Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls 11 Plus Tutor

Leading Tuition's Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls 11+ tuition is one-to-one preparation for the entrance test shared by the West Midlands grammar schools. The qualifying score is 205, but for applicants outside the looked-after and Pupil Premium categories the score required for an offer on national offer day was 227 for 2026 entry and 222 to 229 across 2023 to 2026 entry. We recommend dividing session time by the 50/25/25 weighting.

Criteria, dates and registration are in our Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls 11+ guide. The Birmingham grammar schools share the test, covered in our King Edward VI Birmingham guide.

What Score Does a Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls Place Take?

The school's admission arrangements set the qualifying score at 205 for both September 2027 and September 2028 entry. Both sets of arrangements add that entry rests solely on scores gained in the Entrance Test, with no residence requirement. A girl below 205 is not considered. Above it, the 180 places are filled in score order within the school's published categories, so the number that matters is the one that wins an offer, which the King Edward VI Foundation (KEF) publishes.

For each Birmingham grammar school, KEF's results page gives the score required for an offer on national offer day in March and, in brackets, the final score offered by September after waiting-list offers. For applicants outside the looked-after and Pupil Premium categories, which KEF lists separately, Sutton Coldfield's figures are below. The last two columns are our own subtraction against the 205 qualifying score published for 2027 and 2028 entry, applied to every row for comparison.

Source: King Edward VI Foundation, Grammar Schools results and offers, all-other-applicants row for Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls. The two margin columns are Leading Tuition's own subtraction.

The qualifying score is a long way from the offer line: for girls in this category, the lowest score to receive an offer on offer day was between 17 and 24 points above 205, and after waiting-list offers it was still between 13 and 22 points above. In this category, a score of exactly 205 would have been at least 13 points short of an offer in every one of the four years.

The line also moves. In this category, offer-day scores ran from 222 to 229, a spread of 7 points, and final scores from 218 to 227, a spread of 9. The waiting list then lowers the line by a small and uneven amount: 4 points for 2023 entry, 2 for 2024, 5 for 2025 and 2 for 2026.

Because the arrangements offer places by rank order of score, each line depends on how that cohort scores, and no figure here predicts a later year. What the history gives is a range to plan inside. Our recommendation, for girls outside the looked-after and Pupil Premium categories, is to treat 229, the highest offer-day score across these four entry years, as the working target and 205 as eligibility only: in this category a score of 229 would have met the offer-day line in every one of the four years, and a score of 205 would have met none.

KEF states that it provides no raw scores and no information on how many marks are available in each section or in the test as a whole, and that it does not re-mark answer sheets. A standardised 229 therefore cannot be turned into a number of questions answered, so the target can only be worked towards through the test's published weighting.

How Does the 50/25/25 Weighting Divide Tutoring Time?

The consortium that co-ordinates the entrance test weights the results at 50% for English and verbal reasoning, 25% for non-verbal reasoning and 25% for mathematics. Each of the two papers is split into individually timed sections covering English comprehension, verbal reasoning, mathematics and non-verbal or spatial reasoning. Every question is multiple choice, GL Assessment provides the test, and each section's score is standardised for age so that younger children are not disadvantaged against children almost a year older.

English and verbal reasoning together therefore carry as much of the result as non-verbal reasoning and mathematics combined. Mathematics is the component children recognise from school, which makes it the natural place to put the hours, but it is one quarter of the result.

Our recommendation, in principle, is to divide tutoring time in proportion to the published weighting and then shift it towards the child's own gaps, which a diagnostic across all four components identifies in the first sessions. A girl who has not met hidden-shape questions needs more of the non-verbal share than the weighting alone gives it. A girl with quick reasoning and a thin vocabulary needs more of the verbal share.

Vocabulary built for the verbal reasoning questions feeds the English comprehension questions too, so the 50% block moves together, while non-verbal reasoning and mathematics each have question types of their own. Each paper runs for approximately 50 to 60 minutes including instructions and example questions, with a short comfort break between the two, so stamina matters as well as accuracy within a section.

What Do the Schools Say About Tuition and Past Papers?

The consortium's preparation page is direct. It says that none of the schools keep past papers, and that “intensive coaching or tuition is not in the long term best interests” of a child. It adds that none of the schools are connected to, or endorse or recommend, any organisation or agency offering tuition or revision courses for the entrance tests. Leading Tuition is an organisation of that kind, and a parent choosing a tutor should read the consortium's position first.

Three working rules follow. First, with the schools holding no past papers, there are none for a provider to pass on; the official material is the Entrance Test Familiarisation Guide that the consortium links, with further sample questions on GL Assessment's free materials page, and we recommend starting from those. Second, because the consortium cautions against intensive coaching, our recommendation is a programme paced across the run-up to the test rather than compressed into a short run. Third, the real test cannot serve as a rehearsal: KEF says the test is not to be used as a practice or mock test by candidates with no intention of applying to the Birmingham grammar schools, and a child may not sit it more than once. Rehearsal therefore has to happen outside the real test, and we recommend running it under the test's own conditions.

One resource sits outside tuition: the consortium works with Atom Learning to give pupils eligible for the Pupil Premium free KS2 learning and entrance test familiarisation, and families who qualify should register for it. Within these limits, a tutor can add what a guide and a set of sample questions cannot: finding which of the four components a particular girl loses ground in, teaching the skill behind the question type, and building speed and accuracy on it. We do not claim to reproduce the test, and we do not claim the schools' backing.

What Do the Twelve Practice Questions in the Official Guide Ask?

The Familiarisation Guide, which the consortium publishes from its preparation page, is the consortium's own material for the test and is published by GL Assessment. It numbers twelve practice questions: four on verbal reasoning, two on non-verbal reasoning, four on English and two on mathematics. The guide says that not all of the question types it shows will definitely appear in the real tests and that the real tests will include types it does not show, so it works as a map of the skills involved and not as a forecast of the paper. The question wording belongs to GL Assessment; the table names each type and sets out what we recommend a session does with it.

The guide's own note on mathematics matters for the plan. It says the section draws on what children have been taught in class but may include questions more challenging than they are used to. The tutor's job there is less to teach new content than to give practice in unfamiliar problem types, so that a child who has met the content is not surprised for the first time in the test room. Our parent guides to verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning cover the two reasoning formats in more depth.

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How Is the Test Room Rehearsed?

Timed sections that cannot be reopened. Instructions, example questions and timings arrive by audio CD, and before each section candidates are told how long it lasts. They can work only on the current section and may not revisit an earlier one or move ahead until told to. In sections lasting more than five minutes the audio gives a warning when five minutes remain. We recommend working a section as a sealed block against a fixed time, because a question left behind stays behind.

No watch, no calculator, no scrap paper. Watches, timers and stop clocks of any kind are not permitted, although a clock is in the room, and the guide lists a ruler, a calculator, a protractor and scrap paper as banned as well. Working out goes in the question booklet, which is not marked. We recommend practising with a clock rather than a timer, and setting out arithmetic in a small space.

A separate answer sheet. Only the answer sheet is marked, by computer. The guide tells candidates to check that each answer goes in the box with the same number as the question, to draw a line through the box beside the chosen answer, and to rub out a mistake completely, because a crossed-out answer cannot be read by the computer. The guide includes a sample sheet, and practice that ends on a sheet like it makes the routine automatic.

Our recommended approach is timed practice by section under these rules, kept for the later part of a programme, once the question types are familiar.

How Are Sessions Spread Over the Run-Up to the Early-September Test?

KEF says parents register a child for the test in Year 5 and the child sits it in Year 6. For 2027 entry, registration closed at 4pm on 26 June 2026 and the test was held on Saturday 12 September 2026, at the start of Year 6. For 2028 entry, which covers girls born between 1 September 2016 and 31 August 2017, the school's arrangements place the test on a Saturday in early September 2027. Year 5 and the summer holiday that follows are the stretch between registration and the test, and preparation can start earlier.

Over that run-up we recommend four phases, with time in each set by the child's diagnostic, not a fixed calendar.

1. Diagnostic. A short check across English, verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning and maths to find where a girl is secure, where she loses ground and which question types are unfamiliar.
2. Weighted teaching. Time divided in proportion to the 50/25/25 weighting and then shifted to the gaps the diagnostic found, with vocabulary work running through the 50% block.
3. Timed sections. Practice by section under the test's rules, with no going back, no calculator and answers on a separate sheet, once the question types are familiar.
4. The summer before the test. Consolidation and the answer-sheet routine. The consortium says parents can help anxious children by not putting pressure on them, so this stage is kept light.

We recommend tracking progress session by session on the same four components. The official result is a single standardised score, which KEF's results page says families receive by 16 October 2026 for 2027 entry, and it carries no raw marks and no re-mark, so a family cannot read a paper's strengths and weaknesses back from it. Families weighing an earlier or later start can read our guide to when to start 11+ preparation, and the GL Assessment format is covered in our GL Assessment parent guide.

Reviewed October 2026: figures and rules checked against the KEF results and entrance test pages, the West Midlands Grammar Schools consortium site and Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls' admission arrangements for 2027 and 2028 entry.

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