Parents are stumbling over 11+ style questions that thousands of children across the country face in entrance exams. Grammar was a particular sticking point for many of the 10,000 parents that tackled the exam questions on the Explore Learning website over the last year.
The average overall score of the parents’ mock test was just 61% equating to just a 1% pass rate! Parents who took the quiz were asked a range of questions covering grammar, verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning and mathematical reasoning to give them a taster of what primary school children undertake.
Relative clauses were the biggest puzzle with more than half (59%) of parents getting this question wrong: Identify the part of the sentence that contains a relative clause. On Saturday the car broke down, which distressed Viktor as he was late for the match. Relative clauses start with a relative pronoun such as who, that, which, whose, where or when.
Pronouns proved a stumbling block again with this second grammar question: 53% of those tested failed to identify the pronoun in the following sentence. Do you like strawberry and vanilla ice cream? enquired Katie.
Angles posed another problem with a similar number of parents struggling to correctly identify angles. Just under half (49%) got this question wrong: What is the size of angle x in the triangle below?
More than four in ten (44%) parents couldn’t solve this maths problem: Cara is saving her paper round earnings to buy a new bicycle. She earns £6, seven days a week. The bicycle costs £462, how many weeks will it take her to save enough money to buy the bike?
Charlotte Gater, Head of Curriculum at Explore Learning, says: "The curriculum has changed so much since parents were at school and some of these terms and questions that they were up against will be entirely new concepts. Even if the concepts are not new, if parents haven’t actively used these skills since school, they can be hard to remember. This is why we have open sessions with parents to give guidance on how to support children with the exams and show them what they can do at home”
