P5, P6 or P7: when to start preparing

The honest answer

Most families begin somewhere in P6, and that is comfortable rather than late. Starting earlier can help, but only if what you do early is the right kind of thing — and starting in P7 is not the disaster it is sometimes made to sound.

What consistently matters more than the start date is whether preparation is steady, whether it stays proportionate, and whether the child is still willing by the time it counts.

P5 — reading, and nothing that looks like a test

There is little value in formal Transfer Test preparation at this stage, and some risk in it: two years of practice papers is a reliable way to produce a child who is thoroughly sick of the whole thing by P7.

What does pay off is invisible. Reading widely, being read to, talking about what was read. Times tables to the point of genuine fluency. Mental arithmetic in ordinary situations — change in a shop, time until something happens. None of this looks like test preparation, and all of it is exactly what the assessment eventually draws on.

P6 — the natural time to begin

P6 is where structured practice starts to earn its place. The curriculum has covered enough that most question types are reachable, and there is a full year before it matters.

Keep it light: two or three short sessions a week, organised by topic rather than by whole papers. The aim in P6 is breadth and confidence — finding out what is shaky while there is plenty of time to fix it. Timed papers can wait.

Early P7 — narrowing down

By the start of P7 the useful question changes from "what do they know?" to "what specifically is still weak?". This is where topic-level detail earns its keep: three sessions on the two weakest sub-topics beat six sessions spread evenly across everything.

It is also when timed practice starts to matter, so that pace and stamina are familiar rather than novel.

Starting in P7 — still very much worth doing

If you are starting late, do not spend energy regretting it. A focused few months can move a child a long way, particularly on technique, which is often where the accessible marks are.

Prioritise ruthlessly: find the weak topics quickly, work only on those, and practise under the clock so the format holds no surprises. Trying to cover everything in the time available is the one approach that reliably does not work.

The signal that you started too early

If a child in P5 or early P6 already talks about the test with dread, the start date was wrong for them regardless of what the calendar says. Stop, do something else for a few months, and come back to it. Willingness in September of P7 is worth more than a head start in P5.