

"You're so clever" is the sentence most of us say without thinking. It is meant as warmth, and it lands as a label.

Decades of research on how children respond to praise found something that still surprises parents: children praised for being clever tend to choose easy tasks afterwards, while children praised for effort reach for harder ones. A label about who you are is something you have to protect. Effort is something you can repeat.

So the sentence does quiet work in the wrong direction. A child who is told they are clever has more to lose from trying and failing.

What to say instead is simple, and it is more specific, not more effusive: "I liked how you checked that." "You didn't give up on that one." "You noticed something there that most people would miss." Nothing about identity. All about what they did.

It takes a fortnight to change, and then it becomes natural.

What is the phrase you find yourself saying to your child without thinking?

If your child is coasting and you have a quiet sense that something is not being asked of them, that instinct is usually...
18/09/2026

If your child is coasting and you have a quiet sense that something is not being asked of them, that instinct is usually right. It is also easy to leave alone, because nothing is actually going wrong.

The reason to act is not the exam. It is what the exam will reveal.

A child who has never been stretched learns, over years, that "fine" is their ceiling. By the time they meet a real wall — at 11+, at 13+, in the first term of a selective school — they have no experience of what to do at one. So they conclude the wall is about them, rather than about the work.

That is the thing worth preventing, and it is much easier to prevent than to undo.

You do not need to change everything this month. Add one thing a week that your child might not manage: a book slightly above their level, a question with no obvious answer, a task that takes three attempts.

Then let them see that the second attempt is the normal one.

Is "fine" the highest thing your child's work has ever been asked to be?

There was a boy whose reports were all the same."Working well." "A pleasure to teach." "Reading fluently." Every term, e...
18/09/2026

There was a boy whose reports were all the same.

"Working well." "A pleasure to teach." "Reading fluently." Every term, every subject, and every parent's evening ended with the same warm nothing. His parents were pleased, of course. What was there to worry about?

At home he did his homework at the kitchen table, quickly, and then he was gone. He never complained about it. He never mentioned it either.

His mother brought him to us almost apologetically. She said she felt a bit fraudulent taking a slot — "he's not really a 11+ problem, he's fine".

He was fine. He was also, we discovered in the first diagnostic session, four years ahead in reading and roughly on the line in written work, and he had no idea that anything could be asked of him that he could not already do.

The first time he met a genuinely hard question, he stopped and looked at me with a kind of polite bewilderment, as if the question must be a mistake.

We spent the first month doing things he was bad at. On purpose. Deliberately, cheerfully, and often badly. It was much harder for him than any exam would have been, and it was exactly the work he needed.

What does your child do when they meet something they cannot do yet?

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