Best Grammar Schools in Kingston and Richmond (2027 Entry)

Richmond upon Thames has no grammar school. The two selective state schools that families in this corner of south-west London actually compete for are both in Kingston: Tiffin School, which tested 1,866 boys for 186 places in 2026, and The Tiffin Girls' School, which offers 180. This guide uses only the admissions data the two schools publish themselves.

Does Richmond upon Thames have a grammar school?

It does not. There is no selective state secondary school anywhere in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, and there has not been one for decades. This matters more than it sounds, because a great many pages written about "grammar schools in Kingston and Richmond" quietly treat the two boroughs as a single selective catchment. They are not. Kingston has two grammar schools; Richmond has none.

The school most often mistaken for a selective one is Waldegrave School in Twickenham. It is a large, popular, high-performing girls' comprehensive with a Year 7 Published Admission Number of 216 for 2027-28, and a Sixth Form PAN of 20 for external applicants. We checked the school's determined admissions arrangements line by line on 22 August 2026. The words "aptitude", "music" and "sport" do not appear in the document at all. The word "selective" appears exactly once, in the sentence confirming that the Sixth Form is not selective.

Waldegrave allocates its 216 Year 7 places in five steps: looked-after and previously looked-after girls first; then girls with an exceptional medical or social need evidenced by a professional at the time of application; then girls with a sibling in Years 7 to 11; then daughters of staff employed by the school for two years or more; and then girls living inside a rectangular catchment area. Nowhere in that sequence is there a test, a score, or a rank order of academic ability.

Nor does the school run the process. Year 7 admissions for Richmond residents are handled by Achieving for Children in partnership with the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, and offers are issued by the local authority rather than by Waldegrave. A family preparing a daughter for a Waldegrave "entrance exam" is preparing for something that does not exist. The variable that decides a Waldegrave place is the home address on the closing date, not the child's performance in October.

Tiffin School: how do 1,866 boys compete for 186 places?

Tiffin School publishes a Patterns of Admissions table each spring, and it is the single most useful document a Kingston family can read. The 2026 edition sets out three years of outcomes side by side.

Three things fall out of that table. The first is the ratio. Divide 1,866 Stage One candidates by 186 places and you get exactly 10.0 boys per place for 2026 entry. The second is the direction of travel: Stage One entries rose by 191 candidates between 2025 and 2026, an increase of 11.4 per cent, while the number of places did not move at all. Competition at Tiffin is tightening measurably, not anecdotally.

The third is where the process narrows. Of 1,866 boys tested in the first round, 665 were invited back, which is 35.6 per cent. Of those 665, some 186 were offered a place on National Offer Day, or 28.0 per cent. Put together, the first sitting removes roughly two-thirds of the field and the second removes roughly seven in ten of what remains. A family planning preparation should note that the two rounds are not equally weighted in difficulty of survival, and that reaching Stage Two is itself a meaningful outcome rather than a formality.

The qualifying score is worth reading carefully. It is the lowest score achieved by a boy who was offered a place on 1 March, not a pass mark set in advance. It fell from 104 for 2024 entry to 100 for both 2025 and 2026, and the later cut-off, once waiting-list movement is included, dropped to 98 for 2025. Those are standardised, age-weighted figures. A boy whose mark sits a point below the line one year can be offered a place on the same mark the next, purely because of who else sat the paper.

One detail almost nobody reports: Tiffin sets its Year 7 tests in partnership with Quest, which builds a bespoke paper for Tiffin that changes every year. That is the strongest possible argument against drilling a fixed question bank. The school also publishes free Illustrative Questions for both the English and the Maths tests, and provides free Atom Home familiarisation to Pupil Premium pupils through the same Quest partnership. Our Tiffin School 11 plus preparation page goes through the paper structure in more detail.

The Tiffin Girls' School: what does a 44-district Designated Area decide?

The Tiffin Girls' School has a Published Admission Number of 180 for September 2027 entry and publishes its own three-year admissions record, currently covering 2023 to 2025 entry. For 2025 entry, 1,498 girls sat Stage One and 475 were invited to Stage Two. The comparable figures were 1,485 and 465 for 2024, and 1,445 and 477 for 2023. Dividing 1,498 by 180 gives 8.3 Stage One candidates per place, a little easier than Tiffin School on the raw ratio, though the girls' school converts a higher share of its second round: 180 offers from 475 Stage Two candidates is 37.9 per cent.

What genuinely governs the outcome, though, is geography. The school states that since the Designated Area was introduced in September 2014, every place has been offered to a girl living inside it. That is twelve consecutive admissions rounds. The Designated Area is defined in the admissions policy as 44 postal districts, and sitting within it is a smaller Inner Area that carries additional priority.

The mechanics are unusually precise, and worth setting out because they change what a strong score is worth. Up to 60 of the 180 places are allocated first, before the general rank order runs, to girls whose combined mark is at or above the 350th ranked mark of everyone who sat Stage Two. Within that group of 60, Pupil Premium girls living in the Inner or Designated Area come first, and Inner Area girls come second. The remaining places are then filled in strict rank order of combined mark, Designated Area girls before everyone else.

The consequence is that a girl in the Inner Area does not need to be in the top 180 to be offered a place. She needs to be in the top 350 of Stage Two candidates and to be among the first 60 in that priority group. A girl outside the Designated Area, by contrast, sits behind every Designated Area applicant in the queue no matter how high her mark. Ties for the 60th place are broken by straight-line distance, and if distances are identical, by an independently verified random draw.

What do the Stage One and Stage Two tests actually contain?

Both schools run the same two-round architecture, and neither uses any collective consortium paper. At The Tiffin Girls' School the policy is explicit: Stage One consists of English and Maths questions marked by computer, and Stage Two is written tests in English and Maths. Scores are standardised and age-weighted, then combined into a single mark on which applicants are ranked. Tiffin School follows the same shape, with English and Maths at both stages and a Quest-built paper that is rewritten each year.

The computer-marked first round has a practical implication that catches families out. A multiple-choice answer sheet rewards accuracy under time pressure and punishes poor transcription; Tiffin School publishes an example OMR marksheet precisely so boys can practise filling one in. Nothing about that skill transfers from a school maths book. The written second round is a different exercise altogether, closer to sustained extended answers, and a child who has only ever practised multiple choice will meet it cold.

The registration step is also a trap in its own right. At The Tiffin Girls' School, the Supplementary Information Form is a registration to sit the Stage One test and is explicitly not an application for a place. The school must also be named on the local authority Common Application Form by 31 October, and the girl must actually attend Stage Two. All four conditions have to be met for the application to be considered at all, and a girl who is not invited to Stage Two is not eligible for a place under any circumstance.

Neither school offers a resit, an alternative date for a missed sitting, or a route in on school reports. This is a single-attempt process on a fixed day. Our wider Kingston 11 plus guidance sets out how we structure preparation across the two rounds, and the Tiffin Girls' School page covers the written paper in detail.

How close to Kingston do you actually have to live?

This is the question that decides most families' answer, and both schools now publish enough to answer it honestly.

Tiffin School states, in terms, that for 2024, 2025 and 2026 all places were offered to boys in the Priority Area, defined as 10km, and that no places were offered to those outside it. Three consecutive years, no exceptions. The Tiffin Girls' School states that all places since September 2014 have gone to girls inside the Designated Area. Neither school forbids an outside applicant from registering or sitting the test; both have simply never had to reach beyond the boundary to fill a year group.

The practical reading is that catchment at these two schools behaves as a condition rather than a preference, even though it is written as a preference. A family living 11km from Kingston can enter their son, and he can score well, and on the published record he will not receive an offer. That is a very different proposition from a borough where distance is a tie-break, and it is the single most important thing to establish before committing eighteen months of preparation.

Waldegrave, by contrast, uses a catchment with a genuinely unusual history. Its priority area is a rectangle whose shape was fixed in 1998 by the furthest link primary school in each direction: John Betts in Hammersmith to the north, St John's in Kingston to the south, St Faith's in Wandsworth to the east and Forge Lane in Hounslow to the west. The rectangle is split into two halves, and 85 per cent of catchment places go to priority area A with 15 per cent to priority area B, then by shortest route by road or maintained footpath to the nearest pedestrian school gate, measured on the Council's own mapping system.

Do the Pupil Premium and Inner Area routes make a measurable difference?

Both schools have built in disadvantage measures, and both now publish enough data to test whether they work.

At Tiffin School the trend is clear and positive. Pupil Premium boys offered a place rose from 6 for 2024 entry to 11 for 2025 and 15 for 2026. The school adds a footnote that is easy to miss and important: for 2026 entry, 18 Pupil Premium candidates were eligible for a place, but only 15 had listed Tiffin as their first-choice school. Three boys who had done the hard part lost the place on a form. That is a preventable loss, and it is entirely about how the local authority application is completed in October.

At The Tiffin Girls' School the picture is more nuanced. For 2025 entry, 71 Pupil Premium girls sat Stage One and 18 reached Stage Two, a survival rate of 25.4 per cent against 31.7 per cent for the cohort as a whole. Inner Area girls did better than the field: 100 of 255 reached Stage Two, or 39.2 per cent, about a quarter better than the overall rate. The policy responds to exactly this gap by applying a 10 per cent leeway to the standardised mark of looked-after girls and of Pupil Premium girls in the Designated Area, applied once only even where a girl qualifies on both counts.

Tiffin School's aptitude routes are a separate matter and are frequently overlooked. Since September 2025 entry the school has awarded up to 10 per cent of its places on aptitude, split evenly between 5 per cent for Sport and 5 per cent for Music. On 186 places that is around 18 or 19 boys a year entering by a route that has nothing to do with the English and Maths papers. The catch is timing, and it is severe: for 2027 entry the aptitude deadline fell at 09:00 on 6 July 2026, with the Music assessments on 8 and 10 July and the Sports assessments on 13 and 14 July, all before the summer holidays and nearly two months before academic registration closed.

Which 2027-entry deadlines close first?

The two schools have deliberately aligned their headline dates, which makes the timetable simpler than in most selective boroughs. The sequence below is taken from each school's published key dates.

Two dates deserve a note. Tiffin School recommends that any evidence for special educational needs or access arrangements reaches it by 17 July 2026, because the admissions office does not work through August and a primary school cannot supply paperwork once term has ended. The Tiffin Girls' School makes the same point about medical and Pupil Premium documentation. In practice the real deadline for anything requiring a third party is mid-July, six weeks before the published one.

The Tiffin Girls' registration also requires a digital colour passport-style photograph uploaded with the form. It is a small thing that has stopped families on the last afternoon.

Is an appeal worth lodging if the answer is no?

Both schools publish their appeal outcomes, and the combined record is unambiguous. Tiffin School heard 3 appeals for 2025 entry and 9 for 2024, upholding none. The Tiffin Girls' School heard 10 for 2025 entry, 5 for 2024 and 8 for 2023, upholding none. Across the two schools that is 35 appeals heard in the most recent published years, and zero successful.

The reason is structural rather than harsh. An appeal against a selective school is heard on grounds that the admissions arrangements were not applied correctly, or were unlawful, or that the decision was one no reasonable body would have made. A panel cannot substitute its own view of a child's ability for the school's standardised score. Where a genuine irregularity occurred on test day, that is a different argument, and it is worth raising with the school immediately rather than six months later.

The more productive route is the waiting list. Tiffin School's cut-off score by the end of Year 7 was 98 for 2025 entry against an initial qualifying score of 100, which means places genuinely moved after 1 March. Both schools' local authorities make further offers from early April onwards as families decline. Staying on the list costs nothing and has a better record than an appeal.

So what should a Richmond or Kingston family actually do?

Start with the address, because it settles more than anything else. If you are inside Tiffin School's 10km Priority Area or The Tiffin Girls' Designated Area, a selective application is a realistic proposition and the preparation is worth the eighteen months it takes. If you are outside, the published record of the last three admissions rounds says plainly that no place has been offered, and the honest advice is to build the plan around Waldegrave's 216 places, the strong Richmond comprehensives, and independent options rather than around a test.

If you are inside, work backwards from the earliest deadline that applies to you rather than the headline one. For a musical or sporting boy that is early July, not 1 September. For any child needing access arrangements it is mid-July. For everyone else it is 12.00 noon on 1 September 2026, and both schools have stated in writing that no late application will be accepted.

And prepare for two different examinations rather than one. A computer-marked first round rewards fast, accurate multiple-choice work under timed conditions; a written second round rewards sustained, structured answers. Roughly 36 per cent of Tiffin School candidates cleared the first round in 2026, and 28 per cent of those cleared the second. Preparing only for the shape of the first is the most common reason a strong child stops in November. You can see how we sequence the two rounds on our London borough 11 plus hub, or book a free consultation and we will map your child's timetable against the 2027 dates above.

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