Forest School Walthamstow 13+ Preparation

Forest School is a selective, co-educational independent day school in Walthamstow, north-east London, that sets its own 13+ Entrance Exam rather than the ISEB Common Pre-Test used by many comparable senior schools. The exam combines a digital test with a 30-minute paper-based written English paper. Registration for September 2027 entry to Year 9 closes at midday on Monday 18 January 2027, only ten days before the exam itself on Thursday 28 January 2027.

Forest School's 13+ Entrance Exam Is Not the ISEB Pre-Test -- What It Actually Involves

Most independent senior schools that admit pupils at 13+ into Year 9 use the ISEB Common Pre-Test, a standardised digital assessment shared between hundreds of schools nationally and sat well over a year before the pupil actually starts. Forest School does not use it. The school’s own 13+ Entry page is explicit about the format: “13+ Entrance Exam will take the form of digital and written tests.” Part one is a digital test; part two is a paper-based assessment of written English, for which candidates are given thirty minutes. Nothing about that description matches the ISEB Common Pre-Test’s single online sitting, and a family preparing on the assumption that Forest uses ISEB is preparing for the wrong exam. If you want to understand what the ISEB Common Pre-Test actually involves, and which schools genuinely use it, our separate guide to the ISEB Common Pre-Test covers that exam in full; Forest is simply not one of the schools that sets it.

Selection at Forest runs on three elements together, not the exam alone: the Entrance Examination itself, an interview, and a school reference from the candidate’s current school. Shortlisted candidates -- those who do well enough in the written stage -- are invited to interview with a senior member of Forest staff, where, in the school’s own words, they have “the opportunity to talk about their interest and achievements, both academic and co-curricular.” A reference is taken up separately, alongside the interview stage rather than before it, so a candidate’s current school is not asked to comment before Forest has any exam evidence to weigh it against.

The Ten-Day Gap: Registration Closes 18 January 2027, the Exam Is 28 January 2027

Families researching Forest’s 13+ process for the first time consistently underestimate how little time separates registration from the exam itself. Parents must complete the online Senior School Registration form and submit a non-refundable registration fee -- £180 for UK-based families, £240 for overseas registration -- by midday on Monday 18 January 2027. The 13+ Entrance Exam is then sat only ten days later, on Thursday 28 January 2027. That is considerably tighter than the four-to-six week run-up common at comparable senior schools in this bracket, where registration typically closes a month or more before the exam itself. A family that leaves registration until the new year, rather than treating it as a task for the previous autumn term, effectively compresses its own final preparation window down to those same ten days.

Forest also runs a 13+ Open House on Thursday 14 January 2027 -- four days before registration closes -- which is realistically the last point at which a family unfamiliar with the school can see it in person before committing to the process. Candidates must have reached the age of 13 before 1 September in the year of entry to be eligible; because offers for September 2027 entry are made on this timetable, that means turning 13 by 1 September 2027 at the latest.

How Many Places Does Forest School Offer at 13+, and How Competitive Is Entry?

Forest does not publish a fixed number of 13+ places each year. The school’s own wording is direct about this: “Forest School will offer a small number of places for new entrants into Year 9, who meet the selection criteria for September 2027 entry. The number of offers will vary according to the size of the cohort in Year 8 coming through to Year 9.” In practice, that means the 13+ intake exists to top up whatever space is left in a Year 9 cohort that is mostly made up of pupils continuing on from Forest’s own Year 8, rather than to fill a fixed quota of new places set in advance. A family cannot look up a published pupil-admission-number for 13+ the way they might for some other entry points, and Forest does not publish CEM-style score thresholds or percentile bands for this entry point either -- a generic ‘competitiveness index’ applied to Forest by some tutoring directories is not something the school itself publishes or endorses.

The Interview, Reference and Scholarship Assessments: What Happens After the Exam

Forest’s published 2027 calendar for 13+ entry runs in a tight sequence after the exam itself. Interviews with a senior member of staff take place on Monday 8 February 2027, the same day as Academic Scholarship interviews for candidates who have also applied for an academic award. Families applying for a non-academic scholarship -- sport, music, art or drama -- are assessed slightly earlier, in the window from Friday 5 February to Wednesday 10 February 2027. Offers are emailed on Monday 22 February 2027, a little over three weeks after the exam, and families then have until midday on Monday 8 March 2027 to accept a place -- a two-week acceptance window, considerably more generous than the ten days allowed for registration.

What Is Forest School's 'Diamond Structure', and Does It Reach a Year 9 Entrant?

Independent school-guide sites, including the International Student Services Centre’s own school database, describe Forest as operating a ‘diamond structure’ -- shorthand for a school that is co-educational at its youngest and oldest years but organises some part of the middle years by gender. Forest’s own school-history page confirms the origin of this: the school opened as a boys-only grammar school in 1834, and did not become mixed until the arrival of girls was completed by the end of the 1970s, with the Girls’ School formally opened by HRH The Duchess of Kent in 1981.

What survives of that structure today, verified directly on Forest’s own site, is pastoral rather than academic. Forest’s Houses -- the pastoral and tutor-group system every pupil belongs to -- run “Year 7- 13 inclusive,” fourteen of them, “7 each for boys and girls,” with each House holding around 80 pupils. A Year 9 entrant at 13+ therefore joins a single-sex House and tutor group that follows him or her from Year 7 all the way through Year 13, even though Forest’s own current Senior Prospectus is explicit that classroom teaching itself is mixed: “Co-educational teaching at Forest… enables the School to encourage wider definitions of masculinity and femininity.” In short: a 13+ entrant is taught in mixed classes but belongs to a single-sex House and pastoral group for the rest of their time at Forest -- a structural detail that shapes day-to-day school life and that a family moving from a fully co-educational or fully single-sex prep school should understand in advance, rather than discover in the first term.

Scholarships and Fees for Forest School 13+ (Year 9) Entry

September 2027 is the first year Forest extends its Scholarship programme to 13+ entry at all. The school’s own scholarships page states that awards are “for sport, music, art, drama and academic excellence at 11+, 13+ (from September 2027) and 16+” -- a bracketed detail easy to miss, but one that means a family targeting Forest’s Year 9 intake for 2027 is applying into the very first 13+ scholarship cohort the school has run. The maximum scholarship awarded to any one pupil is 20% remission of the full school fee, whether earned in a single area or a combination of areas, though Forest is explicit that “most Scholarships will be awarded as a smaller percentage, usually 5% or 10%.” Bursaries sit alongside scholarships as a separate, means-tested award and “can provide up to 100% fee reduction when combined with a Scholarship” -- so a family should not assume a modest scholarship award is the ceiling of what financial support is available.

Forest’s fees for the Senior School, which covers Years 7 to 13 and therefore the Year 9 intake at 13+, are published on the school’s own fees page effective from 1 September 2026: termly tuition of £8,790 before VAT, rising to a total termly school fee of £10,898 once VAT on tuition and the obligatory lunch charge are included. A further £1,400 acceptance fee is payable once a Third Year place is formally accepted. These figures sit alongside, not instead of, whatever bursary support a family may separately qualify for.

How Leading Tuition Prepares Candidates for Forest School's 13+ Assessment

We build a 13+ preparation programme around Forest’s actual exam, not a generic Common Entrance or ISEB course repurposed for a school that uses neither. Because Forest’s assessment splits into two genuinely different formats -- a digital test and a separate 30-minute written English paper -- our tutors prepare candidates for each in turn: reasoning and problem-solving practice suited to a digital format, and dedicated written English work that builds the extended, timed writing Forest’s own paper demands, rather than treating the two as a single undifferentiated ‘entrance exam.’ We also prepare candidates specifically for the interview stage, since it sits alongside the exam and the school reference as one of three things Forest weighs together, not a formality after a strong written result.

Given the ten-day gap between registration closing on 18 January 2027 and the exam on 28 January 2027, we time preparation against the registration deadline, not the exam date -- a programme that only ramps up once registration has closed leaves a candidate with far less runway than the calendar suggests. Families can also weigh Forest alongside our wider work on the school’s other entry points: our Forest School 11+ preparation page covers the separate Quest Assessment used at that stage, and our Forest School 16+ Sixth Form entry page covers GCSE-based entry into Year 12, if you are considering more than one Forest entry point for the same family.

Families preparing for Forest’s own test format can also work from the sample papers we host for this school: 13+ English Sample Paper 1, 13+ English Sample Paper 2 and a 13+ Maths Sample Paper.

We are rated 4.8 out of 5 from 57 reviews on Trustpilot, read on 19 August 2026, and 91% of our students achieve their desired grades. Book a free consultation to talk through a preparation plan built around Forest’s actual ten-day registration-to-exam window, not a generic 13+ timetable.

Further reading: Forest School 11+ Preparation | Forest School 16+ Sixth Form Entry | What Is the ISEB Common Pre-Test?

Frequently Asked Questions About Forest School 13+ Entry