What arrangements are available, what evidence schools and consortia actually require, and how far ahead of exam day you need to apply
Book a Free ConsultationEvery year, thousands of children sitting the 11+ need some form of adjustment to sit the exam fairly - not because they are less able than their peers, but because the standard timed, single-sitting format disadvantages them for a specific, documented reason. This might be a child with dyslexia who needs extra time to finish reading the paper, a child with a physical disability who needs a scribe, a child recovering from a broken wrist who needs a laptop for that one sitting, or a child with diagnosed anxiety who needs a smaller room and a supervised break partway through. This guide covers exam access arrangements for any 11+ candidate who may need them: what arrangements typically look like, what evidence schools and consortia actually ask for, how the process differs between a regional testing consortium and an individual independent school, and - critically - how far in advance you need to start. If your child's situation is specifically about giftedness alongside dyslexia or ADHD, our dedicated guide to twice-exceptional children and the 11+ goes into that particular profile - including how giftedness can mask a learning difference - in much more depth than this general overview can.
Access arrangements are adjustments to the standard exam conditions that let a child with a genuine, documented need demonstrate their true ability, without giving them an advantage over other candidates. They are not a way of making the test easier - they remove a specific barrier that is unrelated to the ability the 11+ is trying to measure. According to The Good Schools Guide, which advises UK families on special educational needs provision, "the most frequent [arrangement] is extra time which is usually around 25 per cent" - for example, an extra 12 to 13 minutes on a 50-minute paper. Extra time is calculated per paper, not as a single lump sum for the whole test day, so a child sitting three 45-minute papers with 25% extra time receives roughly an additional 11 minutes on each one, with breaks in between as normal.
Beyond extra time, the most commonly granted arrangements are supervised rest breaks (the exam clock stops while the child steps away, then resumes), a separate or small-group room away from the noise and movement of a large exam hall, enlarged-print or otherwise modified papers, and - for a smaller number of children with more significant reading difficulties - a human reader or reading pen that reads printed text aloud. Scribes and word processors are granted far less often at 11+ level than at GCSE or A-level, because most 11+ papers are short-answer or multiple-choice rather than extended writing, but they remain an option for children with significant motor or physical disabilities that affect handwriting speed.
| Arrangement | Evidence Typically Needed | Typical Deadline vs Exam Date |
|---|---|---|
| Extra time (usually 25%) | EP report or specialist teacher assessment; school confirmation of normal working practice | 4-6 months before |
| Supervised rest breaks | SENCO/school evidence, medical or diagnostic letter | 4-6 months before |
| Separate/small-group room | School support plan or diagnosis (anxiety, autism, ADHD) | 4-6 months before |
| Reader / reading pen | EP report showing reading need as normal way of working | 4-6 months before |
| Scribe / word processor | Medical/OT evidence of a motor or physical need affecting handwriting | 4-6 months before |
| Special consideration (short-term) | Recent medical certificate/incident report | Days before/after, applied retrospectively |
Access arrangements are not restricted to any single diagnosis, and it is a mistake to assume they exist only for children with dyslexia. In practice, consortia and schools consider applications relating to specific learning difficulties (dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia), attention and neurodevelopmental conditions (ADHD, autism spectrum conditions), sensory impairments (visual or hearing impairment), physical or motor disabilities that affect writing or mobility, and diagnosed medical or mental health conditions - including anxiety - that affect concentration or stamina under exam conditions. A child with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) is usually granted arrangements more readily, since the EHCP itself is accepted as strong evidence of established need. Short-term situations - a broken arm, a recent bereavement, an acute illness in the days immediately before the test - are usually handled separately, through a "special consideration" process rather than a standing access arrangement, and can sometimes be applied for much closer to, or even just after, the exam date.
If your child's need is specifically that they are intellectually gifted alongside a learning difference such as dyslexia or ADHD - where giftedness can mask the difficulty until the timed 11+ format exposes it - the general process below still applies, but the practical challenge of identification is different. See our twice-exceptional 11+ guide for that specific profile.
Every consortium and school publishes its own evidence checklist, but two components recur almost everywhere: professional documentation of the underlying need, and confirmation from the child's current school that any requested arrangement reflects how the child already works day-to-day in the classroom - never something introduced for the first time on exam day.
The professional evidence is most commonly an educational psychologist's report with standardised test scores, or a report from a specialist teacher holding the relevant assessment qualification. Some panels also accept documentation from a hospital consultant, paediatrician, psychiatrist, occupational therapist, or speech and language therapist - a letter from a GP or optician alone is generally not treated as sufficient on its own. The Consortium of Selective Schools in Essex (CSSE) - which coordinates 11+ testing across a group of Essex grammar schools - requires a Headteacher's Letter confirming the child's "Usual Ways of Working" alongside its registration and notification forms, and states plainly that "requests cannot be processed without this evidence." For long-term medical conditions, CSSE also asks for a letter from a GP or consultant confirming the diagnosis and its impact on test day, and for a copy of the most recent Education, Health and Care Plan review where one exists.
Individual schools that set their own entrance test can be just as specific. Sutton Grammar School's access arrangements guidance for its own September entrance test requires "a letter or report from the hospital consultant, psychologist, psychiatrist, Occupational Therapist, Speech & Language Therapist or other appropriately qualified professional," explicitly ruling out GP or optician letters as sufficient evidence on their own, plus a separate form completed by the child's primary school describing their normal way of working whenever the request involves a change to exam conditions.
Where a numeric threshold is published, it gives a useful sense of what "significant" means in practice. The ISEB Common Pre-Test access arrangements guidance for senior schools sets out that a standardised score below 85 on a relevant measure, a reading speed below roughly 90 words per minute (with more than five errors per 20 words), or a handwriting speed below about 10 words per minute for their age, would typically support a request for extra time; a child with an EHCP qualifies automatically. These specific figures come from an independent-sector pre-test used from age 10/11 upward rather than a local authority grammar test, but they illustrate the kind of quantified, standardised evidence that underpins most decisions, wherever the test is administered.
Navigating 11+ Access Arrangements for Your Child?
Leading Tuition's specialist 11+ tutors regularly work with children who have been granted access arrangements, structuring preparation around the exact conditions - extra time, rest breaks, reader support - your child will use on exam day, so nothing on the day itself feels unfamiliar.
Rated 4.8/5 on Trustpilot. We can also help you think through timing if you are still waiting on an assessment or a decision from your local consortium.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppOne of the most common sources of confusion for parents is assuming that access arrangements work the same way everywhere. In reality, there is a real structural difference between the standardised group tests run by GL Assessment or CEM (Durham University) on behalf of a local authority or regional testing consortium, and the individually set entrance exams used by many independent schools and some smaller school-run consortia.
For a consortium-run test - covering an entire county or borough, and sat by every child applying to grammar schools in that area - access arrangement decisions are usually made by a single centralised panel, using one standard set of forms and one fixed deadline that applies to every family regardless of which school within the consortium they hope to attend. CSSE's guidance is explicit on this point: individual test centres and schools "cannot approve or modify arrangements" themselves; the request goes to a central SEND panel, and complex cases are escalated to a CSSE Executive SEND Panel made up of SENCO representatives from member schools. This centralisation gives consistency across an entire region, but it also means the deadline is early and rigid, because thousands of applications need to be processed and communicated before test day.
An independent school running its own entrance exam, or a small local consortium of a handful of schools sharing a single paper, typically runs a smaller, in-house SENCO panel with its own deadline, its own forms, and - because the numbers involved are smaller - sometimes a little more flexibility to discuss an individual case directly with the school's admissions or SEN team. Crucially, a decision made for one exam does not automatically carry over to another. The ISEB Common Pre-Test's own guidance states plainly that its access arrangement decisions "are not valid for any other tests such as GCSEs or A level examinations" - and the same logic applies between different schools' entrance exams. A family applying to several independent schools, or to both a grammar school consortium and one or two independent schools, may need to submit broadly the same evidence more than once, to different panels, on different timetables. Building a simple checklist per school - what evidence is needed, and by when - early in Year 5 avoids a scramble in the final weeks before each deadline.
Parents are often surprised by how early 11+ access arrangement deadlines fall relative to the exam itself - typically four to six months beforehand, and sometimes longer once you account for the time needed to get an assessment booked in the first place. A handful of real examples illustrate the pattern:
| Test / Consortium | Evidence Deadline | Decisions Confirmed |
|---|---|---|
| Consortium of Selective Schools in Essex (CSSE), 2027 entry | 26 June 2026 (registration opened 12 May 2026) | September 2026 |
| Sutton Grammar School Entrance Test (SET) | Mid-June, for a September sitting | As late as mid-September |
| Buckinghamshire Secondary Transfer Test | 2 June 2026 (state-school pupils), 16 June 2026 (all others) | Summer/early autumn |
Notice that in every case, the deadline for submitting evidence falls in late spring or early summer of Year 5 - many months before a typical autumn Year 6 sitting - and that formal confirmation of the decision often does not arrive until shortly before the test itself. This creates a planning problem that is easy to underestimate: an educational psychologist assessment is not something you can arrange in a week. Most independent EP assessors have a lead time of four to eight weeks once you have found and booked one, and NHS-route assessments through CAMHS or a local authority can take considerably longer - sometimes upward of a year in areas with high demand. Working backward from a June deadline, this means the realistic window to start the assessment process is the beginning of Year 4 if there is any suspicion of a learning difference, and certainly no later than the autumn term of Year 5.
It is also worth noting that these deadlines sit earlier in the calendar than the equivalent process for GCSEs and A-levels, which runs under Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ) rules with a Spring term submission window (broadly January-February) ahead of summer exams sat in the same academic year. Because the 11+ has no equivalent single national regulator, each consortium and school sets its own rules and dates independently - which is precisely why checking the specific deadline for your target school or consortium, rather than assuming a generic timeline, matters so much.
The exact forms differ by consortium and school, but the underlying sequence is consistent enough to plan around.
Step 1 - Identify the need early. If a child is struggling to complete timed classwork, reads noticeably more slowly than peers, or shows a marked gap between verbal ability and written output, raise it with the class teacher and SENCO as soon as possible - ideally by the start of Year 4 for a Year 6 sitting.
Step 2 - Book a professional assessment. An educational psychologist assessment, or a specialist teacher assessment for certain needs, is the evidence base almost every panel asks for. Book this well ahead of any consortium deadline, since assessor availability - not paperwork - is usually the real bottleneck.
Step 3 - Establish in-school support first. Because arrangements must reflect a child's "normal way of working," it is very difficult to justify an arrangement the child has never used in ordinary lessons. Get any recommended in-class support (extra time in tests, a reader, a smaller room for assessments) written into the school's own records before applying externally.
Step 4 - Confirm the exact process for each target school or consortium. Check whether your target 11+ is run by a regional consortium (one centralised deadline and form set for every applicant) or by an individual school (its own deadline and forms) - see the earlier borough guides for consortium-run 11+ tests by area, and note our guide to which London schools share a single paper if you are applying across several consortium schools at once.
Step 5 - Submit every required document by the stated deadline. Late or incomplete applications are very rarely accepted once the window has closed - CSSE's own guidance states this without qualification. Keep copies of everything submitted and the date it was sent.
Step 6 - Get written confirmation before test day. Do not assume an arrangement has been granted until you have it in writing from the consortium or school. If nothing has arrived close to the exam, contact the admissions or SEN team directly to confirm status rather than waiting until the morning of the test.
For a wider view of the run-up to exam day itself, our 6-month 11+ countdown and 11+ exam dates guide set out the wider Year 5-6 timeline that this access arrangements process needs to sit inside, and our 11+ tuition service covers how preparation itself should adapt once arrangements are confirmed.
Most published guidance is blunt about this: applications submitted after the deadline, or missing required documents, will not be processed, and there is no mechanism to add arrangements retrospectively once a child has already sat a paper under standard conditions. Some panels will consider a late application only in genuinely exceptional, well-evidenced circumstances - a sudden diagnosis, an accident, a bereavement in the final weeks - and even then, contacting the consortium or school's admissions team directly to ask is a better strategy than assuming an exception will be made. If you still have time before a deadline, the single highest-value action is to book the professional assessment immediately; everything else in the process moves faster than the assessment itself typically does.
The most common 11+ access arrangement is extra time, usually up to 25% - for example, an extra 12.5 minutes on a 50-minute paper. Other frequently granted arrangements include supervised rest breaks (the clock stops while the child rests), a separate or small-group room away from the main hall, enlarged-print or modified papers, a reading pen or human reader for children who cannot decode text independently, and, in a minority of cases involving significant motor difficulties, a scribe or word processor. Which arrangements are offered depends on the specific need, the evidence provided, and the policy of the individual consortium or school administering the test.
Any child with a diagnosed or documented need that puts them at a disadvantage under standard timed exam conditions can apply - this is not limited to any one diagnosis. Common qualifying needs include dyslexia and other specific learning difficulties, dyspraxia, ADHD, autism spectrum conditions, visual or hearing impairment, physical or motor disabilities, and diagnosed anxiety or medical conditions that affect concentration or stamina. Children with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) are usually granted arrangements more readily, since the plan itself is accepted as evidence. A short-term injury or illness close to the exam date can also qualify for special consideration, which is a separate, faster process from a standing access arrangement.
Most consortia and schools ask for two things together: professional documentation of the need, and confirmation from the child's current school that the arrangement reflects their normal way of working. The professional evidence is typically an educational psychologist's report or a specialist teacher's assessment with standardised scores, though some panels also accept a letter from a hospital consultant, paediatrician, psychiatrist, occupational therapist or speech and language therapist - a GP or optician's letter alone is usually not sufficient. The Consortium of Selective Schools in Essex, for example, requires a headteacher's letter confirming usual ways of working and states plainly that requests cannot be processed without it. The ISEB Common Pre-Test guidance treats a standardised score below 85, a reading speed below roughly 90 words per minute, or a handwriting speed below about 10 words per minute as objective thresholds supporting an extra-time request.
Earlier than most parents expect - often four to six months before the test, and sometimes longer if a fresh assessment is needed first. The Consortium of Selective Schools in Essex sets an absolute evidence deadline of 26 June for a test sat the following autumn, with decisions not confirmed until September. Sutton Grammar School's access arrangements process for its September entrance test has closed for evidence in mid-June for a test sat in the autumn. Buckinghamshire's Secondary Transfer Test closed access arrangement applications on 2 June 2026 for state-school pupils and 16 June 2026 for everyone else. Because an educational psychologist assessment itself can take four to eight weeks to book and complete, families should start the process at the very start of Year 5, not wait until the deadline is announced.
Yes, significantly. Local authority and consortium-run 11+ tests (the kind set by GL Assessment or CEM on behalf of a group of grammar schools) are decided by a single centralised panel using one set of forms and one fixed deadline for every family in that area - test centres and individual schools cannot approve or change arrangements themselves. Independent schools running their own entrance exams, or small local consortia of a handful of schools, typically run their own SENCO panel with a different deadline and form set. A decision made for one test does not automatically transfer to another - the ISEB Common Pre-Test guidance states explicitly that its access arrangement decisions are not valid for any other exam. A family targeting several schools with separate entrance tests may need to submit evidence more than once, on different timetables.
This general access arrangements process still applies, but twice-exceptional (2e) children - those who are intellectually gifted alongside a learning difference such as dyslexia or ADHD - often present a specific complication: giftedness can mask the underlying difficulty, so the need goes unidentified until the timed format of the 11+ exposes it. If this describes your child, our dedicated guide on twice-exceptional children and the 11+ covers masking, the GL Assessment versus CEM format question, and preparation strategies specific to gifted children with a learning difference in far more depth than we can here.
Most consortia state clearly that late or incomplete applications will not be processed, and there is no route to add arrangements retrospectively once a child has sat the paper under standard conditions. Some panels will consider a late application only in exceptional, well-evidenced circumstances such as a sudden diagnosis or an accident shortly before the deadline - contact the consortium or school's admissions or SEN team directly and ask, but do not rely on this as a plan. If you are early enough to still book an educational psychologist assessment, prioritise this immediately, since assessment waiting times are usually the true bottleneck rather than the paperwork itself.
Leading Tuition's specialist 11+ tutors build preparation around the exact conditions your child will use on exam day. Rated 4.8/5 on Trustpilot.
Book a Free Consultation Message on WhatsApp