We, with our AVS Tuition programme and meticulous teaching, will do our best to help your child succeed; however, the parents will need to work alongside their child and in partnership with us. We are there to build the skills required and guide your child to success in these exams. But please remember that in addition to our well-designed course and guidance, it is a child’s perseverance combined with much hard work that will help them to be prepared for the eleven plus exams.

 Tips for parents and children:

• Read with your child regularly and discuss the contents together with special focus on vocabulary.
• Ensure that their reading covers different genre to enrich their contextual knowledge.
• Practice using good quality practice material which provides scores and relevant professional feedback.
• Practice with your child on a variety of 11+ questions and tests before taking the real exam or selection test. The more questions they practice, the more types of questions they will have seen and the more confident they will be. This will help the child to be well prepared for the exams.
• Make sure your child is always in a comfortable environment when they practice any form of question. Don’t sit them down to practice just before going out or when they’re going to be disturbed. It’s essential to give your child your full attention both when practising and when taking the real exam.
• Get all the right tools. Ensure you have lots of rough paper, a few pencils and a stop- watch. The child should practice with all these essentials so that they are accustomed to using them effectively in the real eleven plus exam. Parents should check with the relevant body to ensure that these tools are permitted in the actual eleven plus exam.
• Parents should seek advice from their current primary school whether the Grammar school will be suitable for their child’s future education. 
• You have the right to ask what sort of questions will be asked in the exam, where the child will be expected to sit the eleven plus exam and how long the test will be. Do ask if the test will be in the child’s primary school or at another venue.
• Take the familiarisation tests if offered by the Local Education Authority or the examining bodies. There may be practice questions available on their websites to have a go at. They’re usually quite short and may have worked examples to give a flavour for the type of questions that may be asked in the exam.

Guidance for children on the exam day:

• Stay calm; your job on that day is just to do the best that you can.
• Read any guidance provided before sitting your selection test. Make sure you make a note of how much time you have and roughly how long you should be spending on each question.
• Listen to the instructions given by the invigilator carefully.
• Don’t get bogged down on a question. If you get stuck, don’t let the clock run down, move on, you might find the next question easier and you’ll pick up more marks by moving on.
• Move on if you think a question is going to take a long time, flag it and if possible come back to it if time permits. Some questions can be very time consuming and you may be better off coming back to it. Once you leave a question, forget about it until you return to it later in the exam.
• Don’t guess wildly. Your eleven plus exam test score will be made up of a combination of speed and accuracy. It’s crucial not panic and fall in the trap of guessing the answers to try and finish all the questions. Work carefully and as quickly as you can. 
• Spend a few seconds familiarising yourself with any graph/table/pie chart/diagram you are presented with before working through the questions. 
• Write your workings and calculations neatly. The quickest way to do your calculations is often on a piece of paper. Leave yourself plenty of space so that you are not cramming your workings into the corner. Generally, writing on question papers is allowed, but not on the answer sheets.