11+ Offers 2022 — and What Has Changed at These Schools Since

This post is a record of the 2022 admissions cycle, and its outcome figures have not been touched. What has been added is a layer the original could not carry: what has changed at the named schools since, checked against school, council and provider sources on 23 August 2026. Several of the routes described here no longer work the way this page once said they did.

What does the 2022 record say, and what has not been touched?

The figures in this section are the ones published when this post first went up, and they are reproduced exactly as they were written. Nothing has been recalculated, re-rounded or restated, because a results record that quietly drifts is worth less than one that stands still. In the 2022 admissions cycle we worked with 38 students sitting selective school entrance examinations at 11+ and 13+. Of those, 36 received at least one offer from a selective or independent school — a success rate of 94.7%.

The definition behind that figure has not moved either. We counted success as 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, once a first-choice school had already said no, were not counted. That is a narrower test than most published tuition figures use, and it is the reason the number is what it is rather than something rounder and more flattering.

The table below shows where those places were, again exactly as first published.

Two things about that table are worth saying plainly. The first is that it is a snapshot of one cohort in one year, and a cohort of this size cannot tell you what any individual child's chances are at any individual school. The second is more useful. Every route in that table still exists, but several of them no longer work the way this page described them at the time. That is the part of an archive post that goes quietly wrong, and it is what the rest of this page fixes.

Why update a 2022 post rather than delete it?

There are two honest options for a results post that is several admissions cycles old. You can take it down, or you can date it. Taking it down destroys a record. Leaving it up untouched is worse, because a parent reading it now has no way of knowing which sentences were true only of the year they describe. The third option, and the one taken here, is to freeze the outcome figures, mark them clearly as a record of the 2022 cycle, and add a separately sourced layer covering what has changed at each named school since.

That rule has one consequence worth stating up front: nothing below the results table is first-party. Every claim about a school's current test, intake, admission number or deadline comes from that school's own admissions page, its determined admissions policy, the county council, or the assessment provider — and each table names the body it came from and the date it was read. Where a source could not be read, and several schools now render their admissions pages entirely in the browser so that a plain fetch returns a shell, that gap is stated rather than filled in with something plausible.

The largest example of drift on this page concerned the ISEB Common Pre-Test. The original post treated it as the pivotal early filter for North London independent entry. It was, for the school in question, in the year in question. It is no longer a fair description of the landscape, and the correction is set out in the next section rather than buried. Even the mechanics of registration have changed hands: ISEB now states that "Registration for the Pre-Tests is completed by the pupil's parent or guardian via the Guardian Portal" — a job that used to sit with the senior school, and one a family can now miss entirely on its own.

Haberdashers' Girls': what replaced the ISEB pre-test?

The 2022 post said the ISEB Common Pre-Test was "used by Haberdashers' for pre-registration". That sentence described the 2022 cycle accurately and it is left standing as a record of that cycle. It is not true of the current one. Haberdashers' Girls' School states: "We have adapted our 11+ assessment for 2026. Habs Boys and Habs Girls will use the same QUEST first round assessment." Two schools that ran separate first rounds now run one between them, and the pre-test is not part of it.

The replacement is a paper assessment rather than an adaptive computer test, and that difference matters more than it sounds. An adaptive test adjusts its difficulty as a child answers and cannot be revisited; a paper lets a child skip a question, come back to it, and manage their own time across a section. Preparation built for the first behaves badly against the second, and a child drilled on screen-based reasoning can lose marks on a paper simply through pacing.

The sections tell you what the school is weighting. Reasoning is bundled with the subject it sits beside rather than tested on its own, and creative writing is a scored part of the first round rather than something read only at interview. A child who is quick at reasoning but slow at producing finished writing under time pressure will find the shape of this paper harder than the old pre-test, whatever their reasoning scores looked like on practice material.

The numbers around it are published too. Haberdashers' Girls' says "each year there are between 80 to 85 Year 7 places available", and that of the children who sit the first round, "around half of the students are invited to come back for an interview". So the first round is not a formality that filters out a handful of candidates — it removes roughly half the field before anyone is met in person. Families who plan on the assumption that the interview is where a child can make their case are planning for the wrong stage entirely.

Queen Elizabeth's School Barnet: has the test changed at all?

Queen Elizabeth's School Barnet was the single largest destination in the 2022 table, so it is the school on this page where a stale description would do the most damage. It is also the school where least has changed. The published position is still: "Our entrance test consists of two multiple-choice format papers in English and Mathematics sat in a single session." One session, two papers, and no second round to come back for. Nothing in the school's current material walks any of that back.

What the school publishes that most selective schools do not is an absolute qualifying number rather than a percentile: "Those candidates achieving a combined score of 225 or higher will be deemed to have met the standard required by the Governors to be eligible to be considered for admission to the school." Read that sentence slowly, because the wording is doing a great deal of work. Meeting the standard makes a candidate eligible to be considered. It is not an offer, and it is not a promise of one.

The waiting-list line is the one families under-read. The school states that the list for entry into Year 7 in September 2026 "has reached position 20". A place declined in April is a place someone else takes in August, and movement of that order is not unusual at a school with a Published Admission Number of 180. If your child is on a list, the useful question is not whether the list moves at all, but how far it has moved by this point in the year.

The genuine change here since 2022 is about access rather than format. The school now runs a partnership that did not exist in the 2022 cycle: "If your child has been eligible for free school meals at any point in the last six years, they will be given entirely free access to Atom Home by registering via Queen Elizabeth's School below." That is a school deliberately putting structured preparation in front of children who would otherwise not have had any, and over time it changes the composition of the field every candidate is ranked against. Our route notes are in the Queen Elizabeth's Barnet guide.

Henrietta Barnett: does the highest score always win?

This is the school most often described wrongly across the tuition market, and this page was no exception until this pass. The usual framing is that Henrietta Barnett is purely score-ordered, with no geographic criterion of any kind. The school's own determined admissions policy says otherwise, and the difference is not academic — it decides places.

Take the structure first. The school states that admission "is by academic selection, with a First Round Entrance Test in Verbal, Non-Verbal reasoning and English, followed by a Second Round English and Mathematics test". Round One is reasoning-led and Round Two is subject-led, which means a child can be strong enough at reasoning to clear the first cut comfortably and still be out of position after the second.

The first cut is a fixed rank, not a fixed mark. The policy says "the highest ranked (top 300) candidates will be invited back to sit the Round Two test". A rank cut has a consequence that a score threshold does not: how well a child needs to do depends entirely on who else sat the paper that year, and no amount of past-paper work will tell you where that line is going to fall.

Then the criterion that gets misreported. The policy sets out "Criterion Three: Distance from School — Candidates who currently live within 3 miles of the school at the point when they submit their application to the Local Authority in October". That is not a catchment in the ordinary sense, and it is not a tiebreak applied at the bottom of a list. It is a criterion sitting inside the order, capable of admitting a candidate ahead of a higher-ranked one who lives further away. The date attached to it matters as much as the distance: it is where the family lives in October, at the point of the local authority application, that counts, not where they live when the test is sat.

The school publishes the rest of what a family needs in order to plan. "The Published Admission Number (PAN) for September 2027 entry is 120." On waiting lists: "As of 18th August we have offered up to number 40 on the waiting list." And on preparation it is blunt — it points families at GL Assessment familiarisation material for Round One, and says "we do not release any past papers or offer any resources for Round Two". Anyone selling Round Two papers is selling a guess. Our fuller notes are in the Henrietta Barnett guide.

Sutton: one registration, and a second stage three schools now share

The Sutton route accounted for 8 of the places in the 2022 table, and it has been restructured since. Start with what has stayed the same: one registration covers the group. Wilson's School states that its online registration form "will also be accessible via the websites of Greenshaw High School, Nonsuch High School for Girls, Sutton Grammar School, Wallington High School for Girls and Wallington County Grammar School". Six schools, one form, one first-stage test to sit.

The change is at the second stage. "Wilson's School, Wallington County Grammar School and Sutton Grammar School have agreed to share our Second Stage Entrance Examinations." Three boys' schools that once set separate second-stage papers now set one between them. For a family that was previously preparing for two or three different second-stage formats, that is a real simplification. For a child, it means a single paper now carries weight that used to be spread across separate sittings on separate days.

Which brings up the figure that ought to change how a family plans. Wilson's states that "the rank order of the entrance tests will be determined on the basis of the aggregate scores of the SET and the two elements of the second stage Entrance Examination for Wilson's School in the ratio 1:2:2". Add those parts together and the first-stage test is one weighted part out of 1 + 2 + 2 = 5, so it carries a fifth of the final rank order, or 20%, while the second stage carries the other four fifths.

That is close to the opposite of how most families spend their preparation time. The first-stage test is the one everybody talks about, because it is the one every candidate sits and the one that eliminates. But eliminating is mostly all it does; it barely ranks. A child who scrapes through the first stage and then performs strongly at the second is in a better position than one who tops the first stage and coasts afterwards, and the published ratio says so in the school's own arithmetic.

Wilson's publishes its intake plainly: "This is a selective boys' school with an admission number for Year 7 of 186." The Selective Eligibility Test itself "will take place on Tuesday 15 September 2026". Our notes for the group are in the Sutton grammar schools guide.

Kent: what does the qualifying threshold actually mean?

Kent is the one route on this page where the threshold is published as a hard number after the event, and it is routinely garbled elsewhere into a single figure with no context. The county states: "To be given a grammar school assessment, children needed a total score of 332 or more, with no single score lower than 108. Test scores range from 69 to 141. The highest possible total score is 423."

Two things fall straight out of that. First, the highest possible total of 423 is exactly three times the top single score of 141, so the total is built from three scores rather than two or four. Second, the per-paper floor is not decoration. A child who scores exactly 108 on every paper totals 3 × 108 = 324, which is 332 − 324 = 8 marks short of the aggregate threshold. Clearing the floor on every paper does not clear the total. As a proportion, the threshold of 332 out of a maximum 423 is 78.5%, which tells you rather more about the standard than the raw number does.

The writing exercise is the most misunderstood element of the whole test. Kent states there "will also be a writing exercise which will not be marked but may be used by a local headteacher panel as part of the headteacher assessment stage of the process", and that "40 minutes will be allowed for the writing task, including 10 minutes planning time". It is unmarked. It carries no score into the total at all. It exists so that a panel reviewing a child who did not meet the threshold has something written by that child in front of them, which is a different purpose from the one most preparation assumes.

Kent is also unusually direct about who the schools are for: "Many children will find the test difficult. Grammar schools in Kent provide for children in about the top 25% of the ability range." That sentence is worth more to a family than any threshold figure, because it describes what the test is designed to do rather than what one particular year's cohort happened to score.

Highgate, Alleyn's and King's College School: three routes, three answers

There is no such thing as "the independent 11+", and the three independent destinations in the 2022 table demonstrate that between them.

Alleyn's is explicit that the pre-test the original post treated as the North London gatekeeper plays no part in its process at all: "The ISEB Common Pre-test does not form part of the 11+ process at Alleyn's." On intake, the school says it offers "around 150 places, with two thirds of these new children joining from a wide spread of state and independent schools, and the remaining children joining from Alleyn's Junior School". Two thirds of around 150 is roughly 100 external places, which is a large external intake by independent-school standards. Its deadline is unforgiving and says so: registration forms "must be submitted to the Registrar before the registration deadline: Friday 13 November 2026 at midday", and forms submitted late, "for whatever reason, will not be accepted".

Highgate is close to the mirror image. It says: "From next September, we hope to welcome approximately 80 new children into Year 7 of our Senior School. They will join around 105 pupils moving from Year 6 of our Junior School." The external intake is smaller than the internal one. On those published figures the Year 7 group is about 80 + 105 = 185 children, of whom the 80 arriving from outside are 80 ÷ 185 = 43.2% of the year group. A family comparing Highgate with Alleyn's on reputation alone is missing that they are competing for very differently sized external cohorts. Highgate's deadline is stated as "noon Wednesday 4 November 2026".

King's College School Wimbledon publishes its registration deadline as "Monday 2 nd November". That is all this page will say about the school, and the reason is worth stating openly: it renders its admissions pages in the browser, so a plain read of the page returns the site-wide registration banner and very little else. We could not confirm the assessment format from the school's own words, so no format claim is made here at all. An unverified description of a test is worse than no description, because a family will prepare against it.

The pattern across all three is that the registration deadlines cluster in early November while the assessments themselves sit weeks later. The decision a family actually has to make — which schools to enter — is therefore made months before anyone finds out how a child performs anywhere. Our school-by-school entry guides cover the individual formats wherever the schools publish them.

Who sets these tests now, and why does that matter?

The single largest change since 2022 is not at any one school. It is in the small group of organisations that build these tests, and it is also the source of the one outright factual error this page was carrying.

The old FAQ on this page said that "some schools use the GL Assessment or CEM format". The CEM 11+ product no longer exists under that name. The same organisation now markets its selection test as Cambridge Select Insight, described on its own site as computer assessments "designed for selective independent schools, partially selective state schools, Grammar Schools and schools with fair banding admissions". Anyone still buying practice papers labelled for the old brand is buying material for a product that has been retired.

That provider is also unusually clear about preparation, and its position deserves quoting in full because it cuts directly against most of the market: "To maintain the fairness of our assessments, we do not provide any commercially available practice materials (including practice or past papers) nor endorse any other commercially available resources or tuition services." There are no legitimate past papers for that test. Anything sold as one is a reconstruction from memory, and a family paying attention to that sentence will spend its preparation time differently.

The arrival that matters most is Quest. It now sits behind both of the Haberdashers' Elstree schools and behind Tiffin, and its own site claims it is trusted by 130+ schools. Tiffin describes the arrangement precisely: "We work in partnership with Quest to set our Year 7 Entrance Tests. This collaboration ensures we have access to leading edge test design and the best emerging practice in the field. Each year we work with Quest to create a bespoke test specifically for Tiffin, which also changes annually." A test rebuilt every year is a test that past papers cannot describe — the same practical conclusion as the paragraph above, arrived at from the opposite direction.

Tiffin has also opened routes that did not exist in the 2022 cycle: "From September 2025 entry onwards, Tiffin School introduced a new Sporting Aptitude Assessment and a new Music Aptitude Assessment. Up to 10% of places are awarded to boys who demonstrate an aptitude in Sport (5%) or Music (5%)." For a child with a genuine strength outside the academic paper, that is a second door which simply was not there when this post was written, and it is not one that any amount of reasoning practice opens.

ISEB has changed in two ways. Registration has moved from the school to the family — "Registration for the Pre-Tests is completed by the pupil's parent or guardian via the Guardian Portal" — with the portal opening on "Tuesday 9th June 2026" for the current session, alongside an explicit instruction not to register before that date. And ISEB has announced it will be "launching a Creative Writing Assessment for 11+ Admissions next year, designed for schools with a creative writing element incorporated into their admissions processes". Set that beside the Creative Writing section now sitting inside the Haberdashers' first round and the direction of travel is clear: writing is being pulled forward, out of the interview and into the assessed round. Families looking at senior school entry at thirteen should note that the pre-test still sits at the centre of that route even where it has left the eleven-plus one.

What dates are actually published for the current cycle?

Deadlines are the genuinely binary part of this process, and they are the part the rest of the results-day search results will not touch — one page ranking for this query states outright that it will not name dates and tells the reader to check the school instead. The table below names only dates the schools and providers publish themselves, each read on 23 August 2026. Where a school publishes a deadline without a year attached, it is reproduced that way rather than completed with a year we cannot see.

One gap in that table is deliberate. The Sutton second-stage and aptitude dates are published by the schools but were not captured in a form that could be quoted directly here, so they are not listed; the Selective Eligibility Test date is. Check each school's own page before relying on any date above, because a determined admissions policy can be republished at any point in the year, and everything here is a snapshot of a single day.

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