When my children were preparing for the 11 Plus, the hardest part was not the maths or the reasoning. It was getting hold of decent practice papers.

Real past papers are almost never released. GL Assessment, the provider used by most selective areas, keeps its live papers under lock and key, and rightly so. What that meant for me as a parent was a strange grey market. Publishers sold books of variable quality. Websites offered "free" papers that turned out to be a sign-up wall, an email capture and three sample questions. And tutors, who did have good material, charged by the hour partly because the papers came with them. I paid for tuition more than once mainly to get access to the papers the tutor brought along.

That always felt wrong to me. A child's chance at a grammar school place should not depend on whether their parents can afford a tutor's paper drawer.

What WAJD has done about it

WAJD Academy now publishes free 11 Plus practice papers covering all four subjects: maths, English comprehension with spelling, punctuation and grammar, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning. That is 107 questions in the first set, written in the GL multiple choice style with five options per question, pitched at the level of a well-prepared Year 5 child.

Every paper is a printable PDF. Every paper comes with a separate answer sheet that does not just give the correct letter but explains, in child-friendly words, how to work each question out. There is no sign-up, no email capture, no ads and no paywall on the answers. Print as many copies as your family needs.

The questions are original. Nothing is copied from real exams, so the practice stays honest and no child gains an unfair advantage from having seen live material.

"But ChatGPT can write papers. Why use WAJD?"

It is a fair question, and as a company that builds with AI ourselves, we will answer it honestly. Yes, you can ask a chatbot to generate 11 Plus questions, and it will produce something that looks the part. The problem is everything you cannot see.

The answer key has to be right every time. Large language models still make mistakes: questions with two defensible answers, answer keys that do not match the question, explanations that sound confident and are wrong. An adult skim-reading a generated paper will not always catch these. A nine-year-old certainly will not. A child who practises against a wrong answer key does not just lose a mark, they learn the wrong method and carry it into the real exam. Every WAJD question is written and checked by us before it reaches your printer.

Non-verbal reasoning cannot be typed. A quarter of most 11 Plus tests is non-verbal reasoning: sequences of shapes, rotations, reflections, odd ones out. These are drawn figures, and a chat window simply cannot produce a proper, cleanly drawn NVR paper. Ours can, because ours are designed as papers, not as chat replies.

A paper is more than a list of questions. A real practice paper has a designed difficulty curve, gentle starters building to the multi-step questions that separate candidates, a sensible time limit, and a layout a child can sit with under exam conditions at the kitchen table. Prompting a chatbot gives you a different, unknown difficulty every time, which also means you cannot measure progress. If your child scores 60 per cent one week and 75 per cent the next on generated papers, you have no idea whether they improved or the paper got easier. WAJD papers are calibrated to a consistent standard, so a rising score means a rising child.

The answer sheet should teach. The most valuable moment in practice is the half hour after the paper, going through what went wrong. Our answer sheets are written for that moment, explaining the method in words a child understands, so a wrong answer becomes a lesson rather than a lost mark.

Your child's practice should not need a prompt engineer. With WAJD you download, print and sit the paper. No account, no data collected, nothing to configure.

How to use the papers well

Sit the paper in one go, timed, somewhere quiet. Mark it together using the answer sheet, and spend more time on the explanations than on the score. Then, if you want practice that adapts to the exact areas where your child dropped marks, a free WAJD Academy account unlocks targeted tests built for that.

This is set one, and more papers are being added, always free. Because the thing I needed as a parent, and could only get by paying for it, should simply be there for every family.

Download the papers: wajd.co.uk/free-11-plus-papers

I've spent the last few months building learn.wajd.co.uk, a free CPD library aimed at people whose employers won't pay for training: care workers, nurses, tradespeople, small business owners. 32 courses so far. No paywall, no card details, no "free trial".

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