Grammar schools / Sutton boys' Stage 2 English (written) / Mock 9
Sutton Boys' Second Stage Examination · Second Stage
Sutton Boys' Second Stage English Mock Paper 9
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
- Hard
- 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 quotation and its single line of context below, then answer the task that follows. Write your answer on the lined pages.
- 130 marks
Stimulus: the closing lines of a short story
These are the last two lines of a short story called The Long Way Round. You are told nothing else about it at all.
'She had come back to the same gate, in the same coat, on the same wet afternoon in March. Only she was not the same, and the gate no longer opened the way she remembered.'
Task: write the diary entry that this woman writes that night. Her reader is nobody but herself, so the entry may hold things she would never say aloud to anyone. Every word of it must fit the two lines above.
Planning: decide two things the lines do not tell you, namely where she has been and what has changed, and hold both of them steady in your head before you start. Your entry must be written in the first person and dated, must make clear why that gate matters without stopping to explain it, and must sound like a real person writing at the end of a long day rather than a story being performed for an audience.
The examiners are looking at how precisely the instructions have been followed, at the planning behind the entry, at the quality of the writing and at the reach and accuracy of your vocabulary.
Spend about 40 minutes on this task.
Answers, mark scheme and worked explanations
- 130 marks
Following the task (8 marks)
- A diary entry, dated, in the first person, written to nobody but the writer herself.
- Wholly consistent with the stimulus: the gate, the coat, the return, the wet March afternoon and the fact that she has changed.
- The importance of the gate is made clear through what she chooses to write about, not through a paragraph of explanation.
- The private register is sustained, so nothing is set up for a reader who is not supposed to exist.
Planning and structure (7 marks)
- The entry is shaped even while it sounds unplanned: it circles a subject, avoids it, and finally arrives at it.
- Paragraphs turn as the thought turns rather than at even intervals.
- The closing lines settle on something, whether a decision, a refusal or an admission.
Quality of writing and vocabulary (9 marks)
- A convincing adult voice: tired, honest, capable of a short sentence after a long one.
- Concrete detail carries the feeling, so the coat, the latch and the weather do work no adjective could.
- Vocabulary is precise about difficult feeling and avoids the easy words for sadness.
Technical accuracy (6 marks)
- Tense is controlled: mostly past for the day, present where she reflects on it now.
- Sentence boundaries hold even where the writing imitates a mind wandering.
- Spelling, apostrophes and the punctuation of hesitation are handled accurately, and the writing is legible.
You have been given twenty-eight words and a title, and everything else is yours to build. That freedom is the difficulty. Before you write anything, pin down two facts privately, on your plan, where the examiner can see you did it: where has she been, and what has changed. She might have been abroad for eleven years. She might have come out of hospital. She might have been away for one week that turned out to be the week everything altered. Whatever you choose, the whole entry must fit it, because a diary written by somebody with no history reads as empty however pretty the sentences are.
Now use the stimulus rather than quoting it. The temptation is to copy the two lines into your first paragraph and then start. Resist it. Those lines are a mood and a set of facts, and your job is to write from inside them. The same coat matters because she kept it. The gate no longer opens the way she remembered, which might mean the hinge has dropped, or that somebody has changed the latch, or that she is taller, or that her hands are not what they were. The best answers pick one literal meaning and let the other meaning stand behind it without ever pointing at it.
A diary has particular habits, and the marks for form depend on them. It is dated. It is written at the end of a day and knows the day is over. It skips things, because the writer already knows them, so a diary that carefully explains who everyone is has stopped being a diary. It contradicts itself and corrects itself. It can begin in the middle. And because there is no audience, it can say the thing that would be unsayable out loud, which is the whole reason this task is set.
Four errors cost heavily here. Writing a full short story with a beginning, a middle and a neat moral abandons the form. Writing a list of the day is the opposite failure, a diary with nothing underneath it. Announcing the emotion, in a sentence such as I felt so sad and nostalgic, spends in six words what a good writer earns across a page. And contradicting the stimulus, by having her arrive in sunshine or at a different house, loses marks in the largest band of all, since the task says every word must fit.
Timing: this task rewards a longer plan than usual. Take eight to ten minutes and write down the two decisions, three concrete details you will use, and the last line you are heading for. Then write for roughly twenty-six minutes; a diary entry does not have to fill every line, and it is better to write two thirds of the space well than all of it thinly. Keep the final five minutes for tense slips, for apostrophes and for reading it back to check that it sounds like a person and not like a performance.
Sutton Boys' Second Stage Examination, Second Stage, English (written). Written by Revision Library on 2026-08-28, independent check pending.
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