City of London School 11+ Entry: Fees, Dates and Bursaries for 2027

Is This City of London School or City of London School for Girls?

City of London School (CLS) is a boys' independent day school on Queen Victoria Street, London EC4V 3AL, on the Victoria Embankment side of the City of London. It is not the same institution as City of London School for Girls (CLSG), which sits on the other side of the City at the Barbican and admits girls only. Both schools share the words "City of London" in their name, both are connected to the City of London Corporation, and both appear in the same search results for this exact query — which is precisely why families researching 11+ entry for one school so often land on information about the other by mistake.

The distinction matters beyond the name. For 2027 entry, City of London School holds a single entrance assessment day, on Friday 27 November 2026. City of London School for Girls, by contrast, runs its own two-stage assessment timetable for 2027 entry, with second assessments held on Wednesday 6 January 2027. A family that mixes up the two schools' processes risks preparing for, or registering around, the wrong dates entirely. Everything on this page from this point on concerns City of London School, the boys' school — if you are researching the girls' school, its admissions process, dates and fees are published separately on its own site.

What Are the Fees, Registration Costs and Bursaries at City of London School?

Tuition fees are £9,848.40 (including VAT) per term for the 2026-27 academic year, published directly on the school's own admissions and fees page. Music lessons are charged separately, at £429.60 (including VAT) per term, for families who choose them. These are the school's current figures for the year ahead, and because independent school fees are reviewed and reset for each academic year, it is worth checking the school's own fees page directly rather than relying on a figure quoted elsewhere — including this page, a year from now.

Registration for the 11+ entry assessment itself is completed by payment of a non-refundable fee of £192 (including VAT). This is a separate, smaller cost from the tuition fees above and applies whether or not a place is eventually offered. Families who can demonstrate a net household income of £35,000 or less, and who are in receipt of Universal Credit, may be eligible to pay a reduced registration fee of £64 (including VAT) instead — a deliberate design choice by the school to stop the registration step itself becoming a barrier before a bursary application is even considered.

On bursaries, City of London School states plainly that transformational bursaries can cover up to 100% of fees, plus extras, so that a place at the school is accessible to talented pupils regardless of their family's financial circumstances. The school also names a specific point of contact for this process — Menna El-Guindy, its Bursary Programme Manager — who the school says is available to provide personalised guidance throughout a bursary application, rather than leaving families to navigate a generic form alone. Families should treat this as a genuine, well-resourced programme rather than a token gesture: a school naming an individual bursary manager, and publishing a specific reduced registration fee tied to a specific income threshold, is publishing more operational detail about affordability than most independent schools make public.

City of London School also awards £35 academic, music and sports prizes to recognise outstanding achievement in entrance assessments, presented at the school's annual Prize Day, held at Guildhall. It is a small but distinctive detail: relatively few schools formally recognise entrance-assessment performance itself, separately from the offer of a place, with a named prize and a ceremony in one of the City's most historic civic buildings.

Worth knowing before you compare fee figures elsewhere: at least one well-known 11+ tutoring and practice-paper website currently publishes a registration fee figure and a bursary-eligibility income threshold for City of London School that do not match the figures on the school's own admissions pages. We have deliberately not repeated that site's incorrect numbers here, because doing so would only spread them further — but it is worth knowing they exist, and treating any registration fee or bursary threshold you see quoted on a third-party site with some caution. The £192 / £64 / £35,000 figures in this section come directly from City of London School's own registration and admissions pages, checked on the date this page was published.

When Is the City of London School 11+ Exam in 2027, and What Does It Involve?

For entry in September 2027, the registration deadline is Monday 2 November 2026, and the entrance assessments take place on Friday 27 November 2026. Families should register by the deadline; late registrations are not guaranteed a place on the assessment day.

The assessment day itself has three parts. First, a 105-minute online Quest Admissions assessment, covering the academic areas the school uses to gauge readiness for its curriculum. Second, a separate 30-minute creative writing task, assessed on its own terms rather than folded into the online test. Third, for candidates who are shortlisted after the assessment and writing task, an interview lasting around 15-20 minutes. The school describes this interview specifically as an opportunity to get to know a child beyond their assessment results — not a further test of academic content, but a conversation.

Because the assessment, the writing task and the interview are three distinct components, each assessed on its own terms, preparation that focuses only on one of them — typically the online test, since that is the part most commercial practice materials are built around — risks leaving a child underprepared for the creative writing task and the interview, both of which the school treats as genuinely separate parts of its decision, not a formality after the test.

Full current-year details, including how to register, are published on the school's own 11+ entry admissions page, which we recommend checking directly alongside this page, since administrative details can be updated by the school at any time.

How Competitive Is City of London School 11+ Entry — Is There a Pass Mark?

City of London School does not publish a pass mark or a qualifying score for 11+ entry. This is a meaningful point of difference from schools that publish an automatic qualifying score each year: at City of London School, offers are made on the combination of the 105-minute assessment, the creative writing task, the interview for shortlisted candidates, and a confidential report from the applicant's current school — not a single published number that a family can measure their child against in advance.

This absence of a published cut-off has not stopped some third-party sites from inventing one. At least one tutoring and practice-paper site advertises an unofficial "target score" for City of London School entry that the school itself does not publish or endorse anywhere in its own admissions material. Families are understandably drawn to a concrete number, but a target score with no official source behind it is, at best, that site's own estimate dressed up as a fact. The honest answer, direct from the school's own published process, is that there is no single number to aim for — preparation needs to cover the assessment, the writing task and the interview in a balanced way, because all three genuinely count.

Because the school does not publish admissions statistics such as the number of applicants per place, families cannot calculate a precise odds-of-success figure either. What can be said with confidence, from the school's own published process, is that a strong performance in only one of the three assessed components is unlikely to be enough on its own — the process is explicitly designed to look at more than a single test score.

What Is the City of London Corporation's 'Family of Schools'?

City of London School is proud to be part of the City of London Corporation's "Family of Schools", a governance and community structure that the Corporation describes as including four independent schools, one maintained primary school, eight sponsored academies within the City of London Academies Trust, and two co-sponsored academies in neighbouring boroughs. This is a genuinely distinctive institutional fact: City of London School is not simply a private day school operating on its own, but one part of a wider civic education network funded and overseen by the City of London Corporation — the historic governing body of the City of London itself.

This relationship is not just a governance footnote. It directly underpins the school's bursary funding, which is one reason City of London School can credibly offer bursaries covering up to 100% of fees plus extras rather than a smaller, token discount. It also shapes the school's community partnership programme: City of London School pupils gave over 6,000 hours of voluntary service across 2023 alone, much of it connected to the wider Family of Schools network, including outreach and mentoring with the maintained primary school and sponsored academies that sit alongside CLS within the Corporation's structure.

The bursary programme itself, and the school's civic character more broadly, trace back further than most families researching 11+ entry might expect. City of London School's own history dates from the 15th century, through the will of John Carpenter — a Town Clerk of London whose bequest funded the education of poor scholars — through to the school's founding on Milk Street, in the City, in 1837, and its relocation to its current riverside site on Queen Victoria Street in 1987. None of the other results ranking for City of London School 11+ entry currently mention this founding legacy, the Family of Schools structure, or the specific link between the two — despite it being, arguably, the single most distinctive fact about what kind of school City of London School actually is.

What Did the November 2024 ISI Inspection Find?

Independent schools in England are inspected not by Ofsted but by the Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI), and City of London School's most recent full inspection was conducted in November 2024. The school was judged compliant with all regulations, with the inspection confirming that all standards are met — ISI's standard formulation for a school that has satisfied every area of its regulatory framework, covering everything from safeguarding to the quality of education provided.

An inspection result from November 2024 is genuinely current, rather than a report a family has to mentally discount for age, and it sits alongside the fee, bursary and admissions detail above as one more piece of independently verified information a family can check for themselves. The full report is published on the school's own inspection reports page, alongside its earlier ISI reports, for families who want to read the inspectors' findings in full rather than a summary.

Taken together with the Family of Schools structure and the bursary programme described above, the November 2024 outcome is one part of a wider picture: a school with a genuinely old founding legacy, a current civic governance structure funding meaningful bursary access, and a recent, clean independent inspection result — three separate, independently checkable facts that, between them, tell a family considerably more than a marketing description of "excellent academic results" would.

How Does Leading Tuition Prepare Children for City of London School?

Leading Tuition's specialist 11+ tuition programme works with families preparing for City of London School's 11+ entry, structured around the three components the school actually assesses: the 105-minute Quest Admissions test, the 30-minute creative writing task and the interview for shortlisted candidates. Because the school does not publish a pass mark, we do not train towards an invented target score — we prepare children to perform well across all three genuinely separate parts of the process, in the proportions the school's own published process suggests they matter.

We begin with a diagnostic assessment covering the academic areas tested in the online assessment, alongside a first look at extended, timed creative writing, since this is assessed entirely separately from the test itself and is frequently under-prepared by families who focus only on practice papers. As the 27 November 2026 assessment date approaches, we introduce full timed mock sessions replicating the format and length of the actual assessment day, and dedicated interview preparation — not rehearsed answers, but genuine practice at discussing interests, reading and activities clearly and confidently, matching what the school says it is actually looking for.

We also help families navigate the wider process: registering ahead of the 2 November 2026 deadline, understanding the reduced £64 registration fee and £35,000 income threshold if they may be eligible, and preparing a bursary application with the school's own Bursary Programme Manager if a family wants to explore bursary support covering up to 100% of fees. If a family is also considering City of London School for Girls, or applying to both, we help them keep the two schools' separate timetables straight from the outset — including CLSG's own second assessment date of 6 January 2027, which falls well after City of London School's single assessment day. For a wider view of how independent school fees and bursaries have shifted recently, our guide on school bursaries after the VAT change covers the broader context families are navigating alongside a specific school's own figures.

If you are researching City of London School for Girls specifically, rather than the boys' school this page covers, our separate City of London School for Girls 11+ guide covers CLSG's own dates, fees and process in full. Families considering City of London School's sixth form at 16+ may also find our City of London School 16+ guide useful for planning beyond 11+ entry.

Frequently Asked Questions