Bexley Grammar School 11+ Preparation

About Bexley Grammar School

Bexley Grammar School sits on Danson Lane in Welling, in the London Borough of Bexley, DA16 2BL. It is a co-educational academy-converter grammar school, admitting both boys and girls into Year 7 purely on the basis of academic selection through the Bexley Selection Test. This co-educational status sets it apart from two of the other three schools in its consortium: Beths Grammar School (boys only) and Townley Grammar School (girls only). Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School is the other mixed school in the group.

The school holds an Outstanding Ofsted judgement and offers both A-levels and the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma in its sixth form, giving pupils a choice of post-16 pathway that is unusual among maintained grammar schools. With around 1,900 pupils on roll across Years 7 to 13, Bexley Grammar is one of the largest schools in the consortium and consistently ranks among the strongest state secondary schools in South East London for GCSE and A-level outcomes.

Bexley Grammar School is one of four schools in the Bexley Grammar Schools Consortium, alongside Beths Grammar, Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar, and Townley Grammar. A defining feature of the consortium arrangement is that a child sits a single entrance test — the Bexley Selection Test — and the resulting score can be used to apply to any of the four schools. There is no need to sit separate tests for each school, which materially simplifies preparation and the admissions timetable for families.

The Bexley Selection Test: What Changed for 2026

From the 2026 test cycle onwards, the Bexley Selection Test is administered by Quest Assessments, replacing the GL Assessment paper used in previous years. This is a meaningful change for preparation: question styles, timing and familiarisation materials associated with the older GL format are no longer directly representative of what children will face on test day, so families should seek current Quest-format practice resources rather than relying on legacy papers.

The test itself is made up of two timed, multiple-choice papers, sat back to back with a short break, covering three subject areas in total. All answers are recorded on machine-readable answer sheets — there is no written or essay component. Bexley-borough children ordinarily sit the test at their own primary school; children applying from outside the borough sit at one of the Bexley grammar school sites instead. The full session, including instructions and the break, runs to roughly two and a half to three hours.

Each child receives a standardised age score for each of the three areas, then a weighted overall score using the formula above. Age standardisation means a child born in August is compared fairly against a child born the previous September, rather than being penalised for being younger within the school year. There is no fixed pass mark published in advance; the selective standard is set once all scripts have been marked, and roughly one third of children who sit the test in a typical year achieve it. Our companion guide, the Bexley Grammar School 11+ Guide, sets out the full breakdown of the Quest Assessments format, question types and scoring methodology in more depth.

How Are the 210 Places Allocated?

Bexley Grammar School's published Admissions Policy for 2027-2028 confirms an agreed admission number of 210 for Year 7 entry in September 2027. Meeting the selective standard on the test is a prerequisite for consideration, but it does not by itself guarantee a place — in most years more children reach the standard across the consortium than there are places available, so the school's oversubscription criteria determine who actually receives an offer.

The oversubscription criteria are applied strictly in the following order once the selective standard has been met:

1. Children with an Education, Health and Care Plan naming Bexley Grammar School, who are assessed as meeting the selective requirement.
2. Looked-after and previously looked-after children who meet the selective standard.
3. Pupil Premium priority: up to 12 places are reserved for children eligible for Pupil Premium funding who meet the selective standard, ranked by distance from the school where this category is oversubscribed.
4. Guaranteed grammar school place: the roughly 180 highest-scoring children across the whole Bexley Selection Test cohort are guaranteed a place at their preferred consortium grammar school, regardless of distance.
5. Sibling priority: children with a brother or sister already attending Bexley Grammar School in Years 7 to 11 at the time of application.
6. Staff children: children of staff employed at the school for two years or more at the time of application.
7. Distance: remaining places are allocated by straight-line distance from home address to the school, closest first.

Where two applications are tied on distance to an accuracy of 0.001 of a mile, the school uses the Bexley Selection Test score itself as the final tie-breaker. Parents must also formally name Bexley Grammar School on their Common Application Form (CAF), submitted to their home local authority — passing the test and being assessed under these criteria is not automatic unless the school is listed as a preference on the CAF. Waiting lists operate after National Offer Day, ranked by the same oversubscription order rather than by date of joining, and places can become available into the spring term as families decline offers elsewhere.

Key Dates for the 2026 Test Cycle (September 2027 Entry)

The dates below cover the current admissions cycle: children currently in Year 5 who will sit the Bexley Selection Test in September 2026 for a Year 7 place from September 2027.

Notably, the 2026 registration window opened significantly earlier than in previous cycles — the 2025 window did not open until May. Families with a child currently in Year 4, aiming for the September 2027 test and September 2028 entry, should watch for the London Borough of Bexley's registration announcement from late 2027 and expect a similarly early opening. For a full calendar of grammar and independent school test dates across the region, see our 11+ exam dates guide.

No Catchment Area — But Distance Still Matters

Bexley Grammar School does not operate a geographic catchment area. Any child who achieves the selective standard on the Bexley Selection Test is eligible to apply, whether they live in the London Borough of Bexley, a neighbouring borough, Kent, or anywhere else in England. This open-admissions design means the school draws applicants from a wide catchment in practice, even without a formal boundary.

Distance from home to school only becomes decisive once oversubscription criteria higher up the priority order — EHCP status, looked-after status, the Pupil Premium allocation and the guaranteed top-180 places — have been applied. For the remaining places, applicants are ranked by straight-line distance, so families living further from Welling should understand that a child achieving the selective standard is not automatically guaranteed an offer if the school is heavily oversubscribed and distance becomes the deciding factor. Out-of-borough families should also confirm test-day arrangements directly with the London Borough of Bexley admissions team, since out-of-borough children sit at a grammar school site rather than their own primary school.

For families weighing up a longer daily commute, it is worth assessing journey time realistically before applying. Bexley Grammar School in Welling is served by bus routes and is a short distance from Bexleyheath and Falconwood stations. A round trip well over an hour is common for children applying from further parts of Kent or South East London, and this is a practical factor worth considering alongside the academic case for applying.

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Why Families Choose Bexley Grammar School

Bexley Grammar's combination of co-educational admission, Outstanding Ofsted status and a genuine choice of A-levels or the IB Diploma at sixth form makes it one of the most sought-after options within the Bexley consortium, particularly for families who prefer a mixed secondary environment over a single-sex school. With 210 places, it also offers the largest single intake of the four consortium schools, though this scale has not come at the expense of consistently strong GCSE and A-level outcomes.

Because a single Bexley Selection Test score can be used to apply across all four consortium schools, families are not forced to choose a single "target" school before their child sits the test. This flexibility is genuinely useful — many families rank Bexley Grammar highly precisely because it is co-educational, while others apply across two or three consortium schools and let the CAF preference order and offer process determine the eventual outcome. Understanding the oversubscription order in advance, and in particular the interaction between the guaranteed top-scoring band, the Pupil Premium allocation and the distance-based places, is important for setting realistic expectations.

The absence of a catchment area also broadens the realistic applicant pool considerably beyond the immediate Welling area, drawing families from across South East London and North Kent. This means competition for the school's 210 places is intense and consistent year to year, with around 6,000 children sitting the Bexley Selection Test annually across the consortium as a whole.

How Leading Tuition Prepares Children for Bexley Grammar School

Leading Tuition's specialist 11+ tuition programme works with families across Welling, Bexleyheath, Sidcup, Bromley, Greenwich and North Kent to prepare children for the Bexley Selection Test and entry to Bexley Grammar School. Because the test moved to Quest Assessments from the 2026 cycle, we make sure preparation materials and technique coaching reflect the current format rather than legacy GL Assessment papers — the two formats differ in question style, so working from outdated materials can leave children under-prepared for what they will actually see on test day.

We begin with a diagnostic assessment across all three tested areas: verbal ability and English comprehension, numerical reasoning, and non-verbal reasoning. Given that verbal ability alone accounts for half of the weighted score, we place particular early emphasis on vocabulary building, comprehension technique and inference skills, while ensuring numerical and non-verbal reasoning are not neglected — both still carry a quarter of the final score each and are frequently the areas where children lose the most avoidable marks through unfamiliarity rather than ability.

Numerical reasoning preparation is built around Year 5 curriculum content, since the test does not extend into Year 6 topics, but focuses heavily on speed and problem recognition under timed conditions rather than curriculum revision alone. Non-verbal reasoning — often the least familiar area for children, since it is rarely taught explicitly in primary school — is developed through structured, repeated practice with pattern-recognition question types, building the fluency that timed multiple-choice papers demand.

As the September test date approaches, we shift towards full timed mock papers replicating the two-and-a-half to three-hour Quest Assessments session, building the stamina and composure that a test of this length requires from a ten- or eleven-year-old. We also brief families on the practical admissions process: the March registration window, the CAF deadline, how the oversubscription criteria interact, and what to expect if a child is placed on a waiting list. Progress is reviewed after every session, with short diagnostic checks used to catch and correct any drift before it compounds, and parents receive regular updates throughout the programme.

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