11+ Interview Preparation: Which Schools Interview

The 11+ interview is a selection stage used by independent senior schools, not by state grammar schools, which the School Admissions Code 2021 bars from interviewing applicants. Among the eight London schools compared below, Francis Holland Regent's Park interviews every applicant on 4 January 2027, while St Paul's Girls' shortlists on a computer-adaptive pre-test and its own written papers for a 20-minute interview on 16 or 24 January 2027. Four publish no interview format at all.

Why no state grammar school can interview you at 11+

A great deal of 11+ interview advice is written for parents who will never face one. If the school you are applying to is a state grammar, there is no interview, and the reason is statutory rather than a matter of local preference.

Paragraph 1.9 of the School Admissions Code 2021 opens by saying that it is for admission authorities to formulate their admission arrangements, but they must not, and then lists fifteen prohibited practices. Sub-paragraph (m) is the relevant one: admission authorities must not interview children or parents. The prohibition binds every maintained school and academy in England. Designated grammar schools may select by ability, and they do, but the selection has to happen through the test and the published oversubscription criteria. There is no stage at which a child is assessed in conversation.

The Code allows exactly one exception, at paragraph 1.43. A maintained boarding school may interview to assess suitability for boarding, and even then the Code confines that interview to whether a child presents a serious health and safety hazard to other boarders or whether they would be able to cope with and benefit from a boarding environment. It is a safeguarding check, not an academic one, and it cannot be used to rank candidates.

The practical consequence for a family in Kent, Buckinghamshire, Sutton or Barnet is worth stating plainly: rehearsing interview answers will not move a grammar school application. Time is better spent on the test itself. Interview preparation becomes relevant the moment an independent school enters the list, and that is where the rest of this page looks. For the questions themselves, and what interviewers are listening for, see our companion guide to private and grammar school interview questions.

Which London schools interview at 11+, and who actually gets called

The question that decides how much preparation a family needs is not what the questions are. It is whether the child will be interviewed at all, and that varies more between schools than almost anything else in the process. Below are eight London senior schools, each row taken from that school's own published admissions pages for 2027 entry.

Three things stand out. The first is that the spread of practice is real: at one end Francis Holland Regent's Park interviews every applicant as a matter of policy, and at the other Highgate School recalls what it describes as a significant proportion for its second stage. Everything in between is a shortlist of some kind.

The second is that being invited to interview already carries information. At Alleyn's School, an invitation means the written assessments and the school report together suggested the child would flourish there, so the interview is not re-testing academic ability. At St Paul's Girls' School, an invitation follows two prior stages. A parent who understands this stops treating the interview as another exam and starts treating it as what it is: the school deciding whether this particular child fits.

The third is what the table cannot tell you. Francis Holland Regent's Park, Godolphin and Latymer and South Hampstead High School each publish an interview date, and two of the three publish a rule for who gets called, but none of them describes what happens in the interview. City of London School for Girls sets out its second assessment paper by paper and then says nothing at all about the interview that follows. Half the table, in other words, is blank on format. The Consortium's phrase for its members' interviews, an imaginative interview experience individual to each senior school, is easy to misread as a promise of an individual interview. It says the opposite of that: there is no shared format, each school sets its own, and several have not put theirs in writing. A row that reads format not published is doing more for a parent than a confident guess would.

Four interview formats, and what each one is really testing

Grouping every 11+ interview under one heading is the single biggest weakness of the advice available online. Four of the eight schools above describe what actually happens in the interview, and the four formats they describe reward quite different things. The other four publish a date without a format, which is itself worth knowing before buying generic preparation.

The short individual interview

St Paul's Girls' School publishes the tightest description of any school in this group: the interview lasts approximately 20 minutes and is conducted by one member of senior staff, looking for evidence of creativity, engagement and the capacity for independent thought. Twenty minutes is not long. There is room for perhaps six or seven substantial exchanges, which means a child who gives short, closed answers will leave most of the time unused, and a child who has memorised a speech will spend it on the wrong thing.

The group activity with a one-to-one interview

Alleyn's School invites shortlisted children to a group activity and a one-to-one interview. A group task is watched rather than marked: staff are looking at who listens, who builds on another child's suggestion, who takes a turn without taking over. It is the format where coaching most visibly backfires, because a rehearsed child tends to perform at the group rather than work with it.

The group interview with taster lessons

Highgate School's second stage is a group interview together with taster lessons, which the school says lets it get to know the child further while the child learns more about life at the school. Taster lessons introduce a second dimension: the child is being seen as a pupil in a classroom, responding to teaching they have not met before.

The half-day immersive session

Latymer Upper School runs the longest of the four. Its Interview Session comprises a half day of immersive learning activities in classroom settings and what the school calls a 1:2:1 interview, and it names what it is looking for: character, curiosity and teachability. That last word is the useful one. Teachability is not a quality a child can rehearse, but it is one they can be given room to develop, mostly by being allowed to find things difficult and stay interested anyway.

Where the interview sits: one shared test, two sittings, or no pre-test at all

The interview is one stage in a sequence, and the sequence is not the same everywhere. Understanding it matters because it determines how many hurdles a child faces and when.

Thirteen independent London day schools for girls belong to the London 11+ Consortium, which runs one exam across the group. The assessment is 100 minutes in total and is sat in the candidate's current school where possible, with Consortium schools hosting anyone whose school cannot. A child applying to four member schools sits it once. The Consortium then leaves the interview to each school, describing it as an imaginative interview experience individual to each senior school, and names Godolphin and Latymer and South Hampstead High School as selecting for interview from that assessment. Its own FAQ is blunter still: some Consortium schools select for interview and some do not, and how they decide, along with how many they invite, is a matter for each school. That is why neither Godolphin and Latymer nor South Hampstead publishes what its interview consists of, and why the parenthesis about an experience individual to each senior school should not be read as describing one. Our guide to the Consortium schools covers how offers are decided across the group.

St Paul's Girls' School runs three stages instead. All candidates take the ISEB Common Pre-Test first, which the school describes as a computer-based, time-limited adaptive assessment rather than a written paper; those who succeed then sit written examinations in English, Mathematics and General Comprehension at the school; and shortlisting for interview is based on performance in those examinations alongside the pre-test results. The distinction matters for preparation, because an adaptive on-screen test and a handwritten paper are not practised the same way. City of London School for Girls runs two assessment rounds, the first between 13 and 18 November 2026 and the second on 6 January 2027, made up of a 45-minute English paper and a 45-minute maths paper, with interviews between Monday 11 and Thursday 21 January 2027.

Alleyn's takes a different route again, stating that the ISEB Common Pre-Test does not form part of its 11+ process. Candidates instead sit the school's own papers in Reasoning, English and Maths in early January. The point for a family applying across several schools is that there is no single 11+ to prepare for, and the interview arrives at a different depth in each process.

The 2027-entry interview calendar, and the clash risk

Interview dates for 2027 entry fall almost entirely within the first three weeks of January 2027, which creates a scheduling problem nobody warns about until it is too late.

The sequence begins on 4 January 2027 at Francis Holland Regent's Park, followed by Latymer Upper's Interview Day on 6 January, the same morning City of London School for Girls holds its second assessment ahead of interviews spread across 11 to 21 January, then Godolphin and Latymer on 15 January, St Paul's Girls' on 16 or 24 January, South Hampstead on 20 January and Alleyn's on 23 January. Several schools state that they cannot accommodate alternatives: Godolphin and Latymer says explicitly that it is unable to offer an alternative interview date.

Registration deadlines sit much earlier, and they differ. Latymer Upper closes at midday on 12 October 2026, well before the others. City of London School for Girls closes on 30 October 2026, Highgate at noon on 4 November 2026, and the Consortium schools together with St Paul's Girls' on 6 November 2026. Registration fees also vary: Highgate charges £210 and St Paul's Girls' £265. Miss a registration date and no amount of interview preparation matters.

Offers then converge. The London 11+ Consortium common offer date is 12 February 2027, with acceptances due by 12 noon on 3 March 2027, and City of London School for Girls and St Paul's Girls' both use 12 February 2027 as well. A family applying to four or five schools should expect to make a decision on all of them in the same fortnight.

What preparation actually helps, format by format

Preparation is worth doing, but only the kind matched to the format the child will actually meet. The generic question bank is the least useful part.

For a short individual interview, the constraint is time. A child who answers in one sentence and stops leaves the interviewer doing the work. The skill worth building is not the answer but the second half of it: the reason, the example, the thing it made them think about. This is developed by conversation at home over months, not by drilling in the last fortnight.

For a group activity, practising alone is close to useless, because the thing being observed is how the child behaves around other children. Board games, team sports, drama and any setting where a child has to negotiate a shared decision are better preparation than any interview script.

For taster lessons and immersive sessions, what helps is comfort with not knowing. A child meeting unfamiliar material in front of a teacher who is watching them needs to be willing to say they have not seen this before and then try anyway. Children who have been coached to appear polished often cannot do this, which is precisely what Latymer Upper means when it says it is assessing teachability.

One caution worth stating plainly. Schools ask the current school for a reference alongside the interview, and they read the two together. An over-coached child whose interview does not match their reference creates a question rather than an answer.

If you are still choosing schools, our 11+ tuition overview sets out how preparation is usually sequenced across Years 5 and 6.

Frequently Asked Questions

Reviewed August 2026: selection stage and 2027-entry dates for all eight schools checked against each school's own admissions pages, and the shared timetable against the London 11+ Consortium. Format is shown only where a school publishes one