GL 11 plus Maths: what the paper covers and how to prepare

What the GL Maths paper draws on

The GL Assessment 11 plus Maths paper is drawn from the Key Stage 2 national curriculum. There is no separate 11+ syllabus, no hidden list of extra topics, and no content that a well-taught Year 5 child has never met. What GL does is move the emphasis: away from routine arithmetic set out for you, and onto reasoning, multi-step problems and questions that describe a situation instead of printing a sum.

That is unusually good news for a parent. Verbal Reasoning has no published specification, so preparing for it means working from the question families and hoping the list is complete. Maths has one: the national curriculum for Years 3 to 6, a public document your child’s school already teaches to.

The bad news is narrower and easier to miss. A child who is comfortable in school maths can still be caught out, because the paper asks them to choose the method rather than being told it. That distinction is the whole difficulty of the paper, so the rest of this page is mostly about it. One boundary first: GL writes the paper, but your admissions authority decides which subjects are used, how long the paper is, how many questions it holds and how the marks are combined. Those differ by area and change from year to year, so we do not print them here. Confirm the current arrangements with your admissions authority, and see our guide to the GL Assessment 11 plus for how the papers and the scoring fit together.

Knowing a method and choosing one are different skills

In a school lesson the method arrives before the question does. The page has a heading, the heading says fractions, and every question underneath is a fractions question. The child’s job is to execute, and a child who executes well looks fluent.

An 11 plus question removes the heading. A short everyday situation is described, no sum is written out anywhere, and the first job is deciding which calculations to do and in what order. Nothing tells the child that this is a ratio question, that the unit changes halfway through, or that the number they have just worked out is not the number being asked for. That is why the first timed paper is so often a shock in a household where maths has never been a worry. Selecting under time is a skill in its own right, and it only improves with practice aimed at it.

The topic areas, grouped

11+ Daily organises Maths into 33 skill projects, and because the paper follows the curriculum, the groups below are close to the shape of the paper itself.

• Number. Place value and ordering, the four operations and the order to do them in, factors, multiples and primes, negative numbers, Roman numerals.
• Fractions, decimals and percentages. Equivalents and simplifying, fractions of an amount, fractions read off a shaded figure, the moving decimal point, percentages forwards and backwards, and conversions in every direction.
• Ratio and proportion. Sharing a total in a given ratio, scaling a recipe, map scales, and the harder version that runs backwards from one share to the total.
• Algebra. Sequences and patterns, function machines forwards and in reverse, and missing numbers in an equation, sometimes with the answer wanted as an expression.
• Measurement. Units and conversion, money, perimeter, area and volume, time and timetables.
• Geometry. Properties of 2D shapes, 3D shapes and nets, angles, coordinates and position, and transformations.
• Statistics and data. Bar charts and pictograms, line graphs and pie charts, tables and two-way tables, Venn diagrams, and mean, median, mode and range.
• Problem solving and reasoning. Multi-step word problems, working backwards from an answer, estimation, and questions where several rules apply at once and exactly one option satisfies all of them.

How much of each appears varies by area and by year, and nobody outside GL and your admissions authority knows this year’s mix. So do not drop a whole area because last year’s paper was light on it. Cover the field, and put the extra time where your own child is weak.

Three questions that show the difference

In the multiple-choice format most GL areas use, the wrong options are not random. Each one is where a particular slip lands.

A leisure centre charges £3.60 per swim. A monthly pass costs £9 and reduces the entry price to one third. Omar swims 9 times in a month. How much does he save by buying the pass?

Nine swims at £3.60 cost £32.40. With the pass each swim costs one third of £3.60, which is £1.20, so nine swims cost £10.80, and adding the £9 pass gives £19.80. The saving is £32.40 minus £19.80, which is £12.60. The tempting wrong answer is £19.80, because it is a real number the child worked out on the way and it is sitting in the options. It answers the question “what does the month cost with the pass”, which is not what was asked.

Layla buys 6 books. Each book costs £4.98. How much does she pay in total?

Round £4.98 up to £5, so six books come to £30. Each book was rounded up by 2p and there are six of them, so take off 12p. The total is £29.88. The tempting wrong answer is £30.00, and it is tempting for a good reason: it is the correct estimate, and estimating was the right first move. The question asked for the exact figure, so the estimate is a step, not an answer.

Nina and Omar share some money in the ratio 3:5. Omar receives £40. How much money is shared altogether?

Omar’s £40 is 5 parts, so one part is £8. Nina has 3 parts, which is £24. Altogether that is £64. This one runs backwards, from one share to the whole, and the wrong options are built from the child who runs it forwards: £24 is Nina’s share offered as the total, and £80 comes from doubling Omar’s £40, which would be right only if the ratio were 1:1.

We have a worked page for each of those skills: multi-step word problems, estimation and approximation and ratio and scaling.

The fluency underneath all of it

None of those three questions is difficult arithmetic. Every one of them needs three or four small facts recalled while the child holds the shape of the problem in their head, and that is the real load.

This is why tables, number bonds, doubles and halves have to be automatic rather than merely known. A child who says 7 times 8 without pausing knows it. A child who has to rebuild it from 7 times 4 has spent those seconds not thinking about the problem, and by the time the answer arrives the thread has gone. The cost rarely shows up as a tables mistake. It shows up as a child who makes careless errors on multi-step questions. Fluency is built in short daily bursts over months. It cannot be assembled in the final few weeks, and for most families it is the first piece of eleven plus preparation worth starting.

It pays off outside the maths paper too. Several Verbal Reasoning families are numerical: one of ours, Complete the Sum, gives an equation with a value missing from one side, such as 9 add 16 take away 4 equals 3 times something. Finish the complete side first, then undo the operation. A child slow on tables is slow there as well.

Common mistakes

• Answering the previous step. The most expensive error in the paper, and the one the options are built to catch. The fix is a habit: before marking an answer, reread the actual question.
• Losing the unit. Grams left as grams when kilograms were asked for, or a point moved by a factor of 10 rather than 1,000. The wrong options here carry the right digits in the wrong place, so the answer looks familiar. Units and conversion is worth drilling on its own.
• Reading a table too fast. In tables and two-way tables every number needed is already printed, so the work is picking the right cells. Wrong row, right arithmetic is a common way to lose a free mark.
• Missing a small word. “How many more”, “complete boxes”, “at least”. Each changes the answer and takes a second to read.

How to practise 11 plus maths at home

1. Fix fluency first, and keep it running. A few minutes of tables and bonds daily, alongside everything else, from as early as you can.
2. Work one topic at a time, untimed, until it is accurate. Speed built on a shaky method just produces confident mistakes.
3. Then mix topics with no labels. This is the step most home preparation skips, and it is the one that builds method selection, because nothing on the page announces what kind of question it is.
4. Add the clock last, one topic at a time. Pace sits on top of accuracy rather than beside it.
5. Use full papers sparingly and late. A paper measures rather than teaches. Our guide to why the GL 11 plus is learnable sets out the same order for the other subjects, and how much 11 plus practice a child needs each day covers the time it takes.

If your area is changing provider, the maths work is the part that transfers. Trafford and the seven Gloucestershire grammar schools move to FSCE for 2028 entry, with a test drawn from the Key Stage 2 curriculum rather than a reasoning test, and the Gloucestershire FSCE test is sat at the end of the summer term of Year 5. Several areas have moved to Quest, and Essex CSSE writes its own paper. The curriculum maths counts for as much or more in each case, but the dates and the format may not be what you expect, so confirm the current arrangements with the admissions authority.

Where 11+ Daily fits

11+ Daily covers the areas listed above. The Today screen picks one subject and one specific skill for each session of roughly seven to ten minutes, chosen from what has not been covered, what has gone stale and what is weak, so the one-topic-at-a-time order happens without a parent planning it, and a parents area shows which skills have been covered and how accurately. The questions are original to 11+ Daily, organised by skill rather than tagged to any area or school, and we are not connected to GL Assessment. The 11 plus Maths practice pages list every topic with worked examples, and the 14-day free trial needs no card.

Questions parents ask