2026 Reading School 11+ focus group
The first of our 2026 Reading School focus groups was held in August, shortly after the July entrance exam. A total of twenty-eight boys took part, twenty of whom received weekly tuition from us as well as having attended our mock exams, while the other eight had only attended the mock exams and feedback sessions. Of the entire group, sixteen of the boys included had taken four or more mock exams. The boys began with a short general group discussion on the exam they sat and their preparation. After this initial discussion, each boy then filled in a separate written feedback form anonymously. The figures and themes listed below are based on those anonymous forms.
No response has been assigned to an individual boy or connected to anything he said during the discussion. In the anonymous written comments, each of the 28 boys rated themselves as feeling at least 'well prepared' in all the areas examined. When questioned about the types of questions they had come across, 27 boys said that they had felt at least 'sufficiently' prepared for all of them, and 27 stated that they had not had any difficulty with the timing.
The average level of self-reported nervousness was 8.6 out of 10 before the boys' first mock exam and 5.8 before the actual exam. In the written comments attention was drawn to the types of material used in the preparation process. The examples cited were stories and poems, historical and newspaper articles, blogs, interviews with local people, theatre reviews, statistics and sports data, scientific articles, world maps and rare languages. The boys who received tuition often gave anonymous replies saying that they had enjoyed the discussions and the way they exchanged views with their tutors. They generally found writing more enjoyable than it had been before, and tuition was frequently said to be enjoyable (19 out of 20 boys rated their tuition as ‘enjoyable’, ‘very enjoyable’ or ‘extremely enjoyable’) and to be different from other schoolwork. The boys were asked to name the paper which they found most difficult in the real exam, and 18 of them chose the Beacon Paper, six chose the Adventure Paper and four chose the Compass Paper. The detailed feedback on specific question types, stimuli and prompts collected in Part 1 is being kept and analysed internally, and this knowledge will be applied to the further development of our tuition and mock exam papers. Information regarding content of the actual exam will not be published or reproduced. The second part of our 2026 Reading School focus group is due to happen soon (this will take place online with a different set of boys) and will collect additional qualitative feedback.
For more information about our Reading School preparation, see our Reading School 11+ tuition page and Guide to Reading School entry.
