The 11+ Year

It’s a Sunday evening in October. Your child, who has just turned ten, is at the table with her vocabulary book, going over the same nine words she didn’t know on Wednesday and still doesn’t know now. She has been at it since teatime, and her face has gone slightly fixed. You haven’t sat down since lunch. At the other end of the table your laptop is open at what you’ve started to call the file: the timeline, the school list, the entrance dates, the log-in for the practice papers, and the email from the head of Year 5 saying she’s doing fine. You’d meant to make a proper supper tonight. There’s a frozen pizza on the side.

Some version of this evening is happening in many of the families we see at this point in the school year. In some houses the child is six and being prepared for 7+ entry to a competitive prep school. In others she’s eleven and working towards senior school admissions or a scholarship interview, or thirteen and in the Common Entrance term, which for that family has become the longest term of the year. The thing ahead has a different name in each house, but it puts every family under the same kind of pressure.

We aren’t the definitive book on school admissions. What parents read tends to be either technical (the papers, the tutoring strategies, the admissions data school by school) or dismissive (the reassurance that none of it matters, which is hard to believe when you’re watching your child do a practice paper late on a Sunday night). What we can offer, from over a decade of counselling work with parents and children in this position, is a slower look at what is actually happening in the household, in the child and in you as the thing ahead gets closer.

What is actually happening

From outside the family, a school admission process is a series of dates on a calendar. From inside, it’s something bigger. In most houses it’s the first sustained period in which the child is being assessed by adults who don’t know her, on terms she didn’t choose, with consequences you have decided are significant. What we see in our work usually comes down to three things happening at once.

The first is the pressure on the child. Even when you’ve been careful not to say so, she knows this matters. She notices the laptop open at the file, and the slight tightness in your voice when you ask about the practice paper. In most cases, the pressure she feels comes from seeing how worried you are on her behalf. She is sitting the test for two people, and for a ten-year-old that is harder than the test would be on its own.

The second is your own history at school. If you sat an 11+ yourself thirty years ago, and remember that morning more clearly than most of the rest of that year, you bring that memory to this Sunday evening. If you didn’t, and what you remember of school is being on the wrong side of a result, you bring that too. And if you’ve wondered since your teens whether you were the bright one, you’re now watching your daughter go through a process that you privately fear will settle the same question for her. It’s rarely conscious, but it almost always has an effect.

The third is how much time and attention the household has to spare. The application doesn’t take many hours on the calendar, but it takes up a great deal of everyone’s thinking. The weekend that used to include a slow Sunday morning is now organised around the practice paper. A brother or sister who isn’t going through an admission this year will have noticed that the family’s attention has narrowed. In our work, it’s often the sibling, and not the child sitting the exam, who shows the first sign of strain. The more a family worries about the thing ahead, the more of family life it takes over, however big or small it really is.

None of this is your fault. It comes with a school admission process in any household where the parents care about the outcome. Naming these three things is the first practical step, because once you’ve named what’s happening, you’re a little less caught up in it.

The pressure differential by stage

Admission processes vary with the age of the child and with what they ask of her.

The 7+ and 8+, where they exist (most often in London, for entry to competitive prep schools), ask slightly more of a six- or seven-year-old than, in our view, she can comfortably manage at that stage of her development. She’s being asked to perform under timed conditions, on tasks designed to pick out the children who are already ahead of the standard for their year group. Your job at this age is mostly to shield her from the pressure. Keep preparation to a little on most days, and one day with none. Don’t let it eat into the parts of the week that are her childhood, and remember that how a six-year-old does on a Saturday morning is not, by any clinical measure, a fixed report on who she is becoming.

Most parents in our practice describe the 11+ as the hardest of these. The child is now ten or eleven. She can put into words what she’s being asked to do, and her friends are doing it too, so the process has taken on a social side. She knows that some of the children she sits next to at lunch will be at a different school from her in the new year. The pressure here is partly academic and largely social. As much as you can, keep the admission away from the table where the family eats, and when you talk to her about it, talk about the work, not the result.

The 13+ Common Entrance and senior-school admissions are different again. The child is thirteen and has spent several years at a school that has been openly preparing her for this, so for many of these children the pressure has become their own. She has been living in this process for years. Your task is partly to ease that internal pressure, which is harder to deal with than pressure from outside, and partly to make sure the next school, whatever it is, has been chosen because of what the school is, not because of her entrance result.

Scholarship processes run alongside all of these and bring their own pressure. The child has been told that she’s the one capable of trying for this, and her workload has gone up without anyone quite saying so. We’d encourage you to remember that not winning a scholarship doesn’t mean she has failed. In most cases the place she already has at the school is unaffected, and the result is just information. It’s your job to say so out loud on the morning the result comes through.

What helps in the household

In our experience, most of what helps happens around the preparation, in the rest of family life.

The first thing is to keep the rest of her life going: Saturday football, Wednesday piano, the Friday playdate that has been a weekly fixture for two years. Three months before an entrance exam, most parents’ instinct is to clear the diary to make more time for work. Our clinical advice is to do the opposite. A diary still full of the things she did before any of this started tells her, at a gut level, that she is still herself. A week cleared down to nothing but preparation tells her that preparation is the only thing that counts this term, and that’s more than you meant to tell her.

The second is to have at least one conversation a day about something else. Spend ten minutes after school asking about her day the way you would have last year, before the file appeared: “How was netball?” “What did you have for lunch?” “Is Sophie back in school yet?” Questions like these tell her you’re still interested in her as a person. If she notices that you’re only interested in the work, she’ll conclude that her worth, this autumn, depends on it.

The third is to take the laptop off the table on at least two evenings a week. For you, the file is a way of feeling in control of a process that is largely out of your control. The cost of having it open at supper is that she’s sitting across from a parent whose attention is on a spreadsheet. In our experience, a parent who manages this two evenings a week does more to calm the household than any amount of extra practice could do to calm the child.

On school stress in children and teenagers more widely, the resource we recommend most often is the YoungMinds material for parents on school anxiety and academic pressure. Their A-Z pages are the clearest single introduction we know of in the UK for parents who want to understand what their child is going through. Family Lives’ helpline, on 0808 800 2222, is the other line we send parents to: not because the child is in crisis but because the parent often needs to be listened to by an adult outside the household. Lisa Damour’s Under Pressure was written about the rise in stress and anxiety among girls, but it applies to any child in the admission years, and it’s the book we give parents who want to read calmly about what is happening in their own home.

At different ages

The admission processes are themselves tied to age, and what you do changes with them. A Year 2 child sitting a 7+ is doing something different from a Year 8 child sitting Common Entrance, and practical advice for one doesn’t transfer neatly to the other.

If your child is in Reception or Year 1 (four to six). You’re at the very start of this, and most of what we’d say at this age is to be careful about how soon you let the question into family life. A four-year-old who has noticed that her mother is anxious about which school she’ll get into in two years has noticed something she is too young to have to deal with. Read about the schools and go on the visits, but keep the question between the adults. If the 7+ is a real prospect for your family, keep the practical work for her small, daily and not presented as preparation: ten minutes of reading together at bedtime, a puzzle on a Saturday morning, and conversations over meals that build her vocabulary because she’s being talked to as an interesting person, not because vocabulary is a target.

If your child is in Year 2 or Year 3 (six to eight). The 7+ or 8+ is now either coming up soon or has just happened. Keep practice short and varied, and stop when she stops. After a Saturday morning with a lot of preparation in it, the most useful thing you can say is “That’s enough for today, we’re going to do something else now.” A child who learns that you’ll stop once she has lost her appetite for it comes back to the work more willingly the next morning.

If your child is in Year 4 or Year 5 (eight to ten). The 11+ is now on the horizon. This is when parents’ own anxiety tends to start showing, and the family’s time and attention start to narrow. Visit the schools she’ll be considering, walk the route, eat at a cafe nearby, and let her form her own impressions. A child who has been introduced to the schools as places, not as targets, finds the admission easier than one who first meets a school as the thing she has to get into.

If your child is in Year 6 (ten to eleven). The exam is this term. Your job now is to bring the tension down. Keep preparation to a daily routine that doesn’t run past the natural end of the school day. At bedtime, if anything, leave more time than you have since Year 4 for talking about things other than the test. On the morning of the exam, be up in good time, give her the same breakfast she’d have on a normal Wednesday, and as she goes, say “I love you, do your best, see you later.” Don’t say “good luck”, and don’t say “remember everything we practised”.

If your child is in Year 7 or Year 8 (eleven to thirteen). Now it’s the senior-school admission, the 13+ or a scholarship, and she’s old enough to be taking on more of the pressure herself than you can fully see. What helps at this age is talking side by side: on a drive, walking the dog or going round the supermarket. Ask “What are you thinking about the senior schools at the moment?” Don’t ask “Have you done your practice today?” Listen to the answer. More and more, she is making an adult decision about her own next several years.

If your child is in early secondary, thirteen to fifteen. Scholarship pressure, pressure about sixth-form applications and the first signs of GCSE pressure all arrive at this age. Keep some of your conversation at home free of achievement altogether: the music she likes, the funny thing the dog did, what she thinks about something in the news. Let supper be just supper, not a debrief. A teenager who can see that you’re still interested in her as a person, and not only in where she’s heading, is the one best protected from the harder forms of perfectionism described in the chapter alongside this one.

When the result is not the one you hoped for

For some of the families we see, the result isn’t the one the parents had been imagining. The first-choice senior school doesn’t offer a place, or the scholarship goes to another candidate, or the 11+ produces a result that closes off the option the family had been planning around for two years. The Sunday evening when that letter arrives is one of the most painful of that year.

On that evening, we’d want you to know that the result is information about a process. It is not a report on the child. The schools that didn’t offer a place made a decision based on what they saw in one morning, using criteria that may or may not be the right ones for understanding her. A process has produced an outcome, and it’s now up to your family how to read it.

Over the years we’ve watched a striking number of children whose first-choice school didn’t offer them a place go on to flourish, often startlingly so, at the school they went to instead. In many of the families we see, the year after the result is the year the parent realises that the school her child ended up at is the one where she has been able to become herself.

What doesn’t help after the result is disappointment that nobody says out loud: a remark to another parent over coffee that she overhears, a look between the adults that she notices, or a silence about the school that didn’t offer, which she reads as a sign that the subject is shameful. She is watching closely. She needs to hear from you that you’ve made peace with the result, and to see from what you say and how you behave that the next school is now the one you’re looking forward to.

The longer arc

In most of the families we work with, the school admission is the biggest single thing the household has had to get through. Looked back on from the end of the first year at the new school, it is almost always smaller than it felt at the time. She has made new friends, the uniform isn’t new any more, Sunday evenings have gone back to normal, and the file on the laptop has been moved into an archive folder.

What stays with a family is the experience you and your child had of going through it together: the Sunday evenings when you closed the laptop early, even though it went against the grain; the breakfast on the exam morning that was the same as on a normal Wednesday; and what you said at the door, “I love you, do your best, see you later.” She’ll remember these long after the result has stopped mattering.

You can’t make the admission any less important to the schools running it. What you can do is make it a little less important at home, which is where she actually lives. Close the laptop at half past seven, ask her what she’d like for supper, and tell her you’re glad she’s here.

NOTES

1. Damour, Lisa. Under Pressure. Atlantic, 2019. Damour’s account of the anxiety epidemic among teenage girls and the place of healthy stress.

Where to go further

Lisa Damour, Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls The clearest evidence-based book we know on the kind of pressure the school admission years bring. It’s written about girls, but parents of any child will find it useful.

Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege A clinical psychologist on what happens to children when high-achieving families confuse high standards with high pressure. It’s set in America, but much of it will be familiar to families in UK independent schools, and it’s useful for seeing your own family more clearly.