Our 2023 School Entrance Results — And What Has Changed Since

In March 2023 we published the outcomes of that admissions cycle: 35 children prepared, 34 offers, a 97.1% success rate. Those figures are a record and they stay as they are. What follows them is new. Every one of the ten schools named below has changed something about how it selects since those letters arrived, and this page now sets out what, and on what date each policy was checked.

Why does a 2023 results post need a 2026 second half?

A results post ages badly. The offers are real, the year is fixed, and within two admissions cycles the tests that produced those offers have moved on. That is exactly what has happened here. A parent landing on this page in 2026 wants two different things from it: evidence that preparation worked, and an accurate picture of what their own child would be walking into. The first half of this page answers the first question and has not been touched. The second half answers the second, and it is built entirely from what the schools themselves publish — admissions policies, determined arrangements, patterns-of-admission tables and key-dates pages — each read on 23 August 2026.

We have kept a hard line between the two halves. Nothing in the 2023 record has been recalculated, re-rounded or restated, and no outcome figure has been added to it. Where we have corrected something, it is a statement about how admissions work rather than an outcome, and we say what was wrong rather than editing it away quietly.

One general point before the schools. The ISEB Common Pre-Test now sits in front of several of the independent schools on this list, and it is widely described as a Year 6 test. ISEB does not say that. Its own description is that senior schools "can use the tests for entry into Year 7, or for deferred entry into Year 9" — the sitting year is a decision each senior school makes, not a fixed national rule. Families planning backwards from a pre-test date should take that date from the school itself. If you are working out which assessments actually apply to your child, our admissions test preparation pages set out the formats school by school.

What did the 2023 cycle actually produce?

In the 2023 admissions cycle, we worked with 35 students sitting selective school entrance examinations at 11+ and 13+. Of those, 34 received at least one offer from a selective or independent school — a success rate of 97.1%. We define success as receiving at least one offer from a school the family had genuinely targeted. We do not count offers from schools added as late safety options after a first-choice school declined.

Places were gained at Queen Elizabeth's School Barnet (8 students), Henrietta Barnett School (5), St Paul's Girls' School (2), Latymer Upper School (3), Dulwich College (2), James Allen's Girls' School (2), Tiffin Girls' School (2), Tiffin School (2), Enfield Grammar School (4) and the Sutton SET schools (4). Those counts stand exactly as they were published in March 2023, and nothing below changes any of them.

Two things about that list need saying in 2026, and neither of them alters a figure in it. The first is Enfield Grammar School. This post described the whole cohort as sitting selective school entrance examinations, which is not true of that school. Enfield Grammar's own admissions page states it in capitals: "Enfield Grammar School is NOT a selective grammar school; we are proud to be a comprehensive secondary school, where all are welcome." Its Year 7 places are allocated on looked-after status, medical and social need, aptitude places in music and sport, staff and sibling connections, and then distance. There is no academic entrance test to pass and no qualifying score to reach. Those children gained places at a good local school; they did not sit a grammar school examination to do it, and presenting the list as ten selective schools was wrong.

The second is the Sutton entry. We wrote "Sutton SET consortium schools", which invites the reading that a consortium tests once and then distributes places between its members. It does not work that way. The SET is a shared first-stage eligibility test; each school runs its own second stage and makes its own offers, and the schools do not even test on the same day. The section on Sutton below sets out what that means for a family listing more than one of them.

What does Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet ask for now?

Eight of the children in this post held a place at Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet, more than at any other school on the list. It is worth being precise about what that school now asks for, because it selects in a way that is unusually simple and unusually unforgiving.

QE Boys publishes a Published Admission Number of 180 for Year 7. It also publishes a threshold, which most super-selective schools do not: "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 carefully. A combined score of 225 makes a boy eligible to be considered. It does not buy a place. Above the threshold the school ranks on score, and the number of boys clearing 225 in any given year is not something the school publishes.

There is no catchment area at all. The school states plainly that it has none, and that where two or more applicants score the same mark, the rank order is settled by the straight-line distance between the home address point supplied by Ordnance Survey and the main school gate, closest first. Distance is a tie-break and nothing more. There is no priority for siblings, for staff, for Pupil Premium status, or for music, sport or drama. For a family living well outside Barnet, that is the most encouraging fact on this page.

The test itself is a single round: "Our entrance test consists of two multiple-choice format papers in English and Mathematics sat in a single session." No second-round paper, no extended writing task. Preparation for QE Boys is therefore a narrower problem than preparation for a school with a written second stage, and a child sitting both should be prepared for them as two different pieces of work rather than one. Our grammar school entrance preparation pages set out where the formats diverge. For September 2027 entry the entrance test falls on 16 and 17 September 2026, with boys attending on one of those two days.

How does Henrietta Barnett select, and does living close by help?

Five children in this post gained places at The Henrietta Barnett School, a short distance from QE Boys and selecting on an almost opposite model.

HBS publishes a Published Admission Number of 120 for September 2027 entry, and it tests twice. Round One is verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning and English, set by an external body. Only a ranked group of candidates is invited back for the Round Two English and Mathematics test, and the school's determined policy adds that where candidates tie at the cut-off score, all of them go through: "If there is a tie at the cut-off score, then all those with the tied score will be invited to sit the Round Two test." The Round Two field is therefore set by score, not by a hard cap that would split identical marks.

The part most often missed is what happens after Round Two. HBS does not allocate purely on rank. Its Criterion Three gives priority to candidates who live within 3 miles of the school at the point they submit their application to the local authority in October and who sat the Round Two test, ahead of the open rank-order criterion that follows it. In plain terms, a girl living within three miles can be admitted ahead of a girl outside it who scored higher at Round Two. That is the single largest planning difference between the two Barnet super-selective schools, and it is not obvious from either school's reputation. QE Boys uses distance only to break tied marks. HBS uses distance as a criterion in its own right, ranked above open score.

We have stated that criterion in our own words deliberately. The text sits in the school's Admissions Policy for 2027-2028, whose published PDF has a defective text layer that runs words together, so quoting it directly would misrepresent the document. The policy is the authority and it is the version a family should read.

What has changed at the two Tiffin schools since 2023?

The two Tiffin schools have changed more since 2023 than anything else on this list, and they are the only schools here that publish enough data to show how the competition itself has moved.

Tiffin School has added an entry route that did not exist for the 2023 cohort. From September 2025 entry onwards it introduced a Sporting Aptitude Assessment and a Music Aptitude Assessment, and up to 10% of places are now awarded to boys who demonstrate an aptitude in sport (5%) or music (5%). This is not a side door. The reserved places go only to boys whose Combined Score is at or above the 450th ranked Combined Score of all applicants who sat the Stage Two test. A boy has to be academically in range first and then demonstrate the aptitude. A strong violinist with a weak Stage Two score is not helped by it.

The test design has changed too. Tiffin School now works in partnership with Quest to set its Year 7 entrance tests, and describes the result as "a bespoke test specifically for Tiffin, which also changes annually". That matters for how a family prepares. A paper rewritten every year cannot be reverse-engineered from last year's paper, and preparation built on recognising a fixed publisher's house style has considerably less to hold on to than it would at a school using an off-the-shelf test.

Geography has hardened into something close to an absolute rule. The school's own patterns-of-admission table records that for 2024, 2025 and 2026, all places were offered to those in the 10km Priority Area, and no places were offered to those outside it. The Priority Area is not formally described as a catchment, but three consecutive years without a single place going outside it is the fact a family living further out should plan around, rather than the wording.

Set against the 186 places offered initially, the 2026 Stage One field of 1,866 works out at 1,866 ÷ 186 = 10.0 boys tested for every place offered at the start of the process. Stage One is where most of the field goes: 665 of 1,866 reached Stage Two, or 35.6%. Of those, 186 received an initial offer — 28.0%. The three-year movement sits almost entirely in the first row. Stage One rose from 1,654 in 2024 to 1,866 in 2026, which is 212 more boys, a rise of 12.8%, while the number tested at Stage Two and the number of initial offers barely moved at all. More boys are entering. The same number are getting through.

The Tiffin Girls' School publishes the same kind of table, and its final column is the exact cycle this post reports on.

In 2023, 1,445 girls were tested at stage one and 477 went through to stage two, which is 33.0% of the field. The two children in this post who gained Tiffin Girls' places were among that 477. Nothing in either table says the test got harder. They say the field got larger while the number of places did not.

Tiffin Girls' geography is stated even more bluntly than Tiffin School's: "Since the Designated Area was introduced in September 2014 all places have been offered to children living inside it. The Designated Area is made up of 44 postal districts and these are set out in the admissions policy." That is a published record with no exceptions in it, and a family living outside those 44 districts should read it as a gate rather than as a preference.

Does one Sutton SET result cover all five schools?

Four children in this post gained places through the Sutton schools, and the label we used for them in 2023 is the most common misunderstanding parents bring us about Sutton.

The Selective Eligibility Test is a first-stage sift. It establishes eligibility; it does not distribute places. Each school then runs its own second stage, sets its own standard and makes its own offers, and the second stages are not even held on the same day. Sutton Grammar's examination page places the stage two test for Nonsuch High School for Girls and Wallington High School for Girls on Saturday 26 September 2026, with the remaining schools on a separate date and Wilson's School running a further aptitude day of its own. A family listing several Sutton schools is not entering one competition. It is entering several, with several diaries and several second-stage formats.

Sutton Grammar also shows how far a second stage can depart from a pure score ranking. Its determined policy for 2027 entry ring-fences a block of places by postcode: "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." A boy inside those postcodes and a boy outside them are, in practice, competing in different queues for different blocks of places, and a raw score comparison between the two tells a parent very little.

The marks themselves are then adjusted twice over. The school states that it "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)", and it applies the same adjustment at the second stage. Age adjustment is standard across selective entry. Income-deprivation adjustment is not, and it is another reason a cut-off score circulating on a parent forum is a poor guide to what any individual child needs to score.

How have the independent schools restructured since 2023?

Four of the schools in this post are independent, and every one of them has restructured the way it assesses since 2023.

St Paul's Girls' School now places a pre-test in front of its own written papers. Its admissions page states that "All candidates are required to complete the ISEB Common Pre-Test, a computer-based, time-limited adaptive assessment designed to identify academic potential across verbal reasoning, mathematics, and non-verbal reasoning." For the cohort in this post, that stage did not sit in front of the SPGS examination. It does now, which means a candidate can be filtered out before the school's own papers are ever reached.

James Allen's Girls' School has moved the same way and pairs it with something softer. 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 carries a one-to-one interview and a creative writing task, so a girl is being read as a person as well as scored as a candidate, and a child who freezes in an unfamiliar room is being assessed on that too.

Dulwich College has changed format rather than sequence. Its 11+ is now largely taken online in timed sections, and the reasoning and mathematics components adapt: "The Maths, Non-Verbal and Verbal Reasoning are adaptive which means that questions get harder or easier depending on answers submitted. Candidates are therefore not able to go back and change their answers." A child taught to sweep back through a paper and revisit the hard questions at the end has been taught a technique that no longer exists in that part of the test. A handwritten creative writing task remains. Dulwich also publishes a figure most schools keep to themselves: 180 boys are invited for interview.

Latymer Upper has gone in the opposite direction from a pre-test. It still writes its own papers, and it has replaced the conventional interview with an assessed half-day: "Interview Sessions will be held in School in January 2027 and will comprise a half day of immersive learning activities in classroom settings and a 1:2:1 interview." Being observed during a classroom activity is a different demand from answering questions across a desk, and it rewards a child who is willing to be wrong out loud. Across the three written papers a candidate is writing for 60 + 35 + 45 = 140 minutes. Preparation for a school that still sets its own papers has to be built on those papers; our senior school entry preparation pages cover how the pre-test and school-set routes differ.

How far do the waiting lists actually move?

The question we were asked most often after March 2023 was not about preparation. It was whether a waiting list ever actually moves.

Both Barnet schools publish the answer, which almost nothing else written about them does. Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet states that "The waiting list for entry into Year 7 in September 2026 has reached position 20." The Henrietta Barnett School goes further and dates it: "Second round offers were made on Thursday 26th March. As of 18th August we have offered up to number 40 on the waiting list."

Two things follow. The first is that these lists do move, and they keep moving deep into the summer — HBS was still making offers in the third week of August for a September start, which is well past the point at which most families have mentally closed the year. The second is that the movement is finite and public. Position 20 and number 40 are the published depths for those years, not open-ended encouragement, and a family sitting far below either should plan around the school they hold rather than the school they hope for.

Neither figure is a forecast. Both schools update these statements during the year, so read the current version on the school's own admissions page rather than any number quoted second-hand, including the ones printed here.

What would we tell a family starting now?

If we were starting with a family today, for entry in 2027, the first step would not be to begin practice papers.

It would be to work out what each school on the list actually does. On the evidence above, four genuinely different things are being asked for by schools that all get called selective in the same breath. QE Boys wants a high combined score across two multiple-choice papers in one sitting and nothing else. HBS wants a Round One rank, then a Round Two performance, and then applies a distance criterion above open rank order. Tiffin School wants a Stage Two score inside a field that grew by 212 boys in two years, from an address inside the Priority Area. Latymer Upper wants extended writing and a child who can think out loud in a room full of strangers. One generic preparation plan serves none of those well.

The second step is to work backwards from each school's own published dates rather than from a general calendar. The dates on this page are the ones the schools published as at 23 August 2026, and several of these schools close registration months before the tests themselves. Where we could not verify a deadline from the school's own page, we have left the cell blank rather than guess at it, and we would far rather a parent rang the school than trusted a table.

The third step is to be honest about geography early. It is the least emotive of these factors and often the most decisive. Tiffin School has offered no place outside its Priority Area for three consecutive years. Tiffin Girls has offered no place outside its 44 postal districts since 2014. HBS ranks a three-mile band above open score. None of that is preparation, but all of it determines whether preparation is aimed at a realistic list.

And keep the list itself honest. Four children in this post went to Enfield Grammar School, a comprehensive, where entrance examination preparation was never going to be the relevant factor. A good school list has each school on it for the right reason, and knowing which of them tests, and how, is the first piece of work rather than the last. Where the real obstacle is a subject-level gap rather than exam technique, our subject tuition pages are the better starting point.

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