How to Prepare for the ISEB Pretest: A Year-by-Year Guide
For many London families, the ISEB Common Pre-Test is the first serious academic hurdle their child will face — and it's natural to wonder whether you're starting preparation at the right time, using the right resources, or doing too little (or too much) at any given stage.
The good news is that ISEB preparation doesn't need to be a source of stress if it's approached in the right order. Below, we've set out a year-by-year timeline of what actually matters at each stage — building a genuine foundation early, introducing exam-specific practice at the right moment, and knowing when to push and when to hold back.
Year 4: Build the Foundation
At this stage, the priority isn't the ISEB itself — it's making sure your child is genuinely secure in the Maths and English being covered at school. If they're falling behind in either subject, it's worth bringing in some extra support now, but the main goal is consolidation: closing any gaps before Year 5, when the pace picks up considerably.
If you'd like to start looking slightly ahead, CGP's 10-minute test books (written for GL Assessment, who set the ISEB tests) for ages 8–9 are a good, low-pressure way to introduce Maths, English, Verbal and Non-Verbal Reasoning in short, manageable bursts. At this age, little and often is far more effective than long, intensive sessions.
Year 5: Introduce ISEB-Specific Practice
Most schools will introduce Atom Learning around this point — an online platform that covers various 11+ exams and now hosts the London Consortium exams on Quest. It's a genuinely useful entry point: user-friendly, engaging for students at the start, and good for building familiarity with online testing and regular homework.
That said, we wouldn't recommend relying on Atom Learning alone for ISEB preparation. Question quality and difficulty can vary considerably, and the mock exam scoring is often unreliable — results can swing wildly and give a very different picture to a student's CAT4 scores, which are a far more dependable benchmark. We'd suggest treating Atom as useful practice early in Year 5, but moving away from its mock exams specifically after the first few attempts.
A stronger option for genuine ISEB-specific practice is Bond Online Premium Plus, which is actually endorsed by ISEB and hosted on Century Tech — the same platform used for the real ISEB Pretest. It allows up to eight mock tests a month and focuses specifically on the topics that appear in the ISEB Pre-Test. It doesn’t have quite the same volume of questions as Atom, so we'd recommend introducing it towards the end of Year 5 and using it consistently through the summer and into Year 6.
Alongside school homework and online practice, the CGP 10-minute test books for ages 9–10 (or 10–11, for students progressing quickly) remain a good option for steady, low-key progress.
Summer of Year 5: The Real Push
With exams typically held in November of Year 6, the summer before is genuinely the last significant window for preparation — and it's worth making the most of it. An hour or two a day, five or six days a week, is enough to make a real difference without eating into the summer holiday, provided the resources used are well-targeted.
Alongside Bond Online Premium Plus, this is the point to bring in resources from the genuine, long-established exam publishers, whose content tends to be far more professionally written and reliable. GL Assessment's own 11+ practice papers are excellent here — they cover every topic and, crucially, get students used to working in a proper written exam format. Writing out full working matters more than it might seem: students are given pen and paper in the real ISEB Pretest but often don't make full use of it. The Schofield & Sims and CGP GL practice papers are also strong options at this stage.
Autumn of Year 6: The Final Stretch
Early in the autumn term, students will sit their CAT4 tests at school — results that will feed into their school reference for senior schools, and arguably the single best available mock for the ISEB itself. They can only be sat once, so there's no opportunity to retake or practise the exact test, but the overlap with ISEB content is substantial (CAT4 is also written by GL Assessment, though its four categories — Verbal, Quantitative, Non-Verbal and Spatial — are labelled slightly differently to the ISEB's Maths, English, Verbal and Non-Verbal).
If you're looking for further mock practice, Pretest Plus offers online CAT4 and ISEB Pretest mocks — though we'd only recommend sitting one or two, as their accuracy, while improved over recent years, still isn't something to place too much weight on.
Beyond that, school homework will naturally ramp up, and continuing with the resources above through the first half of term and the two-week half-term before the ISEB tests (usually held shortly afterwards, online and in school) is generally sufficient. Tutoring support is worth starting at some point in Year 5 — or Year 4, if a student is behind in a particular subject — and can increase modestly in those final two weeks if needed. It doesn't need to be intensive: by this stage, students should be well-prepared, and being well-rested going into the exam matters just as much as any last-minute revision. A couple of hours a day at most is plenty — there's no benefit to exhausting a child right before the exams they've spent a year preparing for.
A Quick Note on Boarding and Day Schools
Most boarding schools, and a good number of independent day schools, use only the ISEB Pretest (alongside CAT4 results) as their academic assessment — so for these schools, the timeline above covers everything you need.
The picture is a little different for some of the most academically selective London day schools — St Paul's, St Paul’s Girls, Westminster, King's College School, North London Collegiate and Latymer among them. These schools typically set their own, considerably harder Maths and English papers around January of Year 6, in addition to the ISEB Pretest. Preparing for these requires a different level of stretch, starting well before the ISEB test itself, in the latter half of Year 5. If your child is applying to one of these schools, it's worth factoring this into your planning early — we'll cover this in more detail in a future post.
Every child's starting point and pace is different, and the timeline above is a general guide rather than a fixed formula — some students will need more support at certain stages, others less. If you'd like tailored advice on where your child currently stands, our team is always happy to talk it through.