Professional Paraplanner is delighted to be running our annual January exam Q&A with Brand Financial Training. If you are studying for the next tranche of exams or lining up to take them later in 2026, you’ll want to read these articles, where the Brand Financial Training team answer some of the more common questions they are asked by paraplanners seeking to achieve success with their qualifications.
We will be running an article a day from Monday 12 to Friday 16 January 2026. We hope you find them valuable.
If you’d like more help with your studying for your exams the Brand team are here to help. You can find out more at: https://brandft.co.uk/ or contact the team at: at: [email protected]
Today the team looks specifically at R06.
Q: I’m struggling with what the CII expect from answers to the R06 ‘recommend and justify’ questions – any tips?
A: R06 questions, such as this, where you are providing solutions for the clients, make up a large percentage of the exam so it’s important to get to grips with what the CII are expecting. The good news is that a lot of the preparation can be done before the case studies are released.
For ‘recommend and justify’ questions (this also applies to ‘identify a range of actions’ questions by the way!), the CII want you to:
- List several recommendations or actions (not just one)
- Justify each recommendation using the client’s specific circumstances
- Use concise bullet points rather than long explanations
What candidates often miss is just how many recommendations or actions the CII expect. As a rule of thumb, each recommendation or action should be supported by one justification, although in some cases two or three justifications may be appropriate.
Once you understand this structure, you are likely to pick up many more marks.
Even if you are asked to recommend and justify a product such as a protection product (a protection product is a particular favourite!), you are not simply naming the product, you are also recommending how it should be set up. For example, your recommendations are likely to include areas such as :
- Sum assured e.g. to meet monthly income needs
- Policy term e.g. until children are financially independent
- Deferred period e.g. longest available or inline with employer sick pay
- Type of cover e.g. guaranteed or renewable
- Include indexation
- Writing the policy in trust (when applicable)
Each of your recommendations (or actions) needs to be justified and linked back to the client’s circumstances.
In the above example, if you are recommending and justifying the deferred period, an answer would typically include
Recommendation (if the case study highlights the need to keep costs minimal):
- Longest available deferred period
Justification:
- Longer deferred periods are cheaper which keeps costs lower
Recommendation (if cost isn’t so much of an issue):
- 4-week deferred period
Justification:
- In line with employer sick pay.
Let’s look at another example of a question that appears regularly in R06 – ‘identify a range of actions to improve the tax efficiency of the client’s financial arrangements’ . If you have a couple with one higher-rate (or additional rate) taxpaying spouse and one basic-rate taxpayer, typical answers will include:
Recommend:
- Transfer some deposit-based savings to basic rate taxpayer
Justification:
- Interest taxed at 20% rather than 40%
- Uses the spouse’s £1,000 personal savings allowance
REMEMBER – always include tax rates and allowances in any question around tax efficiency!
Preparation before the case studies are released
We recommend practising answering these questions before the case studies are released by working through old R06 CII exam guides. Attempt the questions yourself first, then compare your answers carefully with the model answers.
Once the case studies are released
Candidates can then begin to focus on the most likely questions based on the client’s stated aims. You will be given three aims for each of the case studies.
For example, if one of the client’s aims includes improving the tax efficiency of their financial arrangements, then a question asking you to recommend and justify a range of ways (or identify a range of actions) to improve tax efficiency is very likely to appear.
The good news is that many answers come up repeatedly and apply to most case studies. Common tax-efficiency recommendations (or actions) include:
- Increasing pension contributions
- Using salary sacrifice
- Inter-spouse transfers to utilise allowances/transferring deposit account funds
- Using NS&I savings products
- Making use of CGT and IHT annual exemptions
- Registering previous losses
- Bed and ISA
- Maximising ISA allowances or Lifetime ISA allowances
Another frequently tested area is ways to mitigate Inheritance Tax. Again, reviewing past exam guides shows a fairly standard set of recommendations, such as:
- Using the IHT annual exemptions
- Making potentially exempt transfers
- Charitable donations
- Considering EIS or SEIS for higher-risk investors
- Using loan trusts or discounted gift trusts
- Ensuring a will is in place
- Using whole of life cover written in trust
Recognising and applying these standard recommendations is a great way to ensure success in R06.
Training provider analysis can be extremely helpful at this stage. In the Brand Financial Training analysis, we usually include at least one recommend and justify or identify a range of actions question for each of the client’s stated aims, with full model answers.
Q: “Why do my answers not align with the CII model answers?”
A: This usually improves with practice. The more past exam questions you attempt and compare to the model answers, the more closely your responses will align with what the CII are looking for.
As mentioned above, this is important for questions where you are providing solutions for the clients but also for other R06 question types.
The R06 exam often ends with a question asking you to “identify the issues you would discuss at the next annual review meeting”. This is nearly always linked to Case Study 2, and the answers are very standard, making it a good opportunity to finish the exam strongly.
Fact-finding questions can also be practised in advance and often provide a high number of marks early in the exam. The CII are not looking for excessive detail on one point, but rather a broad range of missing information across the client’s finances.
When working through a full past exam guide, it’s sometimes easy to get lost in the detail. A helpful revision technique for R06 is to practise the different question types in isolation. There are a number of past exam guides available on the CII website via the R06 exam homepage. We suggest focusing on each of the following question types separately:
- Fact-finding questions
- Annual review questions
- Recommend and justify / identify a range of actions questions
This approach helps you spot trends and develop a clear understanding of how each question type is structured.
One final tip is to use concise bullet points. Many candidates expand answers unnecessarily when just a few words or even a short phrase would suffice. Bullet points save time and help avoid repetition.
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