Bishop Wordsworth's Grammar School 11+ 2026: Tuition, Test & Results

Bishop Wordsworth's Grammar School at a Glance

Bishop Wordsworth's Church of England Grammar School is a fully selective boys' grammar school on Exeter Street inside Salisbury Cathedral Close, Wiltshire SP1 2ED. Founded on 13 January 1890 by Bishop John Wordsworth, it converted to academy status in March 2011 and remains one of only a handful of state schools nationally holding HMC membership — the network more usually associated with fee-paying independent schools. Every boy applying for Year 7 entry sits the school's own GL Assessment 11+ test; there is no shared consortium paper. Girls join the school for the first time at age 16, since the Sixth Form has been fully co-educational since September 2020.

For a full walkthrough of the school's history, founding story and the South Wilts consortium question, see our companion piece, the Bishop Wordsworth's 11+ guide. This page focuses on what parents need to decide and act on now: the exam, the odds, the real results the school produces, and how we prepare boys for it.

How Competitive Is the Bishop Wordsworth's 11+?

Bishop Wordsworth's is significantly oversubscribed. The school's own admissions policy confirms it typically receives around 500 registrations for its 160 Year 7 places — roughly three boys for every place. Unusually among grammar schools, the competition begins before the test itself: only the 480 applicants who live nearest to the school, measured by straight-line distance, are even permitted to sit the entrance examination. Families outside that radius should check the distance rule carefully before committing to a full preparation programme, since it can rule a child out of the process regardless of ability.

There is no published pass mark. The required standard is set after the test each year by the school's Admissions, Property, Health and Safety Committee, based on how that year's cohort of boys actually perform, so a "qualifying score" from a previous year tells you nothing reliable about this year's threshold. A standard 10% lower than the norm applies to looked-after children and boys eligible for Pupil Premium, and the school reserves 10 of its 160 places specifically for Pupil Premium-eligible boys who meet that adjusted standard — a genuine widening-access provision worth knowing about if it applies to your family.

The Bishop Wordsworth's 11+ Test Format

Bishop Wordsworth's sets a genuinely distinctive two-paper GL Assessment test. Paper 1 is described by the school as a "verbal skills" paper: reading comprehension, the technical skills of spelling, punctuation and grammar, and verbal reasoning, all in one 50–55 minute sitting. Paper 2 combines Key Stage 2 mathematics with non-verbal reasoning in a single paper of the same length. All questions are multiple choice, and scores are age-standardised so a summer-born boy is not disadvantaged against an autumn-born classmate.

This matters for preparation: many regional consortium tests (Lincolnshire's, for example) assess only verbal and non-verbal reasoning and never test extended English or mathematics at all. A generic "VR/NVR only" 11+ programme aimed at those regions will under-prepare a boy for Bishop Wordsworth's, which expects him to be equally strong in comprehension, SPaG and KS2 maths as he is in reasoning.

Designated Area and Oversubscription Order

The designated area covers Salisbury and Wilton and reaches out across south Wiltshire to Winterbourne Stoke in the north, Whiteparish in the east, Nomansland in the south and Bowerchalke in the west, mapped in full on the school's website. Living inside it does not guarantee a place, but it moves a qualifying boy up the oversubscription order, which runs as follows once the required standard has been met:

1. Children with an Education, Health and Care Plan naming the school
2. Looked-after and previously looked-after children
3. Boys eligible for Pupil Premium
4. Boys living inside the designated area, ranked by distance
5. Children of staff employed at the school for two years or more
6. Service children (Service Premium, recent service families, MoD child pension)
7. All remaining qualifying boys, ranked by straight-line distance to school

Where a final place cannot be separated by distance, the school draws lots under independent supervision. A waiting list, ranked on the same criteria, runs until 30 April 2027. In practice, given both the designated-area priority and the 480-applicant sitting cap, most successful applicants live in Salisbury, Wilton or the surrounding south Wiltshire villages.

Bishop Wordsworth's vs South Wilts Grammar School

Salisbury's other state grammar, South Wilts Grammar School, admits girls only and is often assumed to share a test with Bishop Wordsworth's. It doesn't. Each school sets, administers and marks its own separate GL Assessment paper — South Wilts uses a different three-paper structure (mathematics, English and verbal reasoning) — and each has its own independent admissions committee and required standard. What genuinely is shared is the calendar: Wiltshire Council schedules both main test dates for the same Saturday in September, which is almost certainly the source of the "shared paper" assumption. A family wanting both schools kept open must register separately with each.

Beyond the 11+: What Do Bishop Wordsworth's Results Actually Look Like?

Most guides to the Bishop Wordsworth's 11+ stop at the entrance exam. We think parents choosing where to invest years of preparation deserve to see what the 160 places actually lead to, so here is what the school's own published performance data shows.

In the school's 2025 GCSE results, 65% of all grades awarded were at grade 9–7, and 96.8% of pupils achieved grade 5 or above in both English and mathematics — well above the national picture for a comprehensive intake, though a selective grammar school's results should always be read alongside its selective entry. At A-level in 2025, 48% of grades were A*/A and 80% were graded A*–B, with an average A-level points score of 43.80 against an England state-sector average of 35.08. Sciences, mathematics and economics are consistently among the strongest and most popular subjects, alongside chemistry, physics, politics and English literature.

On university progression, among the school's 2021 leaver cohort, 85% progressed to higher education or further training, 60% went to top-third UK institutions, 55% to Russell Group universities, and around 5% secured places at Oxford or Cambridge. The school's Sixth Form has been fully independent of South Wilts and co-educational since September 2020, growing to roughly 397 students, of whom about 40% are girls — continuity of houses, staff and pastoral structure carries through from Year 7 to Year 13 for the boys who join at 11, and girls become part of that same community from age 16.

Key Dates for 2026–2027 (September 2027 Entry)

Registering for the 11+ test is a separate step handled directly with Bishop Wordsworth's online, not by Wiltshire Council. Every family must also submit Wiltshire Council's standard secondary application, naming Bishop Wordsworth's, by 31 October 2026; the school's policy is explicit that a place will not be offered, even to a boy who has met the required standard, if the school is not named as the first preference. See the school's own admissions page for the official, current arrangements.

How Should a Boy Prepare?

Because Bishop Wordsworth's tests English, mathematics and non-verbal reasoning across two papers, effective preparation needs a broader base than a generic verbal/non-verbal-only 11+ programme. Verbal skills preparation should combine timed comprehension practice, targeted SPaG revision and the standard pattern-based verbal reasoning question types (codes, sequences, analogies). Wide reading remains the single best long-term investment, since it builds vocabulary and stamina no short-term drilling replaces. Mathematics preparation needs to be built on secure Key Stage 2 arithmetic — times tables, fractions, decimals, percentages, the four operations applied quickly and accurately — layered with multi-step, reasoning-style word problems, since Paper 2 pairs maths directly with non-verbal reasoning in the same sitting. Non-verbal reasoning responds well to progressive practice across each question type: series, matrices, analogies, figure classification and rotation.

Given how competitive the 160 places are once the oversubscription criteria and the 480-applicant sitting cap are both applied, a personalised one-to-one approach lets a tutor identify precisely which of the three tested areas is weakest for an individual boy and close that specific gap, rather than spreading effort evenly across a generic study plan. Most families we work with begin structured preparation in Year 4 or early Year 5, giving twelve to eighteen months to cover every question type before shifting to full timed practice papers ahead of the September 2026 test date.

At Leading Tuition, our specialist 11+ tutors work with families across Salisbury, Wilton and the wider south Wiltshire designated area, plus online tuition for families further afield. For a broader look at exam technique across question types, see our 11+ exam technique guide, and for the national timetable of test dates, see 11+ exam dates 2025–2026.

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