2021 School Entrance Results — And What a Family Faces Now

In March 2021 we published what happened to the 32 children we worked with that admissions cycle. Those figures are a record and they stay exactly as they were written. What follows them is new: a school-by-school account of how entry to each of those schools actually works today, sourced only to the schools' own admissions pages and determined admissions policies, every one of them read on 23 August 2026.

What is on this page, and what have we left alone?

The block below headed as the record is exactly that. It was written in March 2021, and the numbers inside it — how many children we worked with, how many held an offer, and where those offers came from — are reproduced here without alteration. We have not recalculated one of them, not rounded anything differently, and not added an outcome figure that was not there at the time. First-party results are only worth reading if they are frozen at the moment they were true. A results page that quietly improves with age is worth nothing to anybody.

Everything after that record is dated. It describes the position at the schools named in the 2021 list as those schools' own admissions pages and determined admissions policies set it out, all of them read on 23 August 2026. That is a narrower promise than a "what has changed" article normally makes, and it is worth being straight about why.

We wanted to write a genuine before-and-after: this school's admission number was one figure in 2021 and is another now, this test was set by one provider then and a different one today. We could not do it honestly. The 2021 admissions policies for these schools are not on their live sites, and a policy PDF that is no longer published is not evidence. So this page does not claim that any school changed anything. It states what each school publishes today, quotes the sentence that says it, and tells you where to read it. Where the current position would genuinely surprise a parent working from the 2021 record, we say so — but as a description of now, not as a measured difference.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A page that says "this school has tightened its criteria" is making a claim about two points in time, and half the pages ranking for this subject make exactly that claim without a source for either point. A page that says "here is the criterion, here is the sentence it appears in, here is the policy it comes from" is making a much smaller claim that a parent can check in ten minutes. If you are at the start of this rather than looking back at it, our selective school entry pages cover these schools one at a time; this page is about the group of them together.

What did the 2021 cycle actually produce?

The figures in this section are the ones published in March 2021 and are reproduced unchanged. In that admissions cycle we worked with 32 students sitting selective school entrance examinations. Of those, 30 received at least one offer from a selective or independent school — a success rate of 93.8%.

The definition behind that figure was published alongside it at the time, and it has not been restated or loosened since. Success meant receiving at least one offer from a school the family had genuinely targeted before the cycle began. Offers from schools added late as safety options, after a first-choice school had declined to make an offer, were not counted towards it. That is a stricter definition than the one most published success rates use, and it is the reason the number is not higher.

That list is reproduced as it was written, including the phrase "Sutton SET consortium schools (Wilson's, Nonsuch, Wallington)". It is worth flagging once here that the grouping no longer reads unambiguously, because there are two Wallington schools inside the SET arrangement and they now sit different second-stage papers on different dates. The Sutton section further down separates them. The 2021 line itself stays as recorded, because it is a record.

The original post also drew a conclusion from that cohort which we still think is the right one: what carried those children through was a steady weekly rhythm rather than intensity at the end. The children who came out of that year best had not worked the most hours. They had worked consistently, through a period when consistency was hard, and they had somebody checking in often enough to notice when a topic had quietly stopped making sense.

One correction to the original framing belongs here rather than buried. The 2021 post described the cycle as one in which several schools delayed their sittings into early 2021 or moved to remote assessment formats. We named no school then, and the 2021 arrangements pages that would settle it have since been taken down, so we cannot stand that up as a general fact. What we can say first-hand is what our own tutors and families lived through: format announcements arriving late, months with no classroom teaching to fall back on, and preparation that had to be rebuilt around whatever information a school released next.

What did families say at the time?

Two families wrote to us after results day in 2021 and agreed that we could publish what they said. Both are reproduced as sent.

A parent whose son gained a place at Latymer Upper School wrote: "The whole process felt very uncertain that year — nobody really knew what the exams would look like until quite late. What helped us most was having a tutor who stayed calm, kept the preparation structured, and adapted as soon as the format changes were announced. Our son went in feeling prepared for whatever they put in front of him."

A parent whose daughter gained places at James Allen's and City of London School for Girls wrote: "We had our daughter working with Leading Tuition from the autumn of Year 5. When lockdown hit in Year 6 we were worried everything would fall apart. The tutors moved online without any disruption — if anything, the 1-to-1 sessions kept her more focused than classroom teaching had. The results in March were the best possible end to an incredibly stressful year."

Both of those outcomes came out of one-to-one work with specialist tutors who prepare students individually for the particular format each school sets, rather than for a generic entrance paper. That distinction has become considerably more important since 2021, for reasons the rest of this page sets out: the schools in the list above no longer set anything like the same assessment as each other, and in several cases the assessment is not the only thing deciding the order of offers.

Who actually writes the paper your child sits?

If there is one thing on this page worth taking away, it is that there is no such thing as "the eleven-plus paper" across the schools in the 2021 record. They have diverged to the point where the schools that placed children in that single cohort now use assessments built by different organisations, delivered in different media, and published to different degrees. A family preparing "for the eleven-plus" in the abstract is preparing for something that does not exist.

City of London School for Girls now uses Cambridge Select Insight. The school states that pupils will be invited to City to sit a one-hour computer-based test, Cambridge Select Insight, assessing numerical, verbal and non-verbal skills, and that these tests will run between the 13 and 18 November 2026. Cambridge University Press & Assessment — the former CEM — confirms Select Insight as its entrance assessment for selective schools, and is unusually blunt about what it will not supply: it states that "we do not provide any commercially available practice materials (including practice or past papers) nor endorse any other commercially available resources or tuition services".

The Henrietta Barnett School goes the other way for its first round and names its provider openly. Its admissions page points parents at GL Assessment familiarisation booklets for the First Round Entrance Test, noting that they include packs of free materials. For the second round it publishes nothing at all. So a child at that school meets a familiarisable reasoning paper first and an unfamiliarisable one second, which is a very different preparation problem from either half taken alone.

Tiffin School has stepped outside the off-the-shelf market entirely. It states that it works in partnership with Quest to set its Year 7 entrance tests, that the collaboration gives it access to leading edge test design, and that each year it works with Quest to create a bespoke test specifically for Tiffin, which also changes annually. A test rebuilt every year is one for which a bank of old papers is close to worthless as a predictor, whatever it is sold as.

James Allen's Girls' School has moved its written stage onto the ISEB Common Pre-test. ISEB states that the tests cover English, mathematics, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning and will take 2 hours 15 minutes to complete, that registration is now made by the parent or guardian through its Guardian Portal rather than by the child's school, and that live testing for the 2026-27 session commences on Tuesday 1st September 2026. Because results are shared with the senior schools that require them, the pre-test is sat once. If that is the route your child is on, our senior school pre-test guidance covers what the adaptive format actually asks for.

Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet: what does the school actually publish?

The largest single block of offers in the 2021 record came from QE Boys, so it earns the most detail. It is also the school on this list that publishes the hardest numbers, and the one most often described inaccurately by pages that have never read its admissions FAQ.

The format is one round, not two. The school states that its entrance test consists of two multiple-choice format papers in English and Mathematics sat in a single session. There is no extended writing task in that session and no second sitting, which makes it structurally the simplest assessment of any school named on this page and, precisely because of that, the one where marks are decided by accuracy under time pressure rather than by range.

It also publishes a threshold, which almost no selective school does. Candidates achieving a combined score of 225 or higher, the school says, will be deemed to have met the standard required by the Governors to be eligible to be considered for admission. Read that sentence carefully, because parents routinely misread it as an offer line. It is an eligibility line. Clearing 225 puts a child into the pool that is then ranked; it does not place them.

On geography, QE is the opposite of its near neighbour. The school states that Queen Elizabeth's School has no catchment, and that in the event of two or more applicants scoring the same mark, the rank order for allocation of places will be determined by distance measured in a straight line. Distance is a tiebreak, and only a tiebreak. A family in Barnet is therefore looking at two selective schools a short drive apart operating on opposite geographic principles, which is worth knowing before you build a shortlist around where you live.

One further thing this school does deserves saying plainly, even though it competes with what we do. QE runs a partnership with Atom Learning under which, in the school's words, a child who "has been eligible for free school meals at any point in the last six years" will be "given entirely free access to Atom Home" by registering through the school. It is open to girls as well as boys, and to families who are not applying to QE at all. If your child qualifies, register for it.

Henrietta Barnett: does the highest score still decide the order?

This is the section a parent working from the 2021 record most needs to read, because the published position today is not the one most people assume. Henrietta Barnett is a super-selective girls' grammar school, and the natural assumption about a super-selective is that the ranking is the whole story. Under the policy the school currently publishes, it is not.

Start with the scale of it. The school states that the Published Admission Number for September 2027 entry is 120. Against that, admission is by academic selection with a First Round Entrance Test in verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning and English, followed by a Second Round English and Mathematics test. Two rounds, different subject mixes, and only the second one carries a mathematics paper.

The gate between them is published and it is hard. The determined admissions policy states that the highest ranked candidates — the top 300 — will be invited back to sit the Round Two test. Everyone else stops there. That single line reframes what Round One is for: it is not a component of a combined score in any way a parent can see, it is a filter, and a child either clears it or the second paper never happens.

Then comes the part that genuinely changes how a family should plan. The policy sets out a distance criterion, Criterion Three, covering "candidates who currently live within 3 miles of the school at the point when they submit their application to the Local Authority in October", and that criterion sits above the general rank-order criterion. In practical terms, being inside that radius is considered before open ranking is reached. A very strong score from outside it does not simply outrank a weaker score from inside it in the way pure rank order would imply. We are describing the current published policy here, not asserting that this is a change — we could not source the 2021 baseline — but if your mental model of this school is "score alone decides", the policy does not support it.

The school also publishes something almost nobody else does: live waiting-list movement. Its admissions page states that "as of 18th August we have offered up to number 40 on the waiting list". That is a genuinely useful figure. It tells you that the list moves, that it moves a long way through the summer, and that a place on it is not the consolation prize families often assume.

The Sutton SET: one first stage, and then what?

The single largest group of offers in the 2021 record came from the Sutton schools, recorded then as one consortium. The first stage still is one thing. Everything after it is not, and the differences between the schools are now large enough to change which school a given child should be aiming at.

The calendar for September 2027 entry is fixed and published. Sutton Grammar School lists the Selective Eligibility Test on Tuesday 15 September 2026, Stage 2 for Nonsuch High School for Girls and Wallington High School for Girls on Saturday 26 September 2026, Stage 2 for Wilson's School, Wallington County Grammar School and Sutton Grammar School on Saturday 3 October 2026, and an Aptitude Test Day on Saturday 10 October 2026 for Wilson's School only. That is one shared first stage followed by three distinct second-stage events inside four weeks.

For boys, the second stage is shared. Sutton Grammar's determined policy states that the second stage test will be common to Sutton Grammar School, Wallington County Grammar School and Wilson's School. So a boy applying to all three sits it once, on one Saturday, and the same marks are then used three different ways.

For girls, the position has consolidated in the same direction. Nonsuch states that a joint Second Stage Entrance Examination will be held by Nonsuch High School for Girls and Wallington High School for Girls on Saturday 26 September 2026, and that both the test and the criteria applied to be of selective ability will be common to both schools. Girls no longer sit two separate second-stage papers for those two schools.

The weightings are where it gets interesting, and where the shared first stage stops meaning what parents think it means. Wilson's School states that the rank order will be determined on the aggregate of the SET and the two elements of its second stage in the ratio 1:2:2. Add those parts together — 1 + 2 + 2 = 5 — and the SET contributes one part in five of the final rank order at that school. A child who performs modestly in September and strongly in October is in a far better position at Wilson's than the raw SET mark would suggest. Wilson's also states an admission number for Year 7 of 186, and ring-fences places for free-school-meals candidates and for sport and music aptitude before open ranking begins.

Sutton Grammar applies geography and deprivation adjustments that most families never see coming. Its determined policy allocates "75 places by rank order of the combined scores in the SET and the School's second stage test where the home address of the boy is in one of the following postcodes: SM1-7, KT4, KT17, CR0 4--, CR4". It also states that the school "adjusts marks from the SET for a boy's age and income deprivation score (using data in the Income Deprivation Affecting Children (aged 0-15) Index (the IDACI) published by the Government in 2019)". Two boys with the same raw SET mark can therefore end up in a different order before a single second-stage paper is opened.

Latymer Upper, JAGS and City of London Girls: three schools, three answers

The 2021 record groups these three loosely as independent offers. Today they have almost nothing in common, and a child sitting for all three is preparing for three genuinely unlike assessments inside the same few weeks of the autumn term.

Latymer Upper School still writes its own papers and publishes the timings. There is one paper for Maths of 60 minutes, and two papers for English — comprehension and multiple choice of 35 minutes, and descriptive writing of 45 minutes — with a 20 minute break after the English paper. Shortlisted candidates return for a half-day of immersive classroom activities and an interview. The examination itself sits on Wednesday 2 December 2026, in morning and afternoon sessions, so it lands in the middle of the school term rather than in a January exam season.

James Allen's Girls' School has handed its written stage to ISEB. The school states that candidates are assessed at a Welcome Morning during the autumn term and sit the ISEB Common Pre-test examination between early November and 9 December. The Welcome Morning is not a formality: it comprises a one-to-one interview, a creative writing task and an interactive group task. A child who tests well on screen and disappears in a group activity is being assessed on both.

City of London School for Girls has gone furthest from a traditional written first round. Its first assessment is Cambridge Select Insight, a one-hour computer-based test of numerical, verbal and non-verbal skills, running between the 13 and 18 November 2026. Its second assessment is conventional by comparison: a 45-minute English paper testing creative writing and analytical skills, and a 45-minute maths paper testing problem-solving, followed by interviews.

Set side by side, the point makes itself. Preparing for "the independent eleven-plus" is not one activity any more. One school wants a child who can sustain a 45-minute descriptive piece by hand; another wants a child who stays steady when an adaptive screen keeps getting harder; a third wants a child who can talk about a book to an adult and then work with strangers on a task. Those are different children, or at least differently prepared ones. Our subject-specific tuition is built around whichever of them your child needs to become, and the honest answer for most families is that they cannot chase all three at once.

Kingston: what has Tiffin done that nobody writes about?

Tiffin does not appear in the 2021 placement record, but the original post named it in passing as one of the most selective targets and then never covered it. That was a gap worth closing, because the two Tiffin schools between them carry the least-discussed and most consequential arrangements in London.

Tiffin School no longer buys its test off the shelf. It states that it works in partnership with Quest to set its Year 7 entrance tests, that the collaboration ensures access to leading edge test design and the best emerging practice in the field, and that each year it works with Quest to create a bespoke test specifically for Tiffin, which also changes annually. The consequence for preparation is direct: familiarity with a published test style transfers poorly to a paper that is rebuilt annually, and anything sold as a Tiffin past paper is at best a description of a previous year's design decisions.

It has also opened a second door. The school states that from September 2025 entry onwards it introduced a new Sporting Aptitude Assessment and a new Music Aptitude Assessment, and that up to 10% of places are awarded to boys who demonstrate an aptitude in Sport (5%) or Music (5%). That is a meaningful share of an intake, assessed separately from the main entrance test, and a family whose son has a genuine aptitude in either should be looking at that route explicitly rather than treating it as a footnote to the academic one.

The Tiffin Girls' School applies the sharpest geographic constraint of any school on this page. It states that since the Designated Area was introduced in September 2014, all places have been offered to children living inside it, and that the Designated Area is made up of 44 postal districts set out in the admissions policy. Read that precisely: it is a record of what has happened, not a rule barring an application from outside. But it is published by the school, on its own admissions page, in plain terms, and a family living outside those districts should plan on the basis the school clearly intends before committing a year of a child's life to it.

What do the schools themselves say about preparation?

This section is uncomfortable for a tuition business to publish, which is exactly why it belongs here. Two of the institutions quoted throughout this page state on their own sites that preparation of the kind we sell is either unnecessary or unsupported, and a parent deciding what to do next deserves to read that in their words rather than ours.

Nonsuch High School for Girls is the blunter of the two. It states that its entrance test is broadly based on the KS2 curriculum, that it does not consider it to be necessary for children to be tutored in order to gain access to the entrance test, and that it never allows 11+ tutoring companies in its schools. That is not ambiguous and we are not going to paraphrase it into something softer.

Cambridge University Press & Assessment takes the same line from the other end. It states that it does not provide any commercially available practice materials, including practice or past papers, and does not endorse any other commercially available resources or tuition services. Henrietta Barnett sits somewhere in the middle: it points parents at GL Assessment familiarisation material for its first round, including free packs, and publishes nothing whatsoever for its second.

Put those together and one practical conclusion falls out immediately. Anybody advertising past papers for Cambridge Select Insight, or for a Tiffin paper that the school says is rebuilt every year, is selling something the test owner says does not exist. If a product promises material for a test whose owner publishes none, that promise is the product.

What preparation can honestly do is narrower and duller than the marketing suggests: secure the underlying curriculum so that a hard question is a hard question rather than an unknown one, build reading speed and stamina, get a child comfortable writing to a clock, and remove the shock of an unfamiliar format on the day. What it cannot do is move any of the things that now decide a large share of these outcomes. It cannot move a home address three miles closer to Hampstead Garden Suburb, put a postcode inside SM1-7, change an IDACI score, or place a family inside 44 postal districts. Any honest conversation about a shortlist starts with which of those apply to you, and only then moves to the paper. If you want that conversation, talk it through with us before you commit to a plan.

When is everything, for a child starting now?

Every date below is taken from the school's own published information for September 2027 entry. The clustering is the thing to notice: for a family with a shortlist spread across the boroughs in the 2021 record, September and October are almost entirely Sutton, and then November and early December carry three unrelated assessments in three unrelated formats.

Two collisions in that table are worth planning around rather than discovering. The first is that a child on both the Sutton and the Henrietta Barnett routes is sitting real, ranked examinations in September and October while the Local Authority application — the one that fixes the distance measurement — is being submitted. The second is that the ISEB window and the Latymer Upper examination overlap: a girl doing both may sit her pre-test and a full handwritten paper within days of each other, in formats that ask for opposite things. Neither of those is a reason to narrow a list, but both are reasons to decide the order of preparation in the spring rather than in the week itself.

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