If your daughter breezes through a comprehension passage and then goes quiet the moment a maths or non-verbal reasoning page appears, you're not imagining a pattern, and you're not alone in noticing it. Parents of boys sitting the 11+ often see something close to the mirror image: confident with numbers and diagrams, hesitant with a blank page and an essay title. We wrote about that in Boys and the 11+. This is the other half of that conversation. Like that piece, it's not about which sex is 'better.' It's about where the real, evidenced differences sit, and where they don't.
The attainment picture
National data on Key Stage 2 outcomes shows girls ahead of boys in every core subject except one: maths, where boys hold a narrow lead of roughly a single percentage point. That gap has been persistent rather than dramatic at age 11, but it widens later. Since 2023, the gender gap in GCSE maths attainment has moved further in boys' favour, a trend several education analysts have flagged as worth watching (Department for Education, 2025; House of Commons Library, 2024).
So at the exact age your daughter is sitting the 11+, the honest picture is: she is statistically more likely to have an edge in English, and statistically slightly less likely to have one in maths. 'Slightly' is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it undersells how close the actual gap is.
What this means for the 11+ specifically
English and verbal reasoning. A national analysis of Cognitive Abilities Test scores across UK secondary pupils found girls scoring meaningfully higher on verbal reasoning (by around 2.2 standard points) and marginally higher on non-verbal reasoning (around 0.3 points) than boys of the same age (Strand, Deary and Smith, 2006). If your daughter's VR and comprehension scores are strong, that's consistent with a real, documented pattern, not a fluke.
Maths and quantitative reasoning. The same study found boys with a small edge in quantitative reasoning, around 0.7 points. A follow-up analysis of over 175,000 English 11-year-olds confirmed the same direction but described the overall sex difference in general cognitive ability as statistically real yet practically negligible in size (Calvin et al., 2010). In plain terms: there is a measurable difference, but it's small enough that it shouldn't be the headline your daughter hears about herself.
The confidence gap is the real story, and it's not about ability
Where the research gets more interesting is self-perception. Girls are more likely than boys to be seen (by parents and teachers alike) as 'good at English,' while maths gets coded as a subject boys are naturally suited to, even when actual performance doesn't support that split (Department for Education STEM behavioural insights research). One well-known experimental finding illustrates this clearly: when a group of students was told a maths test 'usually shows differences between men and women,' a performance gap opened up. When an equivalent group was told the same test was simply fair, the gap disappeared (Educational Neuroscience, n.d.). The test didn't change. The framing did.
For 11+ prep, that has a very practical implication: how you talk about your daughter's maths and NVR sessions at home may matter as much as the sessions themselves.
Socialisation and peer dynamics during the transition
Two further findings are worth knowing about, though both come from outside the UK and should be read as useful context rather than settled local fact.
A German study tracking 1,770 pupils through the transition from Year 4 to Year 5 found that how integrated a girl felt with her new class predicted her test anxiety, while for boys, the stronger predictor was parental control rather than peer integration (Feige and Watermann, 2024). A separate Canadian study of over 1,000 students aged 10 to 17 found a same-sex peer effect on anxiety that only showed up for girls: a girl's own anxiety tracked her female classmates' anxiety levels, with no equivalent pattern found among boys (Charbonneau et al., 2022).
Neither study was conducted in a UK 11+ context, and the Canadian study in particular is exploratory. But taken together, they point in a consistent direction: for many girls, how she feels about her peer group during the exam-prep period may be as relevant to her stress levels as the academic content itself.
Choosing between all-girls and co-ed grammar schools
If you're weighing single-sex against co-educational options as part of 11+ planning, the Girls' Schools Association reports that girls at girls' schools are 2.9 times more likely to take Further Maths and 2.2 times more likely to take Physics at A-level than girls at co-ed schools, alongside higher GCSE attainment overall (Girls' Schools Association, 2026).
That statistic is real, but it comes with an important caveat. Written evidence submitted to a UK parliamentary committee by UCL's Centre for Education Policy argues that international research suggests these differences are 'largely driven by the types of girls that attend single-sex schools' rather than by the single-sex environment causing the outcome on its own (UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities, n.d.). In other words: girls' schools may be selecting for pupils who were already more likely to pursue STEM, rather than manufacturing that outcome from scratch. Worth knowing before it becomes the deciding factor in a school choice.
What helps
- Frame maths and NVR sessions as skill-building, not ability-testing. The stereotype-threat research above suggests that presenting a task as simply 'practice' rather than 'a test of what girls are naturally like at' measurably changes performance.
- Pay attention to her peer group during prep, not just her workbook. If the anxiety research holds for your daughter, who she's around day-to-day may affect her stress levels as much as how much she's revised.
- Don't treat a single self-report of 'I'm bad at maths' as fact. The research is clear that confidence and actual ability frequently diverge, particularly for girls in this exact subject.
- If you're considering an all-girls grammar school, ask about the entry cohort, not just the outcome statistics. The STEM uptake numbers are real, but they may reflect who chooses to apply as much as what the school itself changes.
A note on individual variation
Everything above describes averages across large groups of children. It says nothing certain about your daughter specifically. Some girls will be stronger at maths than at English; some boys will show exactly the reverse of the pattern described in our companion piece. The data is useful for understanding broad trends and for not mistaking a confidence wobble for a real ability gap. It is not a verdict on what your child can or can't do.
The most important thing you can know is not what girls do on average. It is what your daughter specifically finds easy, and where the real gaps are. Diagnostic practice, the kind that maps performance by topic rather than just overall score, tells you where to concentrate effort rather than suggesting you need to work on everything at once.
References
Calvin, C.M., Fernandes, C., Smith, P., Visscher, P.M. and Deary, I.J. (2010) 'Sex, intelligence and educational achievement in a national cohort of over 175,000 11-year-old schoolchildren in England', Learning and Individual Differences, 20(5), pp. 424–431. Available at: https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2010-calvin.pdf (Accessed: 3 September 2026).
Charbonneau, S., Journault, A.-A., Cernik, R., Longpré, C., Wan, N., Giguère, C.-É. and Lupien, S. (2022) 'Anxiety in the classroom: only girls' anxiety is related to same-sex peers' anxiety', International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(1), p. 84. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20010084 (Accessed: 3 September 2026).
Department for Education (2025) Key Stage 2 Attainment: Academic Year 2024/25. Available at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/key-stage-2-attainment (Accessed: 3 September 2026).
Educational Neuroscience (n.d.) Girls and boys have different cognitive abilities. Available at: https://www.educationalneuroscience.org.uk/resources/neuromyth-or-neurofact/girls-and-boys-have-different-cognitive-abilities/ (Accessed: 3 September 2026).
Feige, P. and Watermann, R. (2024) 'Perceived peer integration, parental control, and autonomy support: differential effects on test anxiety during the transition to secondary school for girls and boys', Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 53(11), pp. 2610–2622. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-024-02053-z (Accessed: 3 September 2026).
Girls' Schools Association (2026) GSA. Available at: https://gsa.uk.com/ (Accessed: 3 September 2026).
House of Commons Library (2024) Educational Attainment of Boys. Available at: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2024-0043/ (Accessed: 3 September 2026).
Strand, S., Deary, I.J. and Smith, P. (2006) 'Sex differences in Cognitive Abilities Test scores: a UK national picture', British Journal of Educational Psychology, 76(3), pp. 463–480.
UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities (n.d.) Written evidence submitted to a UK parliamentary committee. Available at: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/109052/pdf/ (Accessed: 3 September 2026).