This paper is hard for Year 5: 14 of the 25 questions are Year 6 or secondary content. How she did at each level:

From her everyday practice we expected 19⁠–⁠21 right. She got 18, and three of the misses look like misreading.

She answered 23 questions in the first 36 minutes, faster than the paper needs. The next 15 minutes, 6½ of them over time, went on two hard questions, and neither came right. Stopped at 45 minutes, she would still have had 18.

Had those 15 minutes gone on re-reading the short questions first, the three misread ones were the likeliest to come back.

The other two: one she ran out of time on, and one worth asking her about.

• Question 20, the hardest in Part A, came right: the most tins (78) that fit in a triangle stack in a 100 cm × 72 cm window. She had to keep both the height and the width in mind, and took 4 minutes over it.

1. 1
   Next paper

   When she gets to the end, go back and re-read the short questions first. If a question has had 5 minutes with no progress, leave it and move on.

2. 2
   This week · about 20 minutes

   On the knowledge map, do two focus sets of Complex Fraction Word Problems (Year 5), then two of Percentage Word Problems (Year 6), 3 questions a set. Then two sets of Two-Set Venn Diagrams (Year 4), which practise exactly what question 19 was missing: counting the overlap only once.

3. 3
   Leave for now

   Question 25, working back from two pie charts, is the hardest type on the paper. No need to practise it yet.

She practised on 5 of the first 6 days, then not at all from the 7th to the 21st. On the 22nd she did one round of mental maths; on the 26th, 27th and 28th she sat a PMC paper each day; and on the 29th, after reading the mock reports, she spent 1 hour 50 minutes practising.

• National Curriculum questions are secure: across the three papers she got 91% of the ones she answered, the same as in August.

• Equations, first time out: of the questions that needed an unknown and an equation, she got 4 of the 5. That is Year 6 work, and she has not met it in her practice yet.

• Straight back to it after the reports: on the 29th she worked through every area where the three papers lost marks and got 28 of 38 right. Estimating lengths and weights got the most practice, 10 of 14 right.