You did fractions properly in October. Two weeks on it, a workbook chapter, forty-odd questions, and by the end your child could handle anything you put in front of them. You ticked it off and moved on to ratios.
Then in February a mixed paper turns up with a fractions question on it and your child looks at it as though they've never seen one before. Not rusty. Blank.
The feeling that follows is usually some version of what have we been doing since September? And it's a fair question, because if things don't stay learned then a twelve-month preparation isn't a twelve-month preparation. It's the same three weeks repeated four times.
I want to make the case that this is almost never a memory problem, and that it's usually a problem with how the preparation is arranged rather than anything 'wrong' with your child.
Why does my child forget things we've already covered?
Because forgetting is the default, and most 11+ preparation is unintentionally arranged to make it worse.
Research on how memory decays is fairly blunt about this: without any deliberate return to it, most of what we learn is gone within weeks. That's not a fact about ten-year-olds, or about your child, or about how hard they were trying in October. It's a fact about everyone.
What makes the 11+ a particularly harsh case is the shape of the preparation. Almost every workbook, tutoring programme and home schedule is organised the same way — one topic at a time, in a block, then on to the next one. It's a sensible way to teach something. It happens to be close to the worst possible way to make something stick over twelve months, because it guarantees that each topic is seen intensively for a fortnight and then not at all for the next nine months.
So a child can genuinely learn fractions in October and genuinely not have them in February, without anything having gone wrong in either month.
What's actually going wrong
There are three distinct things hiding under "they've forgotten it", and they need different responses.
They followed rather than learned
Sitting next to your child while they work is the natural thing to do, and it's mostly good. But it changes what the practice is doing.
If you're there — or a worked example is on the facing page, or a tutor is prompting — then at every point where your child might have got stuck, they didn't. The question got answered, the box got ticked, and the session looked productive. What didn't happen is the effortful bit where they retrieve the method themselves, and that effortful bit is most of what causes something to be stored.
This is why a session can feel like it went well and leave almost nothing behind.
The tell: they couldn't do it unaided the next day either, not just three months later.
The topic block did what topic blocks do
This one is the most common and the least obvious, because everything about it feels like it's working at the time.
Doing forty fractions questions in a fortnight produces a child who is very good at fractions by the end of the fortnight. That's real. The problem is that performance during a block of practice is a poor guide to what will survive the following months — you're measuring how well they can do it while it's still fresh and while every question is the same kind of question.
The block is doing two things at once, and both of them flatter the result. The topic is fresh, and your child never has to work out which method applies, because they already know: it's the fractions chapter.
The tell: they were unmistakably good at it in October, but the drop-off is very noticeable in later months.
They have the method but not the trigger
This is the one I'd most encourage you to look for, because it looks identical to forgetting and isn't.
11+ papers are mixed. Workbooks aren't. A child can spend a fortnight on ratios and come out able to do ratios perfectly well, and still be unable to do this:
A recipe for 12 biscuits uses 180g of flour. Sam wants to make 30 biscuits. How much flour does he need?
Nothing in that question announces itself as a ratio question. In the workbook it would have been on page 34 under the heading "Ratio and Proportion", but that's the problem; the heading was doing a great deal of quiet work.
What's missing isn't the method. It's the link between this looks like this sort of question and therefore I use that method. That link only forms when a child meets questions in a mixed order, which in most home preparation only happens on mock papers — by which point it reads as a disaster rather than as the first time the skill has ever been practised.
The tell: tell them the topic and they can suddenly do it. That's not a knowledge gap.
How to tell which one it is
Take a topic you covered at least two months ago and haven't touched since. Give them three or four questions on it, cold, without saying what the topic is. Then work down this ladder, stopping at the first thing that helps.
Reading the response
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They can do it. It stuck. Note what you did differently that month, because whatever it was is worth repeating.
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They can do it once you name the topic. "These are ratio questions." If that unlocks it, the method is intact and what's missing is recognition. This is the third cause, and it's the quickest of the three to fix.
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They can do it after seeing one worked example. The knowledge is there but has decayed and needs reactivating rather than reteaching. This is the second cause. Half an hour of review will do more than a week of starting again.
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A worked example doesn't help. It probably never went in. This is the first cause, and it needs teaching rather than revision.
One topic is a small sample, and children have bad days, so I wouldn't read too much into a single run. But repeating this on three or four old topics usually shows a clear pattern, and the pattern tells you what to change.
What to change
None of this needs more hours. It needs the same hours arranged differently.
Five things that help
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Mix topics within a session. Five questions from three different topics beats fifteen from one. It will feel less tidy and that's why it's considerably more useful, because it forces the recognition step every single time.
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Put old topics back in the diary. A topic covered in October should reappear briefly in November, then in January, then in March. Ten minutes each time is enough. The point is the return, not the volume.
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Test rather than review. Closed book, from memory, before looking anything up. Rereading notes feels like learning and mostly isn't; struggling to recall something is what makes it stick.
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Track dates, not ticks. A list that says "fractions ✓" tells you nothing useful in February. A list that says "fractions — Oct 12, Nov 20, Jan 8" tells you exactly what's due.
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Treat mixed papers as diagnosis, not judgement. A paper taken early that surfaces three forgotten topics has done you an enormous favour. That's three things you can now fix, potentially months out from the actual exam. Don't be disheartened by low scores; they're often exactly what's needed for the best trajectory of practice.
One thing to expect
Mixed, spaced practice feels worse. Your child will get more wrong in the session, work more slowly, and be visibly less fluent than they were during a topic block.
That's the point, and it's the reason most families abandon it after a fortnight. High accuracy during practice mostly tells you the material is fresh. The difficulty is what's doing the work.
What we do about it
The awkward thing about spacing is that it's an administrative problem more than a teaching one. Knowing your child should revisit fractions in eleven weeks is easy; still knowing it in eleven weeks, alongside everything else, is the hard part. A workbook can't help — it's ordered by topic and has no memory of what your child did in October.
That's much of why 11+ Heroes is built the way it is. Our platform keeps track of when your child last worked on something, nudging them back towards exercises they haven't touched in a while. Because returning to old material is genuinely less fun than new material, we attach extra in-game rewards to doing it — which turns out to be a fairly effective way of getting a ten-year-old to voluntarily revisit fractions in February. Our Summits (mini mock exams) then mix topics under exam conditions, which is where you find out what has actually survived.
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