Cognis 11+ exists because the most capable children are often the most poorly served by standard 11+ preparation — and the reason is identifiable, measurable, and fixable.
The 11+ preparation industry is built around a single assumption: that more practice produces better results. For many children, that's true. For a specific type of child — one who constructs understanding before acting rather than pattern-matching automatically — it isn't.
These children understand the material. They can explain their reasoning in detail. They consistently get questions right in relaxed conditions. But in timed papers, something goes wrong. They run out of time. Scores plateau. Tutors prescribe more practice. The gap doesn't close.
The mechanism behind this has been studied in cognitive psychology for over three decades under the name Schema-Based Instruction — the deliberate training of problem classification as a skill independent of problem solving. The research is unambiguous. The application to high-achieving children preparing for selective entry is new.
Cognis 11+ was founded to close that gap: bringing a validated cognitive mechanism out of academic research and into the hands of parents who need it now.
Victor spent over a decade in senior analytics roles at large-scale digital platforms, leading experimentation frameworks, conversion analysis, and data strategy for products with tens of millions of users.
His background spans quantitative analysis, product design, and behavioural economics — with a particular focus on how people make decisions under pressure and time constraints. He holds a BCom (Actuarial), LLB, and CFA.
At Cognis 11+, Victor leads product development, the diagnostic framework, and the design of the Classification Speed Programme.
Martijn is a Ramón y Cajal research fellow at the University of Girona, where he investigates how the brain processes information — consciously and unconsciously — and how automatic versus deliberate cognitive processes interact.
His research career spans institutions including Cambridge, NYU, Sony Computer Science Laboratories Tokyo, and the Free University of Brussels. He uses psychophysics, neuroimaging, and brain stimulation to study how perception and internally generated information emerge.
At Cognis 11+, Martijn provides the academic foundation for the cognitive profiling methodology and oversees the research integrity of the assessment framework.
Schema-Based Instruction (SBI) was developed over several decades as a tool for children who struggle with mathematics — specifically to help them identify problem types before attempting to solve them. The evidence base is extensive and the effect sizes are large.
Cognis 11+ applies this mechanism in a different direction: not as a catch-up tool for children who are behind, but as a performance optimisation for children who are ahead — children whose reasoning ability is genuine and whose preparation simply needs a different entry point.
The diagnostic, the classification training, and the session structure are all grounded in this research. We are not selling a new theory. We are applying an established one to a problem it was never pointed at.
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