My daughter is sitting the Henrietta Barnett School entrance exam in the autumn and we're trying to understand what the maths paper actually covers beyond the standard 11 plus curriculum. She's been working through Bond Assessment papers for about 4 months now at 40 minutes a day and her scores have gone from around 65% to 82%, but I've been told HBS is harder than typical GL assessment papers.
The English paper I feel reasonably confident about — comprehension and composition seem to align with what she's doing at school. It's the maths that I keep hearing is a step above. Some parents in my local group are saying it tests problem-solving and reasoning at a level that requires specific prep beyond KS2 content. Is that accurate or is it more about speed and accuracy under pressure?
She's scoring well in verbal reasoning but numerical reasoning is dragging her composite down by about 8 percentage points. We have roughly 14 weeks and I'm trying to decide whether to stick with the current routine or bring in a tutor who specialises specifically in selective school prep.
HBS maths definitely has a different feel from standard 11 plus papers — the questions require you to hold more steps in your head simultaneously. Bond papers are good for fluency but I'd add some ISEB papers in the last 6 weeks to get used to that format.
My daughter sat it two years ago. The time pressure in the maths section is real — it's not that the questions are impossibly hard, but you have to move quickly without losing accuracy. Drilling for speed matters as much as drilling for correctness at this stage.
A specialist tutor is worth it if numerical reasoning is the specific gap. Generic tutors often don't know the HBS-specific format well enough to help efficiently in 14 weeks.
82% on Bond papers is a solid baseline but HBS candidates often score above 90% on those same papers. The gap is closeable but it requires targeted work on the exact question types that trip her up, not just more volume of the same material.
I sat HBS a few years back as a mature student doing a part-time professional course, so my situation wasn't identical, but the maths paper genuinely surprised me. It's not just content coverage — it's the way questions are worded to trip you up. Things like multi-step problems where the final answer depends on not making a small error three steps earlier. I didn't find Bond papers alone were enough; they're good for fluency but HBS pushes harder on logical reasoning within number problems, so we supplemented with some of the GL Assessment material too.
For fitting it in around a busy schedule, honestly the consistency matters more than the session length. Even 20 focused minutes on a tricky problem type is better than an hour of semi-distracted practice. If your daughter's already doing 40 minutes daily she's building a solid habit — just make sure some of that time is on timed problem-solving under pressure, not just working through questions at her own pace. The time management piece is where a lot of capable kids lose marks.