11+ Ratio Help: Why Your Child Keeps Getting Stuck (And What Actually Works)

Your child can divide. They can multiply. Sit them in front of a ratio question and the answer still comes out wrong.

I'm Aadam, and I've taught ratio to hundreds of 11+ and GCSE students at SHLC. It is the topic where the arithmetic is almost never the problem, which is exactly why more practice of the same kind rarely helps.

The real problem isn't the dividing

Watch a child get a ratio question wrong and you will usually see clean, correct arithmetic that answers a slightly different question to the one on the page.

Two mistakes account for most of it.

The order. The question says three boys for every two girls. Your child writes 2:3. Everything after that is right, and every mark is gone.

Dividing by the wrong number. Share £40 in the ratio 3:2. Your child divides by 3, or by 2, instead of by 5. They have done the division perfectly well. They have just divided the total by a part instead of by the number of parts.

Neither of those is a maths gap. Both are a setting-out gap, and a worksheet full of ratio questions will not close it because the worksheet never shows them how to lay the question out in the first place.

Why worksheets alone don't fix it

A ratio worksheet gives your child twenty questions and an answer sheet. If they have the order wrong, they get twenty questions wrong, check the answers, and learn that they are bad at ratio.

What they needed was someone to stop them at question one and say: write the letters above the numbers before you write anything else.

There is a second problem specific to this topic. Ratio questions look nearly identical on the page but need genuinely different methods. Sharing a total, finding a difference, scaling a recipe up, working out which packet is better value. A child who has drilled one type recognises the words in the others and reaches for the method they know. On a mixed 11+ paper, that is where the marks go.

The ratio skills that trip children up, in order

These build on each other. A gap early on shows up as confusion much later, which is why jumping straight to sharing problems rarely works.

1. Writing the ratio the right way round. Reading a ratio off a diagram or out of a sentence, and getting the two numbers in the order the question asked for.

2. Ratio and fractions are not the same thing. In a ratio of 1:3 there are four parts, not three. Children who miss this get every fraction-of-a-ratio question wrong for years.

3. Simplifying, including different units. 40cm to 2m is not 40:2. The units have to match before anything else happens.

4. Equivalent ratios and missing values. Finding the multiplier that takes one ratio to another, which is the engine behind every scaling question that follows.

5. Sharing a total. Add the parts, divide the total, multiply back up. Straightforward once the first four are secure and near-impossible before that.

6. Difference problems. One child gets £12 more than the other. The total is not given. This is the type that separates a pass from a good mark on a selective paper.

7. Scaling and best buys. Recipes up and down, choosing between the unitary method and a common multiple, and comparing two prices per unit.

What actually closes the gap

Three things, in this order.

Fix the setting out before anything else. Letters above the numbers, every single time, even on questions your child finds easy. O above the 3, B above the 2. Once that is a habit, the wrong-order mistake disappears completely, and it takes days rather than months.

Make the parts visible. A bar model split into its parts turns an abstract instruction into something a child can point at. When they can see five boxes and know the total, dividing by 5 stops being a rule they might misremember and becomes the obvious thing to do.

Mix the question types deliberately. Once each method is secure on its own, practise them jumbled up. Recognising which method a question needs is a separate skill from performing it, and the exam only ever tests the two together.

The lessons we built to fix this

Our Ratio and Proportion Mastery Bundle is built around exactly that order. Three interactive lessons, 19 units, 286 questions.

Introduction to Ratio covers skills one to four: writing ratios from diagrams and from words, the fractions-and-ratios distinction, simplifying, different units, and equivalent ratios.

Sharing and Ratio Problems covers two and three part sharing, difference problems, forming a ratio from context, and multi-step questions where the ratio changes partway through.

Recipes, Scaling and Best Buys covers the four scaling methods, choosing between them, maximising one ingredient, and best buys.

Every method writes the letters above the numbers first, so the order mistake cannot happen. The bar model on screen splits into its parts one step at a time, so your child sees what one part is worth before multiplying back up. Answers stay hidden until clicked, which means they have to commit to an answer before they can check it.

If ratio is one gap among several, these three lessons also sit inside The Complete 11+ Maths Course, which numbers all 80 lessons 1 to 80 so you always know what to work on next.

What to do this week

You do not need to buy anything to start on this.

Sit with your child and give them three ratio questions. Before they calculate anything, ask them to write the two letters above the two numbers. If they cannot tell you which letter goes above which, you have found the gap, and it is the fixable one.

Then ask them this: in a ratio of 2:3, how many parts are there altogether? If the answer is not five, start there before anything else.

If you want the full sequence taught properly rather than assembled from worksheets, the Ratio and Proportion Mastery Bundle covers it end to end, or you can buy the single lesson your child is stuck on. And if you would rather someone looked at where your child actually stands first, book a free consultation and we will talk it through.

Aadam, SHLC Tutors