Grammar schools / Sutton boys' Stage 2 English (written) / Mock 5
Sutton Boys' Second Stage Examination · Second Stage
Sutton Boys' Second Stage English Mock Paper 5
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
- Strong candidate
- 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 survey findings below, then answer the task that follows them. Write your answer on the lined pages.
- 130 marks
Stimulus: findings from a survey
Last term a road safety charity asked 1,240 pupils in Year 6, across three counties, about their journey to school.
Just under a third walk or cycle the whole way. Almost half are driven, and of those, more than a third live less than a mile from the gate. Asked why they are driven, most pupils did not choose distance or weather. They chose traffic: the roads outside their schools felt dangerous to walk along, mainly because of the cars belonging to other families.
The same pupils were then asked what would change their minds. The answer given most often was one road closed to cars for twenty minutes at each end of the day.
Task: you have been invited to speak for four minutes at a meeting of your town council. Write the speech you would deliver, asking the councillors to try closing one road outside one school for twenty minutes each morning and each afternoon. Most of the adults listening drive.
Planning: work out first what your listeners are most likely to object to, and decide where in the speech you will deal with it. Your speech must interpret the findings rather than reciting them, make one clear request the council could genuinely act on, and finish with something a listener is still carrying when they walk out of the room.
The examiners are watching how precisely you follow the task, how carefully the speech has been planned, how well it is written and how wide and exact your vocabulary is.
Spend about 40 minutes on this task.
Answers, mark scheme and worked explanations
- 130 marks
Following the task (8 marks)
- Written to be spoken aloud in about four minutes, not read silently off a page.
- Aimed squarely at a room of adult councillors, most of whom drive, and never at a school assembly.
- One specific, actionable request is made, and the likely objection to it is answered somewhere in the speech.
- The survey is interpreted, so that the figures are used to prove a point rather than being repeated as a list.
Planning and structure (7 marks)
- An opening that earns attention, a middle that builds one step at a time, and a close that lands.
- The objection is placed deliberately rather than tacked on at the end as an afterthought.
- Ideas are linked so that each paragraph follows from the one before instead of restarting.
Quality of writing and vocabulary (9 marks)
- The rhythm is spoken: short sentences among longer ones, and nothing a speaker would stumble over.
- Rhetorical devices such as repetition, contrast and the direct question are used with restraint and for a purpose.
- Vocabulary is exact and appropriate to a council chamber: proposal, trial, congestion, provision, evidence.
Technical accuracy (6 marks)
- Numbers and quantities are written accurately and consistently.
- Punctuation supports the delivery, with commas and full stops marking where a speaker would breathe.
- Spelling and grammar are secure and the writing is legible.
There is one idea buried in this survey, and finding it is what separates a good speech from an ordinary one. The children are driven because the roads feel dangerous. The roads feel dangerous because of the cars. The cars belong to the families of the children being driven. That circle is your speech. If your opening two sentences put that loop in front of the councillors, everything afterwards has something to hold on to. If instead you begin by announcing that 1,240 pupils were surveyed in three counties, you have spent your best moment on an introduction nobody needs.
Use the numbers, but use few of them and use them hard. More than a third of the children who are driven live less than a mile from the gate is a sentence a councillor will remember for the rest of the meeting. Five statistics in a row is a spreadsheet read aloud. Choose one or two, say them slowly, and then explain what they mean for the street outside one particular school.
The audience is the trap. Most of the people listening drive their own children to school, and a speech that tells them they are selfish will lose the room in fifteen seconds. Concede early and genuinely: nobody drives half a mile for fun, they do it because the pavement outside the gate feels like the edge of a motorway. Then the request stops being an accusation and becomes an offer of a way out. This is also where the marks for register live, because a speech to adults must be confident without becoming rude.
Two further mistakes are common. The first is asking for something the council cannot do, such as banning cars from the town; a twenty-minute closure of one road, tried for one term and then reviewed, is small enough that saying yes is easy. The second is writing an essay and calling it a speech. A speech addresses the room directly, repeats a phrase on purpose, uses a question it intends to answer itself, and ends on a short sentence rather than a paragraph of conclusion.
Timing: eight minutes planning is not too much on this task, because the thinking is the hard part. Sketch your opening line, your one statistic, your concession, your request and your last sentence, in that order. Write for about twenty-seven minutes; a four-minute speech is not long, so resist filling every line. Keep five minutes to check that every sentence can be said out loud without running out of air.
Sutton Boys' Second Stage Examination, Second Stage, English (written). Written by Revision Library on 2026-08-28, independent check pending.
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