Test papers by school

When a school's own papers help, and when they don't

Most parents arrive here looking for one school: their child's own, or the one they hope the child will move to. A school's own papers show how its teachers word questions and how much working they expect to see, which is useful before that school's tests. They also show only that school's habits. Add papers from two or three other schools before deciding a topic is secure.

A well-known school's papers are not harder by default. Difficulty depends on the cohort a paper was written for and when in the year it was sat, so compare a paper with the child's recent schoolwork rather than with the school's reputation. Our guide to using past-year papers covers how to pace that practice and mark it for the reason behind each mistake.

Another 317 schools have fewer than 20 papers each, too few for a page of their own. Their papers are still in the catalogue: open the test papers by level and every paper in a set is listed with the school it came from.