How We Created Our Questions

Original and Relevant Questions Only

The thousands of questions in our database are all original, created by a team of experienced teachers & tutors. For each of the four subjects, we have specialists working on the questions, to make sure the questions are at the right level, and formatted just like the ISEB Pre-Test questions are.  Questions are checked and re-checked, with a particular emphasis on staying within the Pre-Test curriculum. We want our users to be prepared for the Pre-Tests, never discouraged by questions that are beyond what they’ll be tested on.

The Question-Creation team includes a maths teacher with 20+ years of experience teaching years 5 – 8 (independent sector) as well as specific experience in secondary school admissions, a private maths tutor specialising in the Years 5 & 6 curriculum, primary school teachers who taught (maths, English and Reasoning) up to Y6 in both State and Independent sectors, a secondary teacher in the Independent sector with extensive knowledge about the admissions processes across the board, a specialist English & VR tutor for Years 4 – 8, amongst others.

We used a varied team of people to create our questions to reflect the fact that there are many methods used (particularly in maths) to work out the answers. It should be noted that the explanations to the questions usually only cover one method, but there are of course multiple ‘right’ ways to get to the correct answer.

Whilst the ISEB website states that ‘no special preparation is required’ for the Pre-Tests, it is common knowledge that the majority of candidates will be preparing in some way, up to two years in advance if they are lucky enough to be in a ‘feeder school’.

The ISEB website provides about eight questions per subject in order to familiarise the child with the format, but do not publicise any of their test papers or questions.  We ensure our questions remain up-to-date by keeping a careful eye on the Y5 & Y6 National Curricula, which is what the ISEB uses to set the content of their tests. It is a public framework issued and updated by the the UK Department for Education. (A copy of the National Curriculum can be found here.)