Thinking Skills is the paper most children have never seen anything like — and the one where taught methods make the biggest difference. Here is what the paper actually asks of your child, and how we prepare them for it.
Thinking Skills sits alongside Reading, Mathematical Reasoning and Writing in both the OC and Selective papers. It is not a test of knowledge — there is nothing to memorise, and no school subject that covers it. It is a test of reasoning, and it broadly covers three areas:
Working with arguments: recognising what an argument actually claims, what it takes for granted, what would strengthen or undermine it, and where the reasoning goes wrong. These questions reward precision — the trap is almost always the answer that merely sounds relevant.
Drawing conclusions that must be true from a set of conditions: conditional statements, ordering problems, overlapping groups, and puzzles where some of the information given is false. Under time pressure, this is where untrained students guess — and where trained students don't.
Visualising objects from different views, counting and folding shapes in three dimensions, navigating grids, maps and directions, and drawing inferences from information that is implied but never stated.
Thinking Skills is taught in our classes as a subject in its own right, from Year 3 onwards — not bolted on as exam practice in the final months. Every question type on the paper has a reliable, written approach, and our students are taught a specific method for each one, then given the practice to make it automatic.
Those methods are our own design, developed and refined over years of preparing students for the OC and Selective tests. We teach them in class, to our students — we don't publish them.
What we will say publicly is this: guessing strategies collapse under time pressure, and pattern-spotting alone does not survive a hard paper. A child who has a method for each question type walks into the exam with a plan. A child who has only done practice papers is hoping the next paper looks like the last one.
The common thread: for every type of Thinking Skills question, we apply a written, repeatable method. That is deliberate. Under exam pressure, students who externalise their working onto paper using our techniques beat students who reason in their heads, almost every time.
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