Your child can speedily recall their times tables. They can do short division without blinking. Give them a page of calculations and they'll get most of them right.
Then they hit something like this:
A baker makes 8 trays of buns. Each tray holds 12 buns. She sells three quarters of the buns. How many buns are left?
And they stop. Not because the maths is hard — every step in that question is something they can already do. They stop because they don't know which sums to do, or in what order, or when they've finished. Word problems (aka worded problems) can be overwhelming.
This is something that multiple parents have raised with us. If this all sounds familiar, here's what I think is going on.
Why can my child do the sums but not the word problems?
Because they are two different skills, and one of them typically gets practised much more than the other.
A word problem asks a child to do two jobs in sequence. First, to translate a short piece of English into a mathematical plan. Second, to carry out that plan. A lot of primary maths teaching, and 11+ practice at home, drills the second job heavily and the first job barely at all.
That gap matters more in the 11+ than it does in school, because when trying to differentiate students who are all comfortable with isolated skills, word problems pose an additional challenge. A child who is fluent at calculation but shaky at translation will look strong on a worksheet but weak on a paper.
The encouraging part is that translation is a teachable skill with a fairly small number of failure modes. Once you can spot which one your child is hitting, it becomes a much more tractable problem.
What's actually going wrong
They're matching keywords instead of reading the question
Somewhere along the way, most children pick up a shortcut: altogether means add, left means subtract, each means multiply or divide. It works on simple questions, so it gets reinforced.
It falls apart the moment a question is written to test understanding rather than naive pattern matching. A question containing the word 'left' might require three operations before the subtraction. A question containing 'altogether' might need a division first. The child who has learned to scan for the keyword and grab the two nearest numbers will confidently produce a wrong answer without ever having read the sentence.
The tell: your child answers quickly and confidently, and the answer bears no relation to the question.
They lose the thread on multi-step questions
This is the big one, and it's why parents so often describe the problem in terms of questions 'with multiple parts'.
A single-step question holds one thing in mind. A three-step question asks a child to hold the story, the current position in the story, the intermediate answer they've just worked out, and what they still need to do with it — all at once, under time pressure. That's a significant working-memory load.
What often happens is that the child does the first step correctly, but the effort of doing it pushes the plan out of their head. They arrive at a number, the number feels like an ending, and they write it down. In the baker question at the top, that number is 72 — how many buns were sold. Correct arithmetic, but answering a question nobody asked.
The tell: the wrong answer is always a real quantity from the question, just not the one requested.
The story needs running backwards
Some questions describe a process forwards but ask the child to reverse it. Sale prices are the classic case: the question tells you what happened after the discount and asks what things cost before.
Children find this genuinely hard, and not because they're weak at percentages. Running a narrative backwards is a distinct cognitive move. Most children will simply run it forwards and produce a plausible-looking wrong answer.
The tell: the answer moves in the right direction but from the wrong starting point — a discount applied to the sale price rather than the original.
Two worked examples
Read these looking at the wrong answers rather than the right ones. If one of them is what your child does, you've found the problem.
Example 1: stopping too early
A baker makes 8 trays of buns. Each tray holds 12 buns. She sells three quarters of the buns. How many buns are left?
The common wrong answer: 72. That's three quarters of 96 — the buns sold. Correct arithmetic, wrong question.
The route through: 8 × 12 = 96 buns in total. Three quarters sold means one quarter left. A quarter of 96 is 24.
Example 2: the story runs backwards
A coat is reduced by 20% in a sale. The sale price is £36. What was the original price?
The common wrong answer: £43.20. That's £36 plus 20% of £36. The child has run the discount forwards from the wrong starting point.
The route through: if 20% has come off, £36 must be 80% of the original price. So 10% is £4.50, and 100% is £45.
Then check it against the story: 20% of £45 is £9, and £45 − £9 = £36. That check takes five seconds and catches this error every time.
Tips that your child can use on any word problem
These tips are repeatable, so they remove the need to have a good idea under pressure. You don't have to use these on every question, but if your child's struggling with word problems, I'd suggest giving them all a go.
Five tips
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Cover the numbers and retell the story. In their own words, out loud. If they can't, they haven't read it properly — and no amount of arithmetic will rescue that.
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Read the last sentence again and say what's being asked for. Out loud, as a full phrase: "how many buns are left". This single step prevents most of the answering-the-wrong-question errors.
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Work backwards from the answer. "To find how many are left, I need to know how many there were in total." Working backwards can make it clearer for your child to identify the required steps.
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Write down each intermediate answer, labelled. For instance, not '96' but '96 buns in total'. Labelling will help to reduce working-memory load and also stops an intermediate answer masquerading as a final one.
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Check the answer against the story. Does it make sense? If the sale price was £36 and you've calculated an original price of £43.20, does that match "reduced by 20%"?
One thing to expect
Incorporating these tips will likely be slower than what your child currently does, but the point is to lay the groundwork for high accuracy. Once that's achieved, speed can be regained through practice.
What we do about it
Our Word Problems exercise exists specifically because of how often parents asked us for it. It works through word questions in graded difficulty, building towards the multi-step and reverse-process questions that cause the most trouble. Every question shows the full worked solution afterwards, so a wrong attempt can always teach something meaningful.
The first difficulty level is free — no payment details needed! You'll just need an account so that your child's progress saves. Click here to get started.