Sevenoaks English entrance exam

[ThisSunnyAzureFish]

Our daughter seems to be pretty good at maths but we are not sure how she would handle the English exam for Sevenoaks admissions. It doesn't help that English teaching in her current prep seems to have been particularly dire this year. She and her peers appear leagues behind old friends who remained (at our frankly average) London prep. How have parents helped support their children with preparing for this? It's obviously a lot more demanding than the ISEB. Is it a case of just getting a good English tutor or are their resources/ books etc we can also use
to help?

I believe the Sevenoaks School test is writing + comprehension like most other 11+ exams. We didn't do anything specific - being able to write 5-6 paragraphs with good logic and a decent vocabulary seems to be enough. Not sure how you can prepare for the comprehension part except reading a lot of fiction and non-fiction! I think most prep students will be ready for this.

Recommend working through the past papers both 11 and 13 plus and the Robert Lomax comprehension and creative writing books. Detailed descriptive writing and literary techniques. It’s putting all the English they learn at school on show aka varying sentence openers, complex vocab, expanded noun phrases. Understanding why the author has used language to enhance content.

We did superselective grammar entry with second stages last year and it’s quite common to use past papers available for free on the sites of a variety of independents schools for English. It’s obviously going to help if you look through the types of authors they use extracts from and if the child has read these types of books. Look at the type of questioning and if you read with your child ask those kind of questions more informally first. It’s all good pre GCSE prep too.

That's an excellent tip with regards to using papers from different schools to give us a bit more material! We got our daughters books back at the end or this year and with the exception of two stories she hasn't written more than 3, not very long or very descriptive, paragraphs all year. She doesn't even seem to have mastered using quotes to support her answers so v behind on what I would consider basics. I was quite shocked at how poor the writing was and how it hasn't been flagged as a potential issue before now despite having (repeated) conversations about Sevenoaks. Friends with dcs at preps in Tonbridge/ Sevenoaks have all been getting a lot more support in terms of writing it seems or at least doing plenty of it in class! Now we are worried about how she will handle a paper which requires a good chunk of creative writing in addition to comprehension as she doesn't seem to have developed these skills all year.

Although we are keen to support her with this we are also looking at alternative schools which just use the ISEB (our prep now seems to mainly be feeding to these). Thankfully she is v strong at maths.

Thank you! Off to search for schools that still use traditional English papers for source material. As you say if it doesn't work out for Sevenoaks it's still good skill development for GCSE down the line. Feeling somewhat worried as school had pushed Sevenoaks as the alternative to grammar and now wonder if we should have been prepping for grammar all along (which they strongly discouraged as it would mean leaving at 11 vs 13).

@Araminta1003 thank you so much! It so nice to have a starting point and these are all excellent suggestions.

@ThisSunnyAzureFish - don’t worry, you will be fine if you do the work this summer. We went from state primary into superselective grammar with just summer prep with me and I have done this 4 times now with 4 different DC. Mine had practised no end of short literary technique at state primary but wasn’t putting it together properly, but the underlying knowledge was all there from lots of reading. We do tend to know our children’s brain best so if you can understand what exactly is required and then support her in a targeted way there isn’t a need for a tutor. It saves money and lots of time. From what I remember the Lomax books explain different detailed answers which was helpful for me. In the actual exam a lot of it is about timing as well. Children need to understand how many points to make to maximise marks.