Preparing in Year 5: A Term-by-Term Plan

The Selective High School Placement Test is sat in Year 6, but the year that shapes the result is Year 5. That is not because Year 5 content is on the paper. It is because a child who arrives in Year 6 already familiar with the format has a year to work on thinking, and a child who does not spends that year learning what the paper looks like.

This is a plan for Year 5, written so that it takes up an hour or two a week rather than a childhood. Applications open in the spring of Year 5 and the test is sat the following May, so the calendar is fixed; what varies is how frantic the last six months feel.

Term 1: find out where they actually are

Start by measuring, not by teaching. Most families begin with a pile of practice books and no idea which pages matter, and a term later they have covered a lot of ground without closing a single gap.

One timed paper per subject is enough to produce a map. You are not looking at the score. You are looking at which strands come back weak and whether the child ran out of time, because those two problems have completely different fixes.

• Weak in one strand, finished in time: a content gap, and content gaps close quickly at this age.
• Strong everywhere, ran out of time: a pacing problem, which is the subject of the 68-second question.
• Weak and slow: start with content. Speed built on shaky content is guessing with confidence.

Our free diagnostic exists for exactly this, and it takes twenty-eight minutes, but a past paper marked honestly at the kitchen table does the same job.

Term 2: fix the gaps, one strand at a time

This is the term where practice should be narrow and unhurried. Take the weakest strand from Term 1 and work on it until it stops being the weakest, then move to the next one. Resist the urge to do a bit of everything every week; a child who does twenty minutes of fractions four times is further ahead than one who does eighty minutes of assorted maths once.

The maths content is finite and known, which is genuinely reassuring, and we have mapped the clusters in the topics worth drilling. Thinking Skills is the exception: it maps to no school subject and cannot be crammed, so it wants little and often across the whole year rather than a block. There is more on why in the Thinking Skills test explained.

No timing this term. A child racing a clock while still learning a topic learns to rush a method they do not have yet.

Term 3: apply, and put the clock on

Applications for Year 7 entry open during Year 5 and close before the end of the year, so this is the term the paperwork happens. Get it done early and get the three preferences right, because the placement runs down your preference order and stops at the first school where your child qualifies. That decision is worth an evening on its own: see choosing your three preferences and, if you want the whole calendar in one place, the Selective test timeline.

On the practice side, Term 3 is where timing starts. Not whole papers yet, just sections: thirty-five maths questions in forty minutes, or forty Thinking Skills questions in forty minutes, so the pace becomes a physical memory rather than a fact they have been told.

Term 4: whole papers, and then stop

By the last term of Year 5 a child should be able to sit one complete section under exam conditions without it being an event. That is the whole goal of the year. Not a score, not a percentage, just the ability to sit down at a screen for forty minutes and work.

The test is on a computer from 2026, which changes small physical things that matter more than parents expect: no working in the margin, scrolling instead of turning, flagging instead of folding a corner. The test is on a computer now covers what actually changes. Practising on paper all year and meeting a screen in May is an avoidable surprise.

Then stop for the summer. A child who has done four terms of steady work does not need December and January as well, and arriving at Year 6 already tired is the most common way a good preparation goes wrong.

What this plan deliberately leaves out

• Daily practice. Two or three focused sessions a week beats seven tired ones, every time.
• Score targets. There is no published minimum score, and chasing one is chasing a historical artefact: what score do you need explains why.
• Writing, until Term 3. Thirty minutes of writing is the hardest component to fake and the easiest to put off, but it improves with reading long before it improves with drilling.

If you are still deciding whether to do any of this, that question deserves its own answer rather than a plan: should my child sit the Selective test is the honest version.