Grammar schools / Sutton boys' Stage 2 English (written) / Mock 4
Sutton Boys' Second Stage Examination · Second Stage
Sutton Boys' Second Stage English Mock Paper 4
Preparation for the Sutton Boys' Second Stage Examination, sat for admission to Wilson's School, Sutton Grammar School and Wallington County Grammar School. This is an original mock paper written by Revision Library. It is not a past paper and it is not an official specimen.
Print the paper (PDF)Paper and mark scheme (PDF)
- Time allowed
- 50 minutes
- Total marks
- 30
- Questions
- 1
- Level
- Selective standard
- You have 50 minutes. There is one task on this paper and it is worth 30 marks.
- Read the stimulus material and then the task itself twice before you begin. Everything you have to do is written down for you.
- Spend the first five to ten minutes planning, and plan on the paper rather than in your head. Planning is never marked as writing and crossing it out costs you nothing.
- Write in continuous prose on the lined pages. Use headings only if the form you have been asked for normally has them.
- Keep the last five minutes to read your work back for spelling, punctuation and sense. Your handwriting should stay readable when you are writing at speed.
- This is a practice paper written for Revision Library. Wilson's, Sutton Grammar and Wallington County Grammar release no specimen papers, so the task type here follows consistent independent accounts of the real examination rather than any published material.
English
Read the description of the photograph below, then answer the task that follows it. Write your answer on the lined pages.
- 130 marks
Stimulus: a photograph, described for you
A photograph hangs just inside the door of a town museum. It was taken on the morning after the river came over its banks.
In the picture the high street has become a slow brown canal. A bus shelter stands in water that reaches the middle of its glass. A woman in wellingtons and a dressing gown wades past the butcher's shop holding a cat above her shoulder with both hands. Behind her a man carries a kitchen chair out of a doorway and does not appear to know where he is taking it. Every shop window shows the same grey sky twice, once in the glass and once in the water underneath it.
Task: write a description of this scene for Weather, a collection of new writing that your local library is publishing. Your readers will never see the photograph. Describe the moment itself rather than telling the story of the flood.
Planning: before you begin, decide the path your reader's eye will travel along, and pick three details from the photograph that you will make your own. Your writing must place the reader in the street, use senses the photograph could never capture, and finish on one small detail rather than on a summary.
Marks are given for following these instructions exactly, for the planning behind the piece, for the quality of the writing and for the precision and range of the words you use.
Spend about 40 minutes on this task.
Answers, mark scheme and worked explanations
- 130 marks
Following the task (8 marks)
- Describes a moment rather than narrating a sequence of events with a beginning, a middle and a rescue.
- Written for readers who have not seen the picture, so nothing is assumed and nothing is referred to as this photograph.
- All three planning points are honoured, including the ending on a single small detail.
- The given details are used and transformed rather than simply listed in the order they appear above.
Planning and structure (7 marks)
- The description moves in a controlled order, for example from the whole street inward to one pair of hands.
- Each paragraph takes charge of one part of the scene, so the reader is never lost.
- The final sentence is deliberately chosen and does not restate what has already been said.
Quality of writing and vocabulary (9 marks)
- Precise nouns and strong verbs carry the description instead of piles of adjectives.
- Comparisons are fresh and belong to this street; nothing arrives second-hand from a film.
- Sound, cold, smell and stillness are used, which is exactly what a photograph cannot give a reader.
Technical accuracy (6 marks)
- Long descriptive sentences stay under control and are correctly punctuated.
- Commas separate items in a list accurately and full stops are never replaced by them.
- Spelling is secure and the writing remains legible throughout.
The instruction that decides most of the marks here is the one that says describe the moment rather than telling the story. A description holds still. It does not have a plot, a rescue, a helicopter or a happy ending, and the moment it acquires one it has stopped answering the question. Think of yourself as standing in that water with a notebook while everything around you is paused.
Use the stimulus as a starting point, not as a shopping list. Copying out the shelter, then the woman, then the man, then the windows in that order produces a piece that reads like an inventory. Instead choose an order of your own and choose what to enlarge. You might open wide with the whole drowned street, come slowly in to the woman and the way the cat has dug its claws into the shoulder of her dressing gown, and end on the kitchen chair standing in six inches of water because the man has finally put it down. That is a shape, and shape is what earns the structure marks.
Now add what the photograph cannot hold. A picture has no sound, so give the reader the suck and slap of water against the shelter, a car alarm somewhere it should not be, and the fact that a flooded street is much quieter than a normal one. A picture has no temperature, no smell of drains and wet plaster, and no time passing. These are the details that make a marker sit up, and they are the reason the task tells you your reader has not seen the image.
Three mistakes cost marks reliably. The first is turning the piece into a story about the woman's night. The second is stacking adjectives, so that everything becomes a dark, dirty, murky, brown, muddy water; one exact word beats five approximate ones, and brown water that carries a traffic cone past the bakery is more vivid than any adjective. The third is a weak ending, either a moral about how we should look after the planet or a sentence beginning it just goes to show. End on the chair, or on the cat's tail, or on the second grey sky lying in the road.
Timing: spend seven or eight minutes planning, and write your plan as a route, three or four stops in order, with two or three chosen words next to each. Write for about twenty-eight minutes and do not chase length; a controlled page beats a rambling two. Save five minutes to read it aloud in your head and cut any sentence that adds nothing.
Sutton Boys' Second Stage Examination, Second Stage, English (written). Written by Revision Library on 2026-08-28, independent check pending.
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