How much work should my child do for the 11+?

Probably less than you think. With 11+ exams being highly competitive - the demand for grammar schools far outweighs the supply - it may be tempting to think that the way to gain the advantage over your child's competitors is to do more homework or to send a child to even more tutors. But learning has a saturation point. Like a face-cloth or a leaf or the air can only hold a maximum amount of moisture, a child - as with any adult - can only hold so much learning at any one time. After this, point a child stops learning and the time is wasted. Unlike a face-cloth or a leaf or the air, a child will get angry/depressed/bored if they receive too much of the thing. This is not good. Getting plenty of exercise and experiencing the world are just as important as working. There is plenty of evidence in the scientific literature - and it seems pretty common sense, anyway - that exercise boosts cognitive functioning. Half an hour of homework after coming home from a game of football at the park is more beneficial than three hours of homework between coming home from school and going to bed. And there's no substitute for experiencing the world. Parents often despair about their child's English performance (it is most children's weakest subject), but the vocabulary a child needs to do well at English isn't just found between the pages of books, its found in conversations, on the labels of products in the supermarket aisles, on the display plaques at museums. There may also be panic about not finishing Bond or CGP ten-minute test books. If we take all the Bond and CGP and other major publisher's 11+ books, you have more than you'll ever need. If you only have time to complete up to test 17 of test 30, this is fine. The question-types in these ten-minute test books usually get recycled (though some publishers do organise their content thematically!), so it's not as though test 30 will have some exotic question to be found nowhere else. Familiarity with question types what is needed; all the repetition in the world won't make a child infallible on a test. Working towards 100% on a test is fine, but expecting that 100% can be achieved on every test if only little Johnny works a little bit more is likely to end in frustration. (Besides, most children will not be able to achieve 100% on any test that has been designed discriminate between different levels of ability.) I cannot be prescriptive about the "ideal" amount of work a child should do for the 11+ because each child is different, and begins their 11+ journey from different places, and different 11+ exams have different degrees of difficulty (and will require some tweaking of one's endeavour, accordingly), but if 11+ preparation is beginning to feel like a warehouse or a factory, then that might be a sign that the workload may be eased a little.