“Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Repeat the same mistakes over and over, and you don't get any closer to Carnegie Hall.” Sarah Kay
There is no doubt that mock exams and exam practice is important for children preparing for examinations. However, often, too much emphasis can mistakenly be put on doing exam practice
as preparation rather than using this practice to inform preparations.
We run our mock programme rather differently at LNW.
How our Mock Exams work
With LNW children complete the mock exam, in exam conditions, followed by the option of taking a personal 121 or group feedback lesson in which they go through the paper, explore strengths and areas for development and leave with a plan for revision with one of our experienced 11+ teachers. This is a 121 or group tuition lesson with your child in our classroom with one of our experienced team. This experience is a much more beneficial and supportive experience for the children and enables the exam experience to be used to support forward learning, preparations and progress. Children then leave the session with a detailed feedback sheet and a parental consultation.
Experience tells us that assessment experiences must be approached in this developmental way and that paper reports alone do not give accurate feedback (nor the most accurate advice and help) as to how to progress. Children benefit enormously from the support, advice and encouragement that our team give them during their feedback sessions, as well as supporting children with academic improvements, we crucially focus on other areas such as confidence building, exam technique, approaches and mindset all of which play a huge part on the children's attitudes, scores and outcomes.
In our feedback sessions, we discuss how children approached the paper, we understand which questions they guessed or rushed, where they ran out of time, where they might have spent too long on one particular question - all this is not possible to ascertain by analysis of the papers alone. We then work though the questions they struggled with, teach methods, exam technique and can accurately inform where the next steps need to be in terms of preparations.