Your child is bright, articulate, and has a wonderful imagination. So why doesn’t their creative writing reflect that? When it comes to the highly competitive entrance exams for London’s top independent schools, it’s not just about having good ideas. It’s about avoiding the common traps that even the brightest students fall into.

These schools aren’t just looking for a good story; they are looking for evidence of sophisticated thinking, careful planning, and technical skill. A single, recurring mistake can be the difference between an offer and a polite rejection.

Here are the five most common and costly writing mistakes we see year after year, and how you can help your child fix them.

Mistake 1: Ignoring the Passage Theme (The Trinity & Dulwich Killer)

Many top schools, like Trinity and Dulwich College, don’t just give a random prompt. They provide a reading passage and then ask students to write something related to it. The biggest mistake a child can make is to ignore the passage and write a completely unrelated story.

• The Mistake: The passage is about the quiet wisdom of an old man, and your child writes a high-octane story about a space battle.

• Why it’s Costly: It shows the examiner that your child cannot follow instructions and has the sophistication to analyse a text and identify its core themes (like ‘wisdom’, ‘loss’, or ‘courage’).

• The Fix: Teach your child to be a ‘theme detective’. Before they even think about their own story, they must ask: “What is the main feeling or idea in this passage?” Their own writing must then reflect or explore that same theme.

Writing a Description (The JAGS & Eltham Failure)

This is a subtle but crucial error. Some schools, particularly JAGS (in one of its formats) and Eltham College, will explicitly ask for a description, not a story. They want to see if your child can paint a picture with words, focusing on sensory details and atmosphere.

• The Mistake: The prompt asks for a description of a mysterious forest, and your child writes a plot-heavy story about getting lost, meeting a monster, and finding their way home.

• Why it’s Costly: Again, it shows a failure to follow instructions. It suggests the child has a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to writing and cannot adapt to different task types.

• The Fix: Use the ‘freeze-frame’ analogy. Teach your child to imagine they are a camera, slowly panning across a single moment in time. They should focus on what they can see, hear, smell, touch, and feel, rather than what happens next.

Mistake 3: Forgetting the Second Essay! (The City of London Girls Trap)

This is a unique and brutal trap set by City of London School for Girls. Their entrance exam requires students to complete two compulsory writing tasks in just 40-45 minutes: one creative and one discursive (opinion-based). Many students spend too long on the creative piece and either rush or completely run out of time for the second, equally important essay.

• The Mistake: Spending 35 minutes on a beautiful story, leaving only 5 minutes for a shallow, one-paragraph discursive piece.
• Why it’s Costly: They have instantly lost 50% of the available marks. No matter how good the first piece is, they cannot get a high overall score.
• The Fix: Practise the ‘two-task’ format under strict timed conditions. Your child must learn to be disciplined, allocate their time equally, and switch their thinking from creative mode to analytical mode in an instant.

Mistake 4: Using Impressive” Words Incorrectly

In a desperate attempt to sound ‘ambitious’, many children will sprinkle their writing with long, complicated words they don’t fully understand. Examiners can spot this a mile away, and it does more harm than good.

• The Mistake: Using a word like “pulchritudinous” to describe a beautiful flower, when a simpler, more effective word like “vibrant” or “delicate” would have been better.
• Why it’s Costly: It looks unnatural and forced. It breaks the flow of the writing and signals to the examiner that the child is trying too hard, rather than writing authentically.
• The Fix: Build vocabulary from reading, not from a list of ‘wow words’. Encourage your child to collect words they love and to understand their nuances. The goal is to use the right word, not just the longest word.

Mistake 5: A Generic Plan for a Specific School

This is the master mistake that leads to all the others. A child who has only practised writing generic stories will be completely unprepared for the unique challenges set by these top schools.

• The Mistake: Using the same simple ‘Beginning-Middle-End’ story plan for every single exam, regardless of the school or the prompt.
• Why it’s Costly: It leads directly to the errors above: ignoring themes, writing a story instead of a description, and being unprepared for unique formats.
• The Fix: Preparation must be school-specific. Your child needs to know the exact format of their target school’s exam and practise that format repeatedly.

The Solution: School-Specific Preparation

Worried your child might be making these costly mistakes? The only way to be sure is with preparation that is as specific and demanding as the exams themselves.

Our school-specific creative writing courses are designed to eliminate these errors. We have dedicated courses for JAGS, Trinity, Alleyn’s, City of London Girls, Dulwich, and Eltham College, each one built from the ground up to address the unique challenges of that school’s exam.

Through our video lessons and personal video feedback, we don’t just tell your child what to do – we show them how to do it. We give them the tools, techniques, and confidence to walk into their exam and show the examiners exactly what they are capable of.

Don’t let a simple mistake cost your child their dream school place. Explore our courses today.