11+ English
Accurate spelling under timed conditions — homophones, common patterns and exam favourites.
Spelling appears in 10 of our 338 ready papers (34 tagged questions). It averages 3.4 questions a paper worth about 1.18 marks each. The typical question allows around 59 sec.
Spelling marks are easy to lose and hard to argue back. 11+ papers test homophones (there/their/they’re), common prefixes and suffixes, and high-frequency “tricky” words. Children who rely on spellcheck habits from everyday typing get caught. Build a personal error list from marked papers and revisit it weekly. Teach proofreading as a final sixty-second pass: read word-by-word, not for meaning. Homophone pairs need meaning checks, not just letter patterns. Strong spelling also protects creative-writing scores when schools mark accuracy separately. Build the list from your child’s own marked papers — ten personal demons beat a hundred random spellings from a workbook. Homophone errors are meaning errors: substitute each option into the sentence and keep only the one that still makes sense.
A real tagged question from our catalogue — method included, not paywalled.
Ranked from our tagged catalogue — open a paper to practise the questions that actually test this topic.
Not sure whether spelling is the problem? Mark any past paper on 11plusSolved and the report tells you which topics are costing marks — and how many.
