Henrietta Barnett School admissions: the complete guide to 2027 entry

The Henrietta Barnett School now admits 120 girls a year, up from 104, and its own policy records 3,121 applications for the last intake it filled at the old number. Two test rounds stand between those applicants and a place, and a distance criterion can put a nearer girl ahead of a higher-scoring one. This guide sets out the 2027 process from the determined policy, and corrects what this page previously got wrong.

What actually changed for 2027 entry?

Start with the number most guides still get wrong. The Henrietta Barnett School admits 120 girls into Year 7, and the school states it without qualification: "The Published Admission Number (PAN) for September 2027 entry is 120." The determined 2027–2028 admissions policy carries the same line. That figure replaced 104, the number the school was filling as recently as the 2025 intake, and the increase took effect from September 2026 entry. Sixteen extra places on a base of 104 — 16 ÷ 104, or 15.4 per cent — is a structural change rather than a rounding adjustment, and every estimate of a candidate's chances built on the older figure is wrong by that margin.

The second thing to establish is that none of this is provisional. The policy ends with the line "Approved by the Governing Body: 3 December 2025", which is the point at which admission arrangements stop being a proposal and become the rules the school is obliged to apply. Several guides ranking for this school hedge on exactly that, telling readers the criteria are based on the most recent policy available and that they should go and check for themselves. There is no need to hedge here. Everything below is taken either from the determined policy or from the school's live admissions page, both read on 23 August 2026.

The competition is heavier than the figures in wide circulation suggest. The policy discloses the real volume: "In 2025, 3121 applications were received for 104 places in Year 7." Divide 3,121 by 104 and that is just over 30 applications for every place. The previous policy records 2,919 applications against the same 104 places, so the number of applicants rose by 202 in two years — 202 ÷ 2,919, or 6.9 per cent. Set the current admission number against the most recent application volume and the arithmetic changes shape: 120 ÷ 3,121 is 3.8 per cent, and 3,121 ÷ 120 is almost exactly 26, so on those figures around one applicant in twenty-six ends up with an offer.

Two cautions about that table. The 120 is a published admission number for a future year, so there is no application figure to sit beside it yet, and the dashes are deliberate — the school has not published one and this page will not invent one. And the appeals rows are not a measure of how strong a family's case might be. An independent panel is asked whether the arrangements were applied correctly and whether the school would be prejudiced by admitting another child, not whether a candidate deserves a place. That distinction explains the pattern in the bottom row better than anything else does.

Round One: who sets it, and what is on the paper?

This is the part of the process that earlier versions of this page described incorrectly, so it is worth being precise. Round One is not written by the school. The policy states that "Round One will consist of a verbal, non-verbal and English test set by a nationally recognised body." Three elements, not two, and reasoning sits at the centre of them. A family who prepared only for English and mathematics, because a guide told them the school sets its own two-paper examination, would arrive at the first hurdle having practised the wrong material entirely. That is not a small edge lost; it is the wrong test.

The nationally recognised body is GL Assessment. The school does not leave this to inference — its admissions page points families straight at the provider: "GL Assessment familiarisation booklets for our First Round Entrance Test can be found by clicking here, and they include packs of free materials." That single sentence settles two questions at once. Round One is a GL paper, with the question styles and answer conventions that implies, and the school is content for candidates to familiarise themselves with the format. Familiarisation is not the same thing as preparation, but it removes an avoidable disadvantage on the day.

The dates are unusually early, which catches families who assume an autumn-term test. For 2027 entry the policy sets out that "The Round One Entrance Test will be held in morning or afternoon sessions of 2nd, 3rd or 4th September 2026." Candidates sit one session across those three days. The invitation carrying the session details is issued in advance: "Applicants will receive details of the Round One Entrance Test by Monday 17th August 2026." That leaves roughly a fortnight between the letter arriving and the paper being sat, which is far too late to begin work, and it is why the summer before the final primary year is the real deadline for readiness rather than the autumn.

There is no second attempt. The policy is one line long on the point: "A candidate may take the Entrance Test for admission to Year 7 once only." That is a harder rule than it sounds, because it removes the strategy that works at some other selective schools, where a weak first sitting can be treated as a rehearsal for a stronger one. At Henrietta Barnett the first sitting is the only sitting, so the question is not whether to prepare but whether the work is finished by the end of August. Our grammar school entrance preparation is built around that calendar rather than a generic autumn test date.

Why is the top 300 a floor rather than a ceiling?

Round One is a filter, and the policy describes the mechanism exactly: "Following the Round One Tests, the results of the verbal, non-verbal and English questions will be standardised, combined and placed in rank order. On the basis of this rank order, the highest ranked (top 300) candidates will be invited back to sit the Round Two test." Three things follow from that wording. Scores are standardised before they are combined, so raw marks across the three elements are not simply added together. The ranking is the whole of the decision at this stage. And a place in Round Two is a rank, not a score.

The detail nobody else on this results page carries is what happens at the boundary. The policy adds: "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 top-300 figure is therefore a floor. If a dozen candidates share the score sitting exactly on the line, all of them go through and the Round Two field is larger that year. For a family whose daughter is likely to land close to the boundary, that is a genuine if modest piece of good news, and it is a reason not to treat any estimated cut-off circulating online as a wall.

Disclosure after Round One is asymmetric, and the asymmetry runs the opposite way to the one most parents expect. The policy says candidates who are not invited to Round Two "will be informed of their overall standardised score and also the cut off score for the top 300 candidates." So the families who receive bad news receive data, while the families who progress are told only that they have progressed. If your daughter reaches Round Two you will never learn how comfortably she got there, and the rest of the process has to be planned without that information. Our admissions test support is built for exactly that kind of blind interval.

Round Two: two subjects, and nothing published to practise on

Round Two is a different examination in almost every respect. The policy is short and clear: "The Round Two Test is in English and Mathematics and will take place in School on one day in early October 2026." Mathematics enters the process for the first time here, roughly a month after Round One, and only the candidates who cleared the Round One rank ever sit it. Any guide describing the Henrietta Barnett entrance examination as two papers in English and mathematics sat on a single morning has collapsed two separate rounds, on separate dates, with different subjects and different authors, into one.

The preparation position for Round Two is the hardest fact on this page. The school says: "We do not release any past papers or offer any resources for Round Two." Not a specimen paper, not a mark scheme, not a description of the question types. That is a deliberate choice and it has an obvious purpose — a paper with no public material is much harder to coach to a template, which is precisely why the school writes its own rather than buying one in. It also means that any commercial product advertised as a Henrietta Barnett Round Two past paper is not what it claims to be.

The practical consequence is that Round Two rewards general strength rather than format familiarity. A candidate who can write well under time pressure on an unseen prompt, and who has genuine fluency in mathematics rather than a bank of memorised methods, is in a better position than one drilled towards a format nobody can actually supply. That is an argument for depth in the underlying subject tuition through the last two years of primary school, and against the late paper-cramming that works reasonably well for tests where past material exists in quantity.

Can living within three miles beat a higher score?

Yes, and this is the single most consequential fact about admission to this school. It is also the one the rest of the results page leaves out. Henrietta Barnett has no catchment area in the ordinary sense — there is no boundary inside which you are eligible and outside which you are not — but it does have a distance criterion, and that criterion sits above general rank order in the list. Four oversubscription criteria are applied in order, and the places run out long before the list is exhausted.

Read the last two rows together and the consequence is stark. Criterion Three covers candidates who "currently live within 3 miles of the school at the point when they submit their application to the Local Authority in October", and the policy sets the bar for that group as low as it can go: "In this category, a candidate will be considered to have the necessary capability if they sit the Round Two test." There is no minimum score inside the three-mile group. Criterion Four then takes "All remaining candidates in rank score order." So a girl living within three miles who came near the bottom of the Round Two field is considered before a girl living outside three miles who came near the top of it.

That is not a loophole; it is the arrangement working exactly as written, and it is the reason families further out should decide whether to register with their eyes open rather than discover the ordering after National Offer Day. It does not mean a distant candidate cannot get in. It means she is competing for whatever remains once the nearer group has been satisfied, and how much remains depends on how many three-mile candidates reached Round Two that year — a figure the school does not publish. Nobody can honestly tell you those odds, and anyone quoting you a distance cut-off in miles for a given year is reconstructing a number the school has never released.

The measurement details matter too. The distance is a straight line to the school's main entrance, so road routes and journey times are irrelevant, and the address that counts is the one on the local authority application in October — not the address at registration in July and not the address in the following March. Families who expect to move between those points should read the policy's wording on the assessment date very carefully before assuming the new address will be the one used.

Criterion Two, the Pupil Premium route, has a trap built into its timing. Eligibility is not enough on its own; written confirmation has to come from the candidate's current school, and the policy fixes the deadline to the day: "This evidence must be received by Wednesday 1 July 2026." That is the same date as the entrance test registration cut-off, which means the request to the primary school needs to go out well before the end of the summer term. A family that qualifies but misses the evidence deadline is assessed under the later criteria like everybody else.

Registration and the CAF: two forms, one deadline that ends it

Two separate applications are required, and families conflate them every year. The first is the school's own registration for the entrance test. The policy is unambiguous about both the form and the cut-off: "You must also complete The Henrietta Barnett School Entrance Test Entry Form using the link published on the School website by 5pm on Wednesday 1 July 2026." A time-stamped deadline in the summer term, months before the local authority application, is the single most common way a family loses this process before it begins — not by failing the test, but by never sitting it.

The second application is the Common Application Form submitted to your home local authority in the autumn, naming Henrietta Barnett among your preferences. Sitting the test does not put your daughter in the running for a place; the local authority application does, and the October submission point is also when the three-mile distance is assessed. Both steps are mandatory and neither substitutes for the other. A candidate who sits both rounds brilliantly and is not named on a Common Application Form cannot be offered a place, and no appeal will retrieve that.

For 2027 entry that registration window has already closed — the deadline fell at 5pm on 1 July 2026 — so the candidates sitting Round One in the first days of September are those already registered. If you are reading this for a younger daughter, treat the 2027 cycle as the template rather than the timetable: a July registration, a mid-August invitation, a Round One in the first days of September and a Round Two in early October. The school confirms its dates in the determined policy for each year, so check them against that document rather than against a guide.

One thing this page will not tell you is when registration opens. Several competing guides state a specific opening date. The school's determined policy gives only the closing deadline, and its live admissions page now records that applications for this cycle are closed, so there is no primary source for an opening date and we are not going to supply one from inference. Work backwards from the closing deadline instead, and watch the school's own admissions page from the spring onwards.

No offer in March: do waiting lists or appeals give a second chance?

Both exist, but only one of them has ever worked at this school. The waiting list is automatic for qualifying candidates — there is no separate form to submit and no request to make — and it operates on the same criteria as the original allocation, so a position on it can move down as well as up as other families join and leave. It does not run indefinitely: "A waiting list will be maintained until the end of the first term after which it will be cleared." That is a short window, and it is why families should keep an alternative place secured rather than treat the list as a plan.

The list moves a long way. On 23 August 2026 the school's admissions page recorded, for the September 2026 intake: "As of 18th August we have offered up to number 40 on the waiting list." That is a live figure the school updates in place, so it will read differently by the time you check it — treat it as an illustration of typical movement rather than as a current position. Even so, the scale is worth absorbing. 40 is a third of 120, so a family told in March that there is no offer is a long way from being out of the process.

Appeals are the opposite story, and the numbers are unusually clear because the school publishes them. Its appeals page records: "In June 2025, 2 appeals were heard; none were successful." And for the largest recent cohort: "In June 2022, 3 appeals were heard; none were successful." The admissions policies carry the same pattern in their own disclosures — two unsuccessful appeals against the 2025 intake, one unsuccessful appeal against the 2023–2024 intake. Nothing in that record says the panels are unfair. It says that at a school which ranks every candidate against a published and mechanically applied set of criteria, there is very little room for the kind of error an appeal exists to correct.

The honest advice that follows is uncomfortable but useful. If the offer does not come, effort is better spent on the waiting list and on the alternative school than on building an appeal case. That is not the same as saying never appeal — a genuine procedural error should always be challenged, and that is exactly what the process is for — but a family should know what the published record looks like before they spend a term on it.

What is the selection actually selecting for?

Descriptions of how difficult this test is tend to reach for adjectives. The school's published results offer a measurement instead. In 2025 its Attainment 8 score was 87.2, against a local authority average of 56.5 and an England average of 45.9. That is 87.2 ÷ 45.9, or 1.9 times the national figure, and 30.7 points clear of the local average. Attainment 8 measures results rather than entry ability, so it is not a direct proxy for how hard the entrance test is — but it does tell you the level of the cohort your daughter would be joining and working alongside for the rest of her school career.

The sixth-form destinations point the same way. The school reports that "28 of our Year 13 students gained an Oxbridge place which represents 21% of the year group, whilst 121 secured places at Russell Group universities overall, representing 90% of the year group." Those are outcomes at the end of seven years in the school, shaped by teaching, peer group and family as much as by anything measurable at age ten. They are worth knowing because they describe the environment accurately. They are not a prediction for any individual child, and a guide that presents them as one is overreaching.

On inspection grade, one guide ranking above this page is simply wrong. Ofsted's most recent inspection of the school, on 4 May 2022, judged it Good overall — not Outstanding — with behaviour and attitudes its one Outstanding sub-judgement. That matters less to a decision than the results figures above, but a family should not be told a grade the inspectorate's own report contradicts. The same report records 812 pupils against a school capacity of 779, which is 33 over, and that pressure is the practical backdrop to an admission number that has just risen.

Is sixth-form entry a realistic second route in?

It is, and it is a better route than the published number implies. The policy sets out that "A minimum Published Admission Number – (PAN) of 30 places will be offered annually to external applicants", but it also discloses what actually happened: "In September 2024 we enrolled 49 external applicants and in September 2025 this number was 53 external applicants." Fifty-three against a minimum of 30 is 53 ÷ 30, or 1.8 times the published floor, and 23 places more than a family reading only the minimum would have planned around. No competitor on this results page covers the route at all.

That does not make it easy, and sixth-form entry is its own subject — a separate application, different deadlines and academic conditions set against GCSE grades. But for a family whose daughter narrowly misses at eleven, it changes the shape of the decision: the door is not closed for the rest of her school career, and the external intake is materially larger than the published minimum suggests. Our sixth form entry page covers how selective sixth-form applications are assessed and what a realistic preparation window looks like.

One last piece of context. The other selective schools in this part of north London run their own separate tests with their own registration windows — there is no shared Barnet entrance test and no joint registration, whatever a directory listing may imply. A family applying to more than one is running several parallel processes with different formats, different providers and different deadlines, and those dates need mapping onto a single calendar well before the final year of primary school begins, not once it has already started.

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