Streatham and Clapham High School 11+: the complete 2027 entry guide

Streatham and Clapham High School does not set its own 11+ paper. Entry for September 2027 runs on the ISEB Common Pre-Test, a group observation and a single 25-minute writing task, with registration closing on 30 October 2026. This guide sets out every published date, what the assessment does and does not test, and what the school's own records say about how contested a place really is.

What are the Streatham and Clapham High School 11+ dates for 2027 entry?

The cycle for September 2027 entry is short and front-loaded. Registration closes on Friday 30 October 2026. The scholarship and bursary deadline falls four days later, on 3 November 2026, which is the trap in this timetable: they are separate forms with separate closing dates, and the later one cannot be used to rescue a missed registration. From there the assessed part of the process splits into two blocks that sit a month apart — the group activity and creative writing task between 11 and 13 November 2026, and the ISEB Common Pre-Test, which must have been sat by Monday 7 December 2026 wherever your daughter takes it.

That split matters more than it looks. The November visit is the only time the school sees your daughter in person, and the December deadline is not a school exam day at all — it is an external, online test that can be taken at her own prep school, at another invigilation centre, or at SCHS on a single date. Offers go out in early February 2027, and acceptances are due by 12 noon on 3 March 2027. The school's own page prints a weekday against that acceptance date which does not match the calendar, so treat the date itself as the binding part and ignore the day name.

Two open events sit ahead of the registration deadline. The Senior School Open Day for 11 to 18 entry runs on Saturday 26 September 2026 from 8:40am to 1:45pm at the senior school on Abbotswood Road, and there are 11+ taster sessions on Friday 2 October and Friday 9 October 2026 from 2:45pm to 4:00pm. Those dates leave only the second half of October to decide, which is one reason we suggest families settle their 11+ shortlist before the autumn term begins rather than during it.

What does the SCHS 11+ assessment actually consist of?

Three things, and only one of them is written by the school. In its own words, the process "includes a group problem-solving activity, a creative writing submission and the ISEB Pre-Test covering English, Maths, Verbal Reasoning & Non-Verbal Reasoning". There is no SCHS-set entrance paper. There is no additional reasoning paper on top of the ISEB. And there is no interview: the school states that through the group observation activity it sees every pupil in action, which it regards as a richer insight than a formal interview.

The group observation is the part parents find hardest to picture, because there is nothing to revise for it. Pupils take part in an interactive and engaging activity built around a specific theme, watched by staff. What the school records from it is behavioural — how a child contributes, listens, changes her mind, keeps going when an idea does not work. Then, on the same day, that theme reappears: the school states that the theme is further developed in the 25-minute creative writing task the candidates complete on the same day.

That single mechanism is the most useful thing on this page, and it is why generic writing preparation only half works. Your daughter will not walk in with a title she can predict, and she will not have a bank of pre-learned openings that fit it. What she can rehearse is the transfer: taking an unfamiliar prompt, choosing an angle inside two or three minutes, and producing something finished in 25. A child who has practised a dozen polished set-piece stories and a child who has practised turning a random object on the kitchen table into 25 minutes of writing are not equally prepared for this task, and the second one is closer.

It is also worth being clear about what the group activity is not. It is not a test the school can hand you a mark for afterwards, and it is not an interview in disguise where a rehearsed answer about favourite books scores points. Our 11+ tuition for SCHS candidates treats it as what it is: a live setting where composure in a room of strangers is the variable, and where the return on practice comes from doing it several times rather than from being briefed about it once.

How does the ISEB Common Pre-Test work, and what does it not test?

The ISEB Common Pre-Test is four tests — English, Mathematics, Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning. ISEB's own guidance for senior schools states that all four tests are online, adaptive and multiple-choice. Both of those words carry weight. Multiple-choice means there is no extended written answer anywhere in the Pre-Test: no essay, no explain-how-the-writer-creates-effect question, no marks for method in Maths. Adaptive means the test adjusts as she goes, so two candidates sitting at the same time will not see the same questions, or necessarily the same number of them.

The second thing worth knowing is the ceiling on content. ISEB states that Mathematics questions are based on the National Curriculum for Mathematics until the end of Year 5. Nothing in the Maths test is drawn from the Year 6 curriculum. That reframes autumn-term preparation completely: a child sitting the Pre-Test in early December of Year 6 is being tested on material she finished more than a year earlier, so the work that pays is fluency and accuracy on Year 5 content, not racing ahead through Year 6 topics she will never be asked about.

Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning are fixed components of the Pre-Test, not optional extras that appear in some years and not others. If you have read elsewhere that reasoning may or may not feature depending on the year, that is simply wrong for this test. Both are always in it, and for most children they are the least familiar of the four papers, because primary schools do not teach either.

None of this makes the Pre-Test easy. Adaptive multiple-choice punishes a particular habit — the child who second-guesses, changes answers and burns time on one hard item early on can spend the whole test in a slower band. What it rewards is steady, decisive answering under a clock. We cover the mechanics of this format in more detail on our guide to admissions tests, because the same platform is used by a large share of independent senior schools across London and the home counties.

Is Streatham and Clapham High School part of the London 11+ Consortium?

No. The London 11+ Consortium names its member schools on its own website: Channing, Francis Holland (Regent's Park), Francis Holland (Sloane Square), Godolphin and Latymer, More House, Northwood College for Girls, Notting Hill and Ealing, Queen's College, Queen's Gate, South Hampstead High, St Augustine's Priory, St Helen's and St Margaret's. That is 13 schools, and SCHS is not one of them. It is a GDST school, which is a different thing entirely: the Girls' Day School Trust is the school's governing body, not an admissions consortium with a shared assessment.

This matters because a great many south and west London families apply to both, and the two timetables are not aligned. Consortium registrations close on 6 November 2026; SCHS closes a week earlier, on 30 October 2026. If you work backwards from the Consortium deadline you will miss the SCHS one. The offer dates diverge as well: the Consortium publishes a single common offer date of 12 February 2027, whereas SCHS says only that offers are sent in early February 2027. The 12 February date does not govern an SCHS application.

The acceptance deadline is the one place the two do line up — 12 noon on 3 March 2027 for both — and that is the practical crunch point for any family holding more than one offer. It also means that if an SCHS offer lands in the first week of February and a Consortium offer arrives on 12 February, the window to decide is the same. What you do not get is a shared assessment. The Consortium runs its own assessment on one of three dates in late November and early December 2026, and sitting it does nothing for an SCHS application, which needs the ISEB Pre-Test and the November visit in their own right.

What is the pass mark for the SCHS 11+?

There is not one, and the school says so directly. Asked for ISEB scores, SCHS states that it is unable to provide them, as there is no set grade or pass mark for the test. It will offer verbal feedback on a candidate's overall performance in its admissions assessments, but only after the acceptance deadline has passed — which is to say, after every decision that could have depended on it has already been made.

So no target score exists to aim at, and any page that gives you one has invented it. What does exist is a stated list of what goes into the decision. SCHS names four pieces of evidence: performance in the entrance assessment, the group assessment and creative writing submission, a copy of the candidate's end of Year 5 school report, and a confidential reference from the head of her present school.

The end of Year 5 report is the item worth pausing on. It is written in the summer before the application year — before most families have started structured preparation, and before the child has any idea she is being assessed on it. Nothing can be done about it once the autumn of Year 6 arrives. If your daughter is currently in Year 4 or Year 5, though, it is a live document, and the ordinary business of attendance, effort grades and how a class teacher describes her contribution becomes part of an SCHS application in a way that no amount of paper practice replaces.

The confidential head's reference works the same way. You will not see it and you cannot draft it. The one thing you can usefully do is make sure the head has been told the application is happening, in good time, so that the reference is written by someone with the relevant context rather than filled in at speed just after the 30 October 2026 deadline.

Scholarship decisions come out of the same review. SCHS states that all offers, including academic scholarships, are based on a holistic admissions review taking in ISEB results, data from the group observation activity, the creative writing task, and other available information such as school reports and references. There is no separate academic scholarship examination at 11+, and no separate paper to prepare for.

Where should your daughter sit the ISEB Pre-Test?

This is an operational decision made in the summer term of Year 5, and it is the one place in the process where an early phone call genuinely changes your options. Every applicant to SCHS must have sat the Pre-Test by Monday 7 December 2026. The school itself will host an on-site assessment on Saturday 5 December 2026, and it is explicit that this is the only date it will administer the test.

One date, and it is rationed. SCHS says that because capacity is limited, it will prioritise pupils for whom SCHS is their only ISEB-administering school and who are unable to sit the test elsewhere. In practice that means a girl at a prep school which runs the ISEB itself should expect to sit it at her own school rather than at SCHS. If your daughter is at a state primary, or at a school that does not administer the test, you are the priority case — but the place still has to be booked, and there is no second date to fall back on.

The school also advises that families applying to several ISEB schools should book the earliest available date. That is worth acting on rather than nodding at, because the Pre-Test result is shared with the schools a family names. The sitting date is therefore set by the tightest deadline across the whole list, not by the SCHS cut-off of 7 December 2026 alone. Book late and you can find that a slot which satisfies SCHS is already too late for another school on the same list.

One more practical point. Because the Pre-Test is taken once and shared, there is no version of this process in which a child sits a different SCHS-specific paper afterwards. Whatever she does on that one morning is what SCHS reads. That argues for sitting it in a familiar room where the choice exists, and for checking that the date does not land in the same week as a school production, a residential trip, or a Consortium assessment on 1 or 3 December 2026.

How do scholarships and bursaries work at 11+?

Two processes, two mechanisms, and one shared deadline of 3 November 2026 — which sits after the registration deadline, so a family that registers on 30 October 2026 still has a few days to finish the rest. It does not work the other way round: the November date does not extend the October one.

On the scholarship side, every 11+ candidate is automatically considered for an academic scholarship, and the school states that no separate application is needed. Specialist scholarships are different. Applicants for Specialist Scholarships in Art, DTEI, Drama, Music and Sport must submit an additional scholarship application form along with any supporting documents. Five disciplines, one extra form, and it is opt-in — nobody is put forward for a music scholarship because a teacher happened to notice she plays.

Bursaries run on a separate track altogether, and the structural fact worth knowing is that they are assessed centrally within the GDST and independently of the admissions office at Streatham and Clapham High School. The school states plainly that a bursary application will have no bearing on its decision when reviewing performance in the entrance assessments, and that all candidates are assessed in the same holistic way. Whatever anxieties families carry about declaring an interest, the school has put its position in writing.

The scale of the programme is published too. As of January 2023, over 6% of students in the senior school community were in receipt of a means-tested bursary award — just over 40 pupils across the senior school and sixth form, with over half of those pupils holding a full 100% award. That is a specific, dated figure rather than the vague reassurance most school pages offer on this subject.

There are two constraints to plan around. Awards are only made for pupils joining in Year 7 and Year 12, and the school states it is not able to award them at any other occasional place entry point. The application portal opens on 1 October for Year 6 and Year 11 families, which leaves a narrow window before the 3 November 2026 deadline. If a bursary is part of your plan, the practical sequence is: open day in September, portal on 1 October, registration by 30 October 2026, and the bursary and specialist scholarship forms by 3 November 2026.

How selective is Streatham and Clapham High School, really?

SCHS publishes no 11+ intake number. It does not appear on the school's admissions pages, in the ISI inspection report, or on the DfE register, and none of the guides currently ranking for this school carries one either. So no page can honestly tell you how many girls apply per place, and any page that offers a ratio has invented it.

What is published is the register. The Department for Education's Get Information About Schools record for URN 100648 gives a school capacity of 1110 against 811 pupils on roll, with the record last confirmed on 18 August 2026. The March 2024 ISI inspection recorded 857 pupils across an age range of 3 to 18. Those are two different counts taken two years apart, and both sit well below the registered capacity.

It is worth being careful about what that does and does not mean. A capacity figure covers the whole 3 to 18 school, not the Year 7 intake, and independent schools routinely operate below a registered ceiling by design. What the gap does rule out is the "places are desperately scarce" framing that fills most pages about this school. Nothing in the published record supports it, and the honest version is more useful anyway: SCHS is classified on the DfE register as selective, with gender of entry recorded as girls, and it selects on a holistic review rather than on a rank order of scores.

On the single-sex point there is no ambiguity, and it is worth stating because more than one widely-read guide gets it wrong. The 2024 ISI inspection report describes the school as registered as a single-sex school for female pupils, and the DfE register records gender of entry as girls. SCHS does not admit boys at 11+. Families weighing co-educational alternatives in the same part of south London are working from a different shortlist entirely.

The inspection itself is reassuring in an undramatic way. The March 2024 ISI report found all five standards met. Its two recommended next steps were that leaders develop the school's system of academic reporting to parents so that parents and pupils understand progress better, and that dates of recruitment checks are correctly recorded when monitoring staff recruitment procedures. One is about communication with families; the other is administrative.

What does a place at SCHS lead to?

The school published its 2026 results this summer, and they are specific enough to be worth reading rather than summarising as "strong". At GCSE, almost one in five grades across the year group was a grade 9, and 70% were at grades 9–7. The subject-level distribution is more interesting than the headline: History was the standout, with 45% of all grades awarded at grade 9 and 88% at 9–7, and the sciences were consistently high, at 95% of grades at 9–7 in Chemistry, 93% in Biology and 84% in Physics. Maths came in at 71% at 9–7.

At A level, the school reported its best results since 2017, excluding the Covid years. 42% of all grades were at A*–A, up from 33% the previous year, and 75% were at A*–B, up from 68% in 2025. A quarter of the girls gained all A*s and As. Two consecutive years of movement in the same direction is a more meaningful signal than a single strong year, and it is a reasonable thing to ask about at the open day on 26 September 2026.

One caveat, said plainly: these are the 2026 figures and they will be replaced in August 2027. If you are reading this during the 2027 cycle, check the school's own results pages for the current set before you use any of these numbers in a decision. Results distributions also describe the cohort that arrived at the start of the senior school, not the cohort your daughter would join, which is why we treat them as one input among several rather than as the answer. Families comparing outcomes across schools often find our GCSE tuition pages a more useful place to think about what each subject actually demands.

How should a Year 5 or Year 6 pupil prepare for this process?

Start from what is actually being tested, because the standard 11+ preparation plan is built for a different exam. There is no comprehension essay to write, no method marks to earn, and no Year 6 Maths in the Pre-Test. What there is: four adaptive multiple-choice tests, a group activity that cannot be revised for, and 25 minutes of writing on an unseen theme.

In Maths, the ceiling is the end of Year 5 curriculum, so the work that moves the needle is accuracy and speed on material she has already met — number, fractions, the four operations, measure — rather than acceleration into new topics. A child who can do Year 6 work slowly and Year 5 work hesitantly is in a worse position for this particular test than one who does Year 5 work quickly and correctly every time.

In English, the test is comprehension alongside grammar, punctuation and spelling, in a multiple-choice format. That is a reading-stamina problem more than a writing problem: the skill is holding a passage in mind while eliminating three plausible wrong options. Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning are the two components primary schools do not teach at all, so for most children they need the earliest start and the most systematic coverage of question types.

For the writing task, the single most useful habit is a weekly 25 minutes on a prompt she has not seen, planned in the first two minutes and finished inside the time. That is far closer to what SCHS asks for than any number of polished redrafts of the same piece. And for the group activity, the honest preparation is exposure: small-group work with unfamiliar children, where she has to contribute out loud without a script and recover when an idea does not land.

Timing across the two years is straightforward once the deadlines are on the wall. Reasoning and Maths fluency through Year 5; test-format familiarity and adaptive pacing through the autumn of Year 6; writing practice weekly from the summer term onwards. Everything peaks in November and early December 2026, and then it is over. Our subject tuition pages set out how we build the individual strands, and for families weighing SCHS against other routes, our 13+ guidance is worth reading before committing to an 11+-only plan.

What if you are looking at 13+ or a place later in the school?

Year 9 is not a formal entry point at SCHS. The school states that any places at Year 9 are subject to availability, and that where places exist, entry is based on assessments in English, Mathematics and Science, as well as an interview with the head. That is a different shape of process from 11+ in three ways: there is no ISEB Pre-Test, there are school-set subject assessments including Science, and there is an actual interview — the very thing the 11+ route deliberately replaces with a group observation.

It also changes what is available alongside the place. Bursary awards are only made for pupils joining in Year 7 and Year 12, and the school states it is not able to award them at any other occasional place entry point. A Year 9 occasional place therefore sits outside the bursary scheme altogether. Sixth form entry at Year 12 is back inside it.

If you are weighing an 11+ application against waiting, the published position points one way: 11+ is the main gate, Year 12 is the other structured one, and Year 9 depends on somebody else leaving. Families in that position often find 16+ entry is the realistic alternative rather than 13+, and it is worth planning for the entry point that actually exists rather than the one that would be convenient.

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