The 7 Biggest 11+ English Mistakes Children Make (And How to Fix Them)
After ten years of preparing children for 11+ English exams at London's most selective schools, the same patterns come up again and again. Not because children are not working hard, but because certain habits and misunderstandings are incredibly common and nobody has specifically pointed them out and corrected them.
The good news is that once you know what these mistakes are, they are all fixable. Here are the seven biggest 11+ English mistakes children make in both comprehension and creative writing, and exactly what to do about each one.
Why the Same Mistakes Keep Coming Up
Every child is different, but the 11+ English exam tests a specific and learnable set of skills. Most of the mistakes children make are not about intelligence or effort. They are about not yet understanding exactly what examiners are looking for, and not having had enough practice with the specific formats and question types the exam uses.
Identifying and fixing these mistakes before the exam is one of the highest-value things you can do in your child's preparation. Each mistake on this list is a source of preventable mark loss, and preventing even two or three of them can make a significant difference to the final result.
Mistake 1: Writing Too Much or Too Little
This is the most common mistake across both comprehension and creative writing, and it costs marks at every level of selective school exam.
In comprehension, children who write too much often repeat themselves, lose focus and bury the correct answer inside a long response. Children who write too little leave out the explanation or evidence the examiner needs to award full marks.
The fix is to use the mark allocation as your guide. One mark means one clear, precise point. Four marks means a developed answer with multiple points, each supported by evidence from the text. Train your child to look at the mark before they begin writing each answer.
In creative writing, writing too little is the bigger risk. Many children rush through their story and produce a piece that feels unfinished or underdeveloped. The examiners at top schools want to see sustained, crafted writing, not a quick summary of events.
Mistake 2: Ignoring the Question in Comprehension
This mistake is more common than you might think. A child reads the passage, understands it well, and then answers the question they wished had been asked rather than the one that was.
Read the question twice before writing anything. Ask yourself: what is this question actually asking me to do? Is it asking for retrieval, inference, language analysis or personal response? Each requires a different kind of answer.
Encourage your child to underline the key instruction word in each question. Words like "explain," "suggest," "find" and "describe" all require different approaches, and missing that distinction is a very easy way to lose marks.
Mistake 3: Weak Story Openings in Creative Writing
The opening of a creative writing piece has an outsized impact on how the whole piece is received. Examiners read hundreds of papers. A strong, original opening immediately signals that this is a child worth paying attention to.
The most common weak openings are those that begin with "One day," that start by describing the weather in a generic way, or that spend the first paragraph explaining backstory before anything has actually happened.
Strong openings drop the reader straight into a moment. They use a specific, vivid detail. They create an immediate sense of atmosphere or tension. They make the examiner want to keep reading.
Practise openings specifically and regularly. Take a creative writing prompt and ask your child to write just the first two sentences in three different ways. Then decide together which is the most compelling and why.
Mistake 4: Repetitive Vocabulary
Vocabulary is one of the clearest signals of a child's reading experience and linguistic confidence, and examiners notice it immediately. Children who use the same words repeatedly throughout a piece, especially common adjectives like "nice," "good," "big" and "scary," are signalling a limited vocabulary range that will hold back their marks.
The best way to build vocabulary is wide, regular reading over time. But for targeted exam preparation, keeping a vocabulary journal of interesting words encountered in books, and actively trying to use them in writing, makes a measurable difference relatively quickly.
Study Planet's Writing Accelerator tool gives your child specific vocabulary feedback on every piece of creative writing they submit, identifying where word choices are repetitive or generic and suggesting the kinds of alternatives that would impress an examiner at their target school.
Mistake 5: Missing Punctuation Under Pressure
Children who use punctuation confidently in their everyday schoolwork often make punctuation errors in timed exam conditions, simply because the pressure of writing quickly overrides the careful habits they have built.
Common exam punctuation mistakes include forgetting speech marks in dialogue, using commas instead of full stops to join sentences, and dropping apostrophes entirely when writing fast.
The fix is timed writing practice. Regular practice under exam conditions, with a timer running and no stopping to correct, followed by careful proofreading at the end, builds the specific habit of maintaining accuracy under pressure.
Mistake 6: Not Planning Before Writing
This is one of the most valuable habits to build in creative writing, and one of the most resisted by children who feel that planning wastes precious time. In reality, two minutes of planning almost always produces a better piece of writing than two minutes of extra unplanned writing.
A plan does not need to be long. It might just be a quick note of the opening moment, two or three key events or descriptions in the middle, and how the piece will end. That simple structure prevents the most common creative writing failure at 11+, which is a strong opening that fades into a rushed or inconclusive ending.
A piece of writing with a clear and satisfying ending will always score higher than a longer piece that simply stops because time ran out. Planning makes a strong ending possible.
Mistake 7: Not Checking Work at the End
Most exam papers at top schools build in time for checking, and most children do not use it. Either they finish early and sit passively, or they run out of time and never check at all.
Checking is a specific skill. Simply re-reading what you have written rarely catches errors because your brain reads what it intended to write, not what is actually on the page. Teach your child to check with a specific focus each time. One pass for punctuation. One pass for vocabulary, asking "is there a more interesting word I could use here?" One pass to make sure every comprehension answer has actually answered the question asked.
Getting Detailed Feedback on Every Mistake
Knowing which of these mistakes your child is making in practice is the first step to fixing them. But identifying the specific patterns in your child's work requires an expert eye and a detailed knowledge of what top schools expect.
Study Planet's AI feedback tool analyses your child's comprehension and creative writing and gives you a precise breakdown of strengths, gaps and next steps, based on the exact standards of the most selective 11+ schools. It identifies the specific mistakes from this list that are showing up in your child's work, so you know exactly what to focus on.
Upload a piece of your child's work today and get instant, tutor-level feedback completely free, with no payment details required.
If you want to go deeper on creative writing specifically, read our guide on How to Improve your Child's 11+ Creative Writing.