11+ verbal reasoning: Complete preparation guide

Verbal reasoning rewards three things: A wide vocabulary, fast pattern recognition, and familiarity with the question formats. Your child can build all three with a sensible nine-month routine, no tutor required for most families. This guide covers the routine, worked examples for every question type, and a timing strategy for exam day.

The biggest mistake parents make is leaving prep too late and drilling intensively in the final eight weeks. Verbal reasoning is mostly a vocabulary test in a different costume, and vocabulary doesn't cram. Start in good time and the work stays light. Start too late and it becomes a stressful sprint that often hurts performance.

Around 90 minutes a week across two or three sessions, starting nine to twelve months before the test. That's roughly 60 hours over the prep window: Enough to cover every question type, build vocabulary, and run a dozen full timed papers without burning your child out.

Children who already read widely need less. Children who don't read much for pleasure need more time on vocabulary up front before formal verbal reasoning practice clicks. There's no single right amount, but if your child is doing two hours a day eight months out, something's gone wrong with the plan.

The shape matters: low and steady early, increasing in the final twelve weeks. Trying to hit 90 minutes a week from day one usually leads to children digging their heels in by month three. Easing in keeps motivation up and gives vocabulary time to build.

GL Assessment publishes verbal reasoning across a range of question styles. They're often grouped into a handful of broad families for teaching purposes (the grouping below is our own pedagogical framing, not an official GL taxonomy). Working through one example per family in detail beats skimming every individual question type, because techniques are shared within each family.

Question: Find the word in the second group that means the OPPOSITE of the word in capitals from the first group.

ELATED (joyful, cheerful, content) (despondent, neutral, peaceful, calm, anxious)

Answer: despondent.

Technique: ELATED sits at the strong end of the happy scale. Its true opposite has to sit at the strong end of the unhappy scale, not the middle. "Neutral," "peaceful," and "calm" describe the absence of strong emotion, not the opposite of it. "Anxious" is negative but isn't about sadness. "Despondent" is the only word that mirrors ELATED in both polarity and intensity.

Question: Find the four-letter word hidden across two consecutive words.

"The young brother stared at the cake."

Answer: "hers," hidden at the join "brot[hers]tared."

Technique: Hidden words always span the boundary between two consecutive words, never sit inside a single word. Train your child to underline each word-pair join and scan only there, not the whole sentence. Doing this systematically saves seconds on every question.

Question (word completion): Add two letters to make a real word, and use the same two letters to complete a second word.

fa _ _ er → ne _ _ er

Answer: "th," giving "father" and "nether." Both completions use the same two letters in the same order.

Question: If BRAVE is written as DTCXG, what does HEART become?

Answer: JGCTV.

Technique: Compare each letter to its code. B→D (forward 2), R→T (forward 2), A→C (forward 2), V→X (forward 2), E→G (forward 2). The code is +2. Apply +2 to HEART: H→J, E→G, A→C, R→T, T→V. Answer: JGCTV.

The trap is assuming all code questions use a fixed shift. Some use a different shift per letter, some reverse the alphabet, some use a keyword shift. Always check at least two letter pairs before deciding the rule.

Question: Five children sit on a bench. Priya sits next to Marco. Marco is at one end. Olu is two seats from Marco. Liang is between Olu and the other end. Where does Maya sit?

Answer: At the end opposite Marco.

Technique: Draw five empty spaces and fill in what you know, one constraint at a time. Marco at end (position 1). Priya next to Marco (position 2). Olu two seats from Marco (position 3). Liang between Olu and the other end (position 4). Maya is the only one left (position 5).

Key rule: never try to hold logic puzzles in your head. Sketch them, even rough. Children who try to mental-arithmetic logic questions lose marks they'd otherwise get easily.

Question: If A=1, B=2, C=3 and so on, what's the value of the letters in MILK added together?

Answer: 45. M(13) + I(9) + L(12) + K(11) = 45.

Technique: An alphabet strip taped to your desk during practice removes the speed penalty while your child learns. After about six weeks of practice they won't need it; before that, they shouldn't be punished for not having memorised letter positions yet.

On a typical GL Assessment paper (length and timing vary by consortium, but a common shape is somewhere around 30 to 50 questions per 25 to 50 minute section), the per-question budget often works out at well under a minute. Your child shouldn't aim for the average on every question. Aim for around 20 seconds on the easy ones, banking time for harder logic and code questions.

The technique that wins marks: Do a full pass through the paper answering everything you find easy, marking anything you skip with a small dot. On the second pass, return to the dots. This stops one stuck question eating five minutes and leaving ten unanswered at the back. Multiple-choice means there's no penalty for guessing, so guess on anything still blank with two minutes left.

Practice this in the final three months. Children who only do untimed practice often crumble under the timer on the day. One timed full paper a week from twelve weeks out, marked the same day, is enough to build the rhythm.

GL Assessment publishes a small set of official familiarisation papers free on their website (gl-assessment.co.uk). These are the closest thing to the real test, so save one or two for the final fortnight.

For bulk practice, the well-known UK 11+ workbook series cover the question types in similar formats. Mix two providers, not one: Question wording varies between publishers, and exposure to variation helps your child read the question rather than assume what's being asked.

Avoid the temptation to do more than one full paper a week in the final three months. The marginal gain is small. The marginal cost in motivation is high. Quality of review matters more than volume.

Three patterns turn up in families whose child underperforms on verbal reasoning.

First: Too much time on the easiest question type. Children who love synonyms and find codes hard rationally spend their practice on synonyms. That's backwards. Track the question types losing marks and target those.

Second: No timed practice until the last fortnight. Speed and accuracy under pressure is a separate skill from solving with unlimited time. Build it deliberately in the final twelve weeks.

Third: Skipping review. A wrong answer where the child shrugs teaches nothing. A wrong answer where you work out exactly why their reasoning failed teaches them to avoid it next time. Twenty minutes of review beats an hour of fresh questions.