11+ and 13+ Results 2024 — From ISEB Pre-Tests to Common Entrance

This page records one admissions cycle. In March 2024 we worked with 39 students at 11+ and 13+, and 37 received at least one offer. Those figures are fixed and we have not touched them. The route to those offers has moved a great deal since, so below the record you will find a school-by-school log of what changed, each line sourced and checked on 23 August 2026.

What does the March 2024 record actually say?

The figures in the table below are the ones we published in March 2024, and none of them has been touched. Nothing has been recalculated, re-derived, rounded differently or quietly improved. That restraint matters more than it sounds. A results page whose numbers drift upward over time is not a record; it is advertising with a date on it. If you have arrived here to find out what happened in one specific admissions cycle, you are entitled to read exactly what we said at the time, and that is what follows.

Two definitions sat behind those figures on the original page and they still do. Success meant a student 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 already declined, were not counted towards it. That is a tighter definition than several published success rates use, and it is the one we are now bound by, because loosening it after the fact would move the number. In the 2024 cycle we worked with 39 students at 11+ and 13+, 37 received at least one offer, and the 11+ cohort was 34 students.

A word on scope, because two numbers on one website can look like they disagree when they are answering different questions. The 94.9% recorded here describes one cohort, in one year, across two entry points. Other headline figures elsewhere on this site cover a different question, over a different group of students, across a different span of time. They are not restatements of each other and neither corrects the other. If you want to hold them side by side, start with the denominators rather than with the percentages.

There is one labelling correction inside that list. The original set out a line for Sutton SET schools and a separate line for Wallington County Grammar School, which reads as though Wallington County Grammar sits outside the group. It does not. The Sutton Grammar admissions FAQ lists it among the schools whose places run from the Selective Eligibility Test. We have relabelled the group line to say so rather than fold the two together, because folding them would alter counts we are not prepared to alter. If you are working out where to apply, our grammar and independent school entry at eleven pages set out each of those schools separately.

What has changed at these schools since 2024?

Almost every guide on this subject explains what the ISEB Common Pre-Test is, how long it lasts and which schools accept it. Very few of them tell you which schools have stopped using it. On 23 August 2026 we opened the admissions page of every school named in the list above and read what it says today rather than what it said when this cohort applied. Four of those schools now describe an assessment route the 2024 families would not recognise, and one of them has moved the deadline that governs everything else.

The Winchester change is the largest single shift in that table, and it works in two directions at once. Winchester College has left the ISEB Common Pre-Test behind: its admissions page now describes a combination of school references, General Ability Testing, a writing assessment and an interview. It has also cut the link between the Year 8 examination and the offer. Boys still sit Winchester Entrance, but the school says plainly that "Entry to Winchester College is not dependent on the results of these examinations." For a family reading a 2024 timeline, that inverts the shape of the whole process. The decision point moves forward by two years, and the examination that used to feel like the gate is now a placement instrument.

The other rows are smaller, but each one breaks a plan built on the old route. Eton College has moved registration from 30 June to 31 August, which sounds generous until you notice the school also publishes the deadline by year of entry, so a boy seeking 2029 entry needs to be registered by 31 August 2026 — the end of Year 5, not Year 6. City of London School for Girls now runs a named commercial adaptive test at the first stage. Highgate School no longer lists entry at thirteen among its main points of entry at all. And Tiffin School has opened routes that are not academic tests. None of this is hidden. All of it is on the schools' own pages. It is simply not in the guides.

Is the ISEB Common Pre-Test really a Year 6 exam?

One sentence on the original version of this page was wrong, and it is wrong in the same way on a great many other sites, which is why it is worth correcting loudly rather than quietly. It said the ISEB Common Pre-Test falls in Year 6. ISEB's own description of the Common Pre-Tests says they are "Often taken in Year 6 or Year 7", and lists four components: mathematics, English covering reading comprehension and grammar, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning. Year 6 is the common case, not the rule. That sentence appeared twice on this page, once in the body and once in a preparation FAQ, and both have been corrected.

The schools bear this out. Marlborough College describes its pre-tests as taken at the child's current school between September and December of Year 6, with Year 7 given in parentheses as a live alternative rather than an exception. Harrow School is far narrower and says standard applicants should sit the ISEB test between 1 October and the end of November in Year 6. Eton College says all boys sit the pre-tests during October or November. So the honest answer to the question "when is it?" is that the exam board permits two year groups and each school then draws its own window inside that. If you are preparing for more than one school, the binding constraint is whichever school's window is tightest, not the board's.

That distinction changes what preparation should look like. A family working to a generic Year 6 assumption can find that one target school has already closed its window while another has not yet opened it. The practical move is to write down each school's own stated window before building any schedule, and to treat the board's wording as the outer boundary rather than the plan itself. Our admissions test preparation pages set out the formats that sit behind each of these stages.

Has Common Entrance been abolished?

The second thing families get told, usually with some confidence, is that Common Entrance no longer exists. It does. ISEB's own Common Entrance page states that pupils sit the assessment at 13+ when they are in Year 8, and that there are three examination sessions each year, in November, January and May or June. That is a live examination with a published calendar, not a legacy product being wound down. What has changed is how many schools treat it as the thing that decides an offer, and the answer at some of the schools in the list above is now: not at all.

There is, however, a real signal of change, and it comes from the exam board rather than from rumour. ISEB has said it will soon be launching a consultation with schools about the development of Common Entrance and prep school assessment. A consultation is not a withdrawal and should not be reported as one. But it does mean that a family entering the pre-test stage now is preparing for a Year 8 assessment whose format is formally under review, which is a good reason to keep the preparation general enough to survive a change of paper. Anyone planning senior school entry preparation across a two-year span should build that assumption in from the start.

It is also worth separating two questions that routinely get merged. "Does Common Entrance still exist?" and "Does my child's target school use it to decide?" have different answers, and only the second one matters for a plan. The board runs the assessment three times a year and publishes the sessions. Whether a place turns on the result is a school-level decision, and on the evidence of the schools in this list that decision is drifting away from Common Entrance and towards each school's own instruments. Ask the school rather than the internet, and ask it in that second form.

How different is the boarding route now from the one this cohort took?

The original version of this page said the 13+ conditional offers were confirmed as the students completed Common Entrance. For some of the schools in that list, that was accurate. For Winchester it was not, and the school has since made the point explicit. The wider problem is that there is no longer a single 13+ shape to describe. The table below sets out what each of the four boarding schools in the 2024 list publishes today, and the empty cells are deliberate: where a school's page did not state a stage in terms we could quote directly, we have left it blank rather than fill it in from a pattern.

Harrow School is the most precisely documented of the four. It admits around 160 boys into Year 9 each year, in the September following their thirteenth birthday, and up to 20 boys, normally aged 16, into Year 12. Its second stage is a named assessment with published component lengths: a 20-minute interview with a House Master, a computerised English and Maths assessment lasting one hour in total, and a classroom-based group activity of 20 minutes. Add those and the whole assessment runs 20 + 60 + 20 = 100 minutes. That is worth knowing when you are deciding how much of a child's preparation should be written practice and how much should be talking out loud, because a fifth of that hundred minutes is an interview and another fifth is a group task.

Winchester sits at the other end of the range. Its Year 8 papers are compulsory and wide, covering Maths, English, Science, History and Geography, but the school states that entry does not depend on the results. That produces an odd but honest arrangement: a demanding examination that a child cannot fail their way out of a place with. Marlborough College and Eton College publish their pre-test windows clearly and say less about what follows in terms we could quote directly, so we have not guessed at it. If a school's page does not say it, this page does not say it either.

What do the tests at eleven look like now?

The template FAQ that used to sit at the foot of this page said that most selective schools test verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, mathematics and English comprehension, and that schools use either GL Assessment or CEM format papers. Measured against the schools this page names, that is close to the opposite of the truth. Of the six routes at eleven in the 2024 list whose current format we could confirm at source, one matches that description, one states outright that it contains no reasoning at all, and the remaining four use named providers or in-house papers that the GL-or-CEM binary does not describe.

The Sutton Selective Eligibility Test is the clearest contradiction. The Sutton Grammar admissions FAQ says the test is made up of two papers, a multiple-choice Maths paper and a multiple-choice English paper, and adds that the tests do not include verbal reasoning or non-verbal reasoning. A child prepared on a diet of reasoning practice for that test would have spent a large part of their preparation on material the paper does not contain. Tiffin School works in partnership with Quest to create a bespoke test specifically for Tiffin, which changes annually, so last year's paper is a guide to style rather than to content. City of London School for Girls uses Cambridge Select Insight, a one-hour computer-based test assessing numerical, verbal and non-verbal skills. Latymer Upper School sets its own papers: Maths for 60 minutes, English comprehension and multiple choice for 35 minutes, and descriptive writing for 45 minutes, with a 20-minute break after the English paper.

Two derived figures are worth pulling out of that. Latymer Upper's papers total 60 + 35 + 45 = 140 minutes of assessed time, of which the descriptive writing paper is 45 of 140 minutes, or 32.1%. City of London School for Girls runs 60 minutes at the first stage and 45 + 45 = 90 minutes at the second, so 150 minutes across the two rounds, with the first on a screen and the second on paper. Neither figure is exotic. Both are simply what the schools publish, added up. The point is that the shape of the assessment differs enough between schools that one generic programme cannot serve them all.

There is a second-order effect worth naming. When schools set their own papers or buy differentiated commercial tests, the market in practice material gets worse rather than better, because no publisher can cover a bespoke paper that changes every year. That pushes the useful work back towards the underlying skills — arithmetic fluency, comprehension under time pressure, writing that holds a shape — and away from format drilling. It is not a comfortable message for anyone selling practice papers, but it follows directly from what these schools now publish about their own tests.

Which published numbers actually tell you anything about your odds?

The most useful numbers in selective admissions are rarely the ones in the marketing. They are the admission numbers, the internal-versus-external splits, the published weightings and the waiting-list depths, and they are all sitting on the schools' own sites where almost nobody quotes them. The table below collects the ones we could confirm at source. Every figure in it comes from the school's published page, and every derived figure shows its arithmetic so that you can check it rather than trust it.

Start with the splits, because they change what competition means. Highgate School expects to welcome approximately 80 new children into Year 7, joining around 105 pupils moving up from its Junior School. That is 80 of 185 places, or 43.2%, available to applicants from outside. North London Collegiate School publishes around 70 to 75 external places joining the 45 or so girls coming up from its Junior School, which puts the external share between 70/115, or 60.9%, and 75/120, or 62.5%. Those two schools are often spoken about in the same breath, and on this measure they are not comparable at all: at one a clear majority of the year group is recruited from outside, at the other well under half is. Nothing in that data says one school is harder to enter than the other. It says the pool you are competing in is a different size.

Then the weighting, which is the rarest figure of the set. Sutton Grammar School publishes that the four standardised scores are weighted in the ratio 2:2:3:3, that an age allowance is then added, and that the total is rounded to the nearest four marks to give the final score. That ratio sums to 2 + 2 + 3 + 3 = 10 parts, so the pair carrying a weight of 3 accounts for 6 of those 10, which is 60% of the final score. The same FAQ sets out a contextual pass mark: candidates registered as Pupil Premium at their primary school are eligible to achieve up to 20% lower than the standardised pass mark, at Nonsuch and at Wallington High School for Girls. Queen Elizabeth's School Barnet has moved in a different direction, partnering with Atom Learning to give those eligible for pupil premium free access to preparation materials for ages 7 to 11.

Finally the waiting lists, which are the only public measure of how far offers actually travel after national offer day. The Henrietta Barnett School published that as of 18 August it had offered up to number 40 on its waiting list. Queen Elizabeth's School Barnet published that its waiting list for entry into Year 7 in September 2026 had reached position 20. These are not equivalent numbers — different schools, different list mechanics, different dates — but together they establish something families are routinely told is unknowable. The list moves, and it moves by an amount the school is willing to put in writing. A place at number 40 in August is not the same thing as no place.

Which dates could we confirm at source?

The last thing this page owes you is a calendar, and the honest version of a calendar is a short one. Several of the schools above publish full date sets, but a date is only worth reprinting if we can point at the sentence it came from. Where we could confirm a date in the school's or the exam board's own words on 23 August 2026, it is in the table below. Where we could not, it is not there at all, and you should go to the school's own admissions page for it rather than to any guide, including this one.

Two of those four deserve a note. The Sutton registration deadline is stated without any softening at all: the closing date for completion of the registration form is midnight on Friday 31 July 2026, and the FAQ adds that no late registrations will be accepted under any circumstances. Deadlines phrased that way are not negotiable, and missing one is the single most common way a well-prepared child ends up not sitting a test. The ISEB portal date matters for a different reason. Registration for the pre-tests is now made through a parent-facing Guardian Portal, so it is not something a prep school quietly handles on your behalf while you concentrate on the preparation. If your child is working towards sixth form entry instead, none of these dates applies and the calendar is a different one entirely.

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