Best Grammar Schools in Barnet and Enfield for 2027 Entry

Barnet and Enfield hold four selective state schools offering 620 places between them, and they share nothing but a corner of north London. Four separate tests, four registration forms closing between June and July, and four sets of rules: Queen Elizabeth's admits from anywhere, while Latymer admits only from a published Inner Area list of 34 postcode districts, some of them only in named sectors.

Is There a Barnet Grammar School Consortium?

No, and this is the single most consequential mistake a family in this corner of London can make. There is no shared paper, no shared registration and no shared results. Each school sets its own test, publishes its own admission number and opens its own form on its own timetable. A family that registers once, believing they have registered for the borough, will find their child sitting one test and locked out of three.

Look at what those four test descriptions actually ask of a child. Queen Elizabeth's is entirely multiple choice, so a boy never writes a sentence. Latymer sets written English. St Michael's and Henrietta Barnett both use non-verbal reasoning, which the other two do not test at all. A child prepared for one of these schools is, for at least one paper, unprepared for the next.

Does Your Address Decide Anything in Barnet or Enfield?

Geography is where these four diverge most sharply, and where a misunderstanding costs the whole application rather than a few marks. The range runs from genuinely address-blind to a hard postcode list.

The Henrietta Barnett position is the one most often reported wrongly, including on this page until today. Both statements are true at once: the school has no catchment area, and it has a distance criterion that sits above rank order. A girl inside three miles who reaches Round Two is placed ahead of a higher-scoring girl outside it. The school notes that the rank-order group has so far been the substantial majority of places, but it publishes no split, so any percentage you see for the inner-area share is somebody's estimate rather than a figure.

Latymer is blunter. The Inner Area is not a priority, it is a condition of admission, and for September 2027 entry priority within it goes to applicants resident there as of 7 January 2027. A family outside those postcodes should not spend a year preparing for a Latymer test.

Four Registration Windows, and None of Them Fall in October

Every one of these schools requires its own form in addition to the Local Authority Common Application Form, and every one of those forms closes months before the October CAF deadline that parents have in mind. For September 2027 entry the four windows fell like this.

That is four windows spread across March to July, with the earliest closing five weeks before the latest. None of them is announced by the local authority, and none of them appears on the Common Application Form. The practical consequence is that the work of applying to these schools starts in the spring of Year 5, not the autumn of Year 6.

Two further details are worth putting in a calendar. Henrietta Barnett requires both the Local Authority CAF and its own Entrance Test Entry Form, and the school is explicit that both are needed for an application to be considered. And St Michael's requires a Certificate of Catholic Practice dated within three months of applying, which means a family cannot obtain it a year in advance.

Why Is 225 Not the Score That Wins a Place at Queen Elizabeth's?

Two schools here publish a number that gets quoted constantly, and in both cases the number means less than it appears to.

Queen Elizabeth's publishes 225 as the combined score that meets the Governors' standard. That is the eligibility floor: it makes a boy eligible to be considered, and nothing more. Above it, boys are ranked and 180 places are filled in score order, so the score that actually secures a place is higher than 225 and is not published in advance. Treating 225 as the target is the most common preparation error at this school.

Henrietta Barnett publishes 300 as the number invited back to Round Two, with ties at the cut-off all invited. Reaching the top 300 is therefore a real milestone, but it is a milestone in a two-round race for 120 places, so rather more than half of the girls who reach Round Two will not be offered one. The school releases no Round Two material of any kind, which means the second round cannot be rehearsed in the way the first can.

Latymer publishes two different rank thresholds inside the same policy, which is easy to misread. Its looked-after-children criterion uses the top 900 applicants on combined Verbal Reasoning and Mathematics scores, whose English papers are then marked; its music criterion uses the top 700, and admits up to 20 children who must also live in the Inner Area. In normal terms the top 700 applicants are deemed selective. Places go to the top 192, with the next 50 on a waiting list.

Which Skills Do These Four Tests Actually Share?

Start by narrowing. A family will not sit all four, because the eligibility rules do most of the narrowing for them: St Michael's is for practising Catholic families, Latymer is for Inner Area postcodes, Queen Elizabeth's is for boys and the other two for girls. In practice most families in this area are choosing between two schools, not four.

Then work out what the shortlisted schools have in common and what they do not. Key Stage 2 Mathematics and English underpin all four, so that work is never wasted. Non-verbal reasoning is needed for Henrietta Barnett and St Michael's and for neither of the others. Written English is needed for Latymer and for Henrietta Barnett's Round Two, but Queen Elizabeth's is multiple choice throughout, so a boy preparing only for that school never needs to produce extended writing under time pressure.

Finally, be realistic about materials. Queen Elizabeth's releases no past papers and points only to sample materials that it warns may not reflect the format of its own exams. Henrietta Barnett releases GL Assessment familiarisation booklets for Round One and nothing whatsoever for Round Two. Any commercial product claiming to be a past paper for either school is not one, and preparing on a paper that mimics the wrong format is worse than preparing on general Key Stage 2 work.

Reviewed August 2026: every admission number, test format, oversubscription criterion, threshold and deadline on this page was checked against the four schools' own admissions pages and their published admissions documents for 2027 entry on 22 August 2026. Registration windows and test dates change between cycles, so confirm them with the school before you rely on them.

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