Your child is through to paper 2
Paper 1 was the filter. Paper 2 is the competition.
Clearing the first round puts your child in rare company. It also changes what they are up against. From here, every child in the room is one of the ones who got through.
The super-selectives are no longer testing what your child knows. They are testing how your child thinks, with questions designed to find the one habit that lets a strong candidate down.
What paper 2 asks of them
- Reason when there is no method to reach for
- Reflect: notice when an answer cannot be right
- Take a hint and run with it, rather than waiting for the next one
- Teach themselves the last step
None of it can be drilled. All of it can be seen, if you watch a child reason out loud on questions hard enough to make them think.
A different ballgame, not a harder version of the same one
Parents are often caught out when a child who sailed through the first round finds the second a fight. Three things change at once.
The field has changed
Paper 1 removed most of the entry. Everyone still standing is quick, well taught and well drilled. Your child is no longer measured against the year group, but against the children who also got through.
The questions have changed
Paper 2 is built to be unfamiliar. There is no method to recognise, so the thorough, work-through-everything approach that carried paper 1 starts to cost time rather than earn marks.
Small weaknesses are magnified
A reasoning habit that costs nothing on a routine question is exactly what a paper 2 question is designed to punish. At this level one mark can decide the outcome.
So: does your child have a blind spot you could still fix?
Not a gap in the maths. A habit in how they reason, of the kind that appears on one question in fifteen and never in homework: trusting one example, stopping a search too early, accepting an answer that cannot be right. On paper 1 it cost nothing.
Marks cannot tell you, because a right answer looks the same whether it came from sound reasoning or from a guess that happened to work. Only watching them think can.
You have come this far
Picture exam day. One question turns on something your child usually gets right. The blind spot surfaces, as it does once in a while, and a mark goes. At this level, a mark is often the distance between an offer and a letter that begins “unfortunately”.
Now picture the same exam after you had seen it coming: ten focused minutes on that one habit, a few weeks before, and the question is just another question.
There may be nothing to find, and plenty of children come through with a report that largely says so. That is worth knowing too. But after the tutoring, the papers and the years of work, an hour is a small price for finding out either way.
Find the blind spot while there is still time to close it
Twenty-four competition-grade questions, answered out loud, and a report that shows you exactly where your child’s reasoning turns.