Now we all know by now that the 11+ test has been moved from January to this September and many children in Kent including my daughter are facing this change. Today at my daughter’s school we had an 11+ meeting, during this meeting it was explained that on the 18/19 September all schools in Kent will be sitting the test and on the 21st October we will get our Child’s results.

Now I can tell you that the year 5 and 6 teachers at her school think that the test being moved is unfair to the children because they will not have enough time to teach them all the work they need in time. The children will now have just 6 weeks from today till they break up and 1.5 weeks until the test after they start year 6 to learn all the information. Now they would have had an extra 6 months to do this in but hay that’s the government for you.

During this meeting a number of parents wanted to know if the pass rate would be lower because the children are younger. The answer we got was that points are added on for those children who are born in June, July and August, OK fair enough but this does not help the fact that my daughter and many others will have only just turned 10 and are sitting an exam that they should be taking later on in the year. Another question was why is it called that 11+? Again this was asked because of the age of the children who will be taking it.

In my daughters school they teach year 5 and 6 together so luckily most of the work for the 11+ has already been covered but in Many schools they have separate year 5 and year 6 classes and this means that a number of children will not have covered any year 6 work.

It looks like many children over the holidays will be doing practice papers to prepare them for the most important test so far. My daughter wants to do her 11+ and we have just told her that all she can do is do her best.

What do you think of this? Do you think that the pass rate will be lower this year?