Grammar schools / Sutton boys' Stage 2 English (written) / Mock 7
Sutton Boys' Second Stage Examination · Second Stage
Sutton Boys' Second Stage English Mock Paper 7
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 news item below, then answer the task that follows it. Write your answer on the lined pages.
- 130 marks
Stimulus: a news item
SHOE PULLED FROM DRAINED RESERVOIR IS 1,700 YEARS OLD
A leather shoe lifted out of the silt at Ladybarn Reservoir in Derbyshire, during repairs to the dam last summer, has been dated to Roman Britain. It is a child's left shoe, about the size a seven-year-old would wear today, and the stitching along one side is still complete.
Archaeologists say the silt kept air away from the leather, which is why it has lasted when almost nothing else from that century has been recovered nearby. The shoe goes on display at the county museum in the spring.
Task: the museum needs a single-page information sheet to stand beside the shoe in its case. Write it. It will be read by families with children, standing up, in a busy room, so it has to be organised and clear as well as interesting.
Planning: choose your headings before you write any sentences, because on an information sheet the headings are the plan. Your sheet must explain what the object is and how old it is, explain why this shoe survived when other things did not, and tell the reader something the news item does not say but which can reasonably be worked out from it.
You are marked on how exactly the instructions have been followed, on the shaping of the piece, on the quality of the writing and on how precise and varied your vocabulary is.
Spend about 40 minutes on this task.
Answers, mark scheme and worked explanations
- 130 marks
Following the task (8 marks)
- Written as an information sheet, with headings and full sentences beneath them, not as a story or a newspaper article.
- Pitched at families reading while standing in a gallery: clear, short-paragraphed and immediately interesting.
- All three planning points are met, including the one that asks for a reasonable inference.
- The stimulus supplies the facts and the sheet organises them, rather than the sheet following the news item sentence by sentence.
Planning and structure (7 marks)
- Headings are chosen so that a reader can find any one fact without reading the whole sheet.
- Sections are ordered from the most striking fact to the most detailed, and each section stays on its own subject.
- The sheet closes on something that sends the reader back to the case, such as what to look for in the stitching.
Quality of writing and vocabulary (9 marks)
- Sentences are compact and confident, and the present tense is used for the object as it exists now.
- Subject vocabulary is used and, where necessary, explained: silt, preserved, excavation, tanned leather, artefact.
- The tone is informative rather than chatty, but never dull, and speaks to adults and children at once.
Technical accuracy (6 marks)
- Dates, numbers and measurements are written accurately and in a consistent style.
- Capital letters are correct on place names, periods and the museum itself.
- Spelling and punctuation are secure and the layout is neat enough to be read at a glance.
An information sheet is a piece of writing with its skeleton on the outside. Four or five headings, each followed by two or three full sentences, will serve you far better than one unbroken block of prose. Sensible headings for this object might be What is it, How old is it, Why did it survive, What it tells us and What to look for. Notice that those headings do the planning for you, which is exactly why the task tells you to choose them first.
Write in full sentences underneath them. A common error on this kind of task is to abandon prose altogether and produce a list of fragments, which throws away most of the nine marks for quality of writing. A museum label is short, but it is properly written: Leather rots quickly in open air. In the silt at the bottom of a reservoir there is almost no oxygen, and without oxygen the bacteria that would normally destroy leather cannot live.
The third planning point is the demanding one, and it is the difference between a good sheet and a strong one. You are asked for something the news item does not say but which follows from it. That means inference, not invention. It is reasonable to say that a shoe of that size means a child of about seven lived, walked and probably worked near this valley in the Roman period, or that a shoe made for a left foot tells us it was shaped rather than made to fit either foot, or that finding one shoe and nothing else suggests the rest of the settlement lies somewhere still buried. It is not reasonable to say the shoe belonged to a boy called Marcus who dropped it while running from a soldier. Museums do not print that, and a marker will see the difference immediately.
Two further traps are worth naming. The first is drifting into narrative, because a child's shoe is an emotive object and it is tempting to write a story about the child who lost it; the task asks for information and the form marks are lost the moment the story starts. The second is copying the news item in the same order, which produces a sheet with no headings worth having and shows no organising thought at all. Rearranging is the skill being tested here.
Timing: five or six minutes to fix your headings and jot one or two facts under each, which is the whole plan. Around twenty-nine minutes to write, keeping each section to two or three sentences so that the sheet stays the length a standing reader will actually finish. Five minutes at the end to check your dates, your capital letters and whether every heading is still answered by the text underneath it.
Sutton Boys' Second Stage Examination, Second Stage, English (written). Written by Revision Library on 2026-08-28, independent check pending.
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