How to Talk to Your Child About 11+ Results

Most advice about 11+ results tells you to celebrate effort and give your child space. Useful, but it does not answer the question they actually ask: is it over? For September 2027 entry the answer arrives on Monday 1 March 2027, and what happens next is governed by published rules and published numbers. This page carries the conversation and the evidence behind it, so you can tell your child the truth rather than a hope.

What actually happens on 1 March 2027?

There is a version of this conversation that starts with feelings and a version that starts with facts, and children almost always want the second one first. The question they ask is not "how do you feel about it" — it is "so is that it, am I definitely not going?" A parent who cannot answer that ends up reassuring in the abstract, and children hear abstract reassurance as bad news being gently rewrapped. Knowing the mechanics is not a substitute for warmth. It is what lets the warmth land.

For September 2027 entry the moment is fixed and public. Hull City Council's guide for the 2027 to 2028 admissions round states that "Offers of secondary school places will be made on 1 March 2027", and that "you will receive an email on Monday 1 March 2027 confirming which school your child has been offered". The day of the week matters more than it looks. The School Admissions Code sets the date as "1 March for secondary schools or 16 April for primary schools (or the next working day where 1 March or 16 April fall on a weekend or bank holiday)". Because 1 March 2027 is a Monday, nothing is deferred: the email arrives that day, at the end of a school day, usually while your child is in the room.

It is worth knowing the national shape of the day before you are inside it. The Department for Education reports that 83.6% of secondary applicants were offered their first-preference school for September 2026 entry, against 92.4% at primary. That leaves 100 − 83.6 = 16.4% of secondary families opening a different name — roughly one child in six across the country. The same release records that 96.4% of secondary applicants were offered one of the schools they had actually ranked, so 100 − 96.4 = 3.6% received none of their preferences at all. If your child did not get the grammar school, they are in a large and entirely ordinary group, and they almost certainly did get a school you chose and listed.

None of that is a consolation prize, and children can smell it if you deliver it as one. It is context. The useful version is: "a lot of people we know will have opened a different name tonight, and there are three things that are still open, and I am going to tell you exactly what they are." That is a promise you can keep, because the routes are published, dated and countable. Families who have worked through grammar school entrance preparation with us tend to find the evening easier when the plan was drawn before the email arrived rather than after it.

When the news is good, how do you celebrate without setting a trap?

Celebrate properly. Say you are proud, say it out loud, and do not immediately attach the next hurdle to the sentence. The trap parents fall into is the compound congratulation: "well done — now the real work starts." A child who hears that learns that success buys nothing except a higher bar, which is precisely the lesson you do not want carried into Year 7.

It also helps to attach a sense of scale to what they did, because children routinely underrate their own result. Tiffin School publishes its testing funnel each year, and the numbers are not small.

In 2026 that is 186 offers against 1866 children tested at Stage One, which is 9.97%, and 186 against the 665 who reached Stage Two, which is 27.97%. The Tiffin Girls' School tested 1498 candidates at stage one in 2025, 1485 in 2024 and 1445 in 2023, against a published admission number of 180 in each of those three years. A child who has come through that has done something genuinely difficult, and telling them the actual figure is a better compliment than telling them they are clever.

One quiet detail from the same table is worth holding onto for later in this page. Tiffin School's published admission number for September 2027 is 180, but 186 places were offered initially in each of 2024, 2025 and 2026 — 186 − 180 = 6 more offers than places, made deliberately because the school expects some offers to be declined. Selective schools plan for movement. That is the fact sitting underneath everything in the next four sections.

If there is a younger sibling in the house, watch the temperature of the celebration. A brother or sister two years behind has just watched what a good result looks like and quietly filed it as the standard. Say plainly that this was one child's result on one day, and that you will not be running the same script twice. Some families move straight on to planning senior school entry at thirteen for the next child, which is a different test on a different timetable and deserves to be treated as its own thing rather than a rerun.

When the news is disappointing, what is actually still open?

This is where almost every article on this subject stops being useful. The standard sentence is that you can consider "waiting lists, appeals, or alternative schools", which tells a worried parent nothing at all. There are three routes, they run on different clocks, and two of the three are routinely misunderstood in ways that cost families places.

The first thing to say to your child, and the thing most parents get wrong, is that accepting the offered school costs you nothing. GOV.UK states it directly: "You can add your child's name to a waiting list even if they have been offered a place at another school." Accepting is not surrendering. Refusing the offered place does not improve your standing anywhere and can leave you with no school at all. So the first action of the evening is the least dramatic one: accept, then join the lists.

The second misconception is that appealing and waiting are alternatives, or worse, that appealing annoys the school and damages your position. The Tiffin Girls' School addresses this in its own appeals timetable in plain words: "Note that the waiting list and the appeal process are completely separate. Making an appeal will not affect your child's position on the waiting list." You are allowed to do both, and doing both is normal.

The third point is which of the two routes actually delivers places. The Department for Education notes, in its own commentary on the appeals statistics, that "Appeals can be withdrawn; for example, because the child has been offered a place at the school via the waiting list." Read that carefully: the national statistics body treats "the waiting list got there first" as a routine reason for an appeal to end. For most families at most selective schools, the list is the realistic route and the appeal is the backstop, not the other way round.

And the third route is the honest one: the school your child has actually been offered. That is not a failure state. It is where the overwhelming majority of children in the country are educated, and what happens next is determined far more by what your child does across Years 7 to 9 than by which building they do it in. If academic momentum is the real worry, that is a concrete thing you can act on with subject tuition rather than a feeling you have to talk your way out of.

Why is a waiting list not a queue?

If you tell a child "we are fourteenth on the list, so fourteen people have to say no", you have told them something false, and you have set them up for a nasty surprise in April when the number goes up instead of down. A school waiting list is not a queue and never has been.

The School Admissions Code is unambiguous. Each admission authority "must maintain a clear, fair, and objective waiting list until at least 31 December of each school year of admission, stating in their arrangements that each added child will require the list to be ranked again in line with the published oversubscription criteria", and "Priority must not be given to children based on the date their application was received, or their name was added to the list." Every time a new child joins, the whole list is re-sorted from scratch against the school's criteria.

The Tiffin Girls' School restates the same rule in its determined arrangements for entry in September 2027: "The addition of each such girl will require the list to be ranked again in line with the Selection Criteria." Hull City Council puts it in the plainest parent-facing English available, and this is the sentence worth borrowing verbatim at the kitchen table: "Waiting lists are kept in the oversubscription criteria order published by the school e.g. sibling link. It does not depend on who applied first for the school."

Two practical consequences follow. First, joining late does not disadvantage you, so a family who comes to the decision a fortnight after offer day has lost nothing except a fortnight. Second, a position can move down as well as up, and a child who was told the list is a countdown will experience that as going backwards. Say in advance that the number is a ranking, not a countdown, and that it is recalculated whenever anyone joins.

The other half of the picture is how long the list stays alive. The statutory floor is 31 December of the year of admission, but schools frequently go further: Tiffin School's policy for September 2027 entry states that "The waiting list will be maintained from 1 March 2027 until the last day of" that school year. In practice that means a child can still be called up during Year 7 itself, months after everyone has stopped expecting it. That is a real thing to tell a child, and it is not false hope — the next section shows how far the bar actually moves.

Does the list really move? What Tiffin's published scores show

"There is still a chance" is the least convincing sentence a parent can say, because children know it is the thing you are supposed to say. What makes it credible is a number. Tiffin School publishes two scores for each cohort: the lowest score achieved by a student offered a place on 1 March, and the lowest score achieved by a student offered a place by the end of Year 7. The gap between them is the waiting list, quantified.

In 2025 the qualifying score fell from 100 on offer day to 98 by the end of Year 7, a fall of 100 − 98 = 2 points. In 2024 it fell from 104 to 102, again 104 − 102 = 2 points. The school has not yet published the end-of-year figure for 2026, so it is shown as tbc rather than guessed at, and nobody should tell you what it will be. But in both completed years for which the school has published both numbers, the bar dropped by the same amount, and it dropped because children who were offered places went elsewhere and the list was worked down.

That is a very different conversation from "you never know". It is: the school offered 186 places against a published admission number of 180 because it expects declines, the list is re-ranked every time someone joins, it runs into Year 7 itself, and in each of the last two published years the score needed to get in ended two points below where it started. If your child was close, close is a meaningful position rather than a consolation.

It also gives you something to do instead of refreshing an inbox. Some local authorities publish fixed dates on which they will tell you where you stand. Buckinghamshire commits to it in writing: "We will email you your child's waiting list position by the end of the day on the following dates: 23 March, 13 May, 17 June." Three named checkpoints turn an open-ended wait into a schedule, which is far easier for an eleven-year-old to hold in their head. If your authority does not publish dates, ask the school when it re-ranks and write those dates on the calendar yourself.

What does an appeal involve, and by when?

An appeal is a statutory right, not a favour, and the clock around it is set nationally. The School Admission Appeals Code requires every admission authority to set a deadline that "allows appellants at least 20 school days from the date of notification that their application was unsuccessful to prepare and lodge their written appeal". GOV.UK says the same thing in plainer terms: the admission authority "must allow you at least 20 school days to appeal from when they send the decision letter." Once lodged, "for applications made in the normal admissions round, appeals must be heard within 40 school days of the deadline for lodging appeals".

The single most useful thing to know on the night is that the dates are already online before you get the email. The Appeals Code requires that "Admission authorities must publish their appeals timetable on their website by 28 February each year." Offer day is 1 March. So on the evening of Monday 1 March 2027, the deadline that governs your family has been published for at least a day, and you can look it up while the email is still open on the screen.

What the national clock does not tell you is your school's own deadline, and those genuinely differ between schools a few miles apart. For the 2026 round, The Tiffin Girls' School required that "Appeal forms must be lodged with Surrey Schools Appeals Service by 13 April 2026". Henrietta Barnett School set its first-tranche cut-off at "4pm on Thursday 2 April 2026 to guarantee that your appeal will be heard in the first tranche of appeals" — eleven days earlier, with a time of day attached, and with no guarantee of an early hearing for anything lodged after it. Miss a first tranche and the hearing can slide a long way down the calendar, which means a child living with an open question for months longer than necessary.

So: check your specific school's published timetable, not a general article about appeals, and check it in the first 48 hours. Two schools in one cohort with deadlines nearly a fortnight apart is the normal situation, not an unusual one.

Why do grammar school appeals so rarely succeed?

This is the hardest part of the page to write kindly, and the part where being vague does real damage. A parent who puts a child through an appeal believing it is a second chance to show how much they want it has misunderstood what the panel is allowed to consider.

For a selective school, the Appeals Code narrows the panel's discretion sharply. It states that "the panel must only uphold the appeal if it is satisfied: i) that there is evidence to demonstrate that the child is of the required academic standards, for example, school reports giving Year 5/Year 6 SAT results or a letter of support from their current or previous school clearly indicating why the child is considered to be of grammar school ability". The question is not whether your child deserves a place, worked hard, or had a bad morning. It is whether there is documentary evidence that they meet the academic standard the test was designed to measure — and the test result is itself the school's evidence that they did not.

The published outcomes at three well-known London selectives show what that means in practice.

Add those up. Tiffin School: 3 + 9 = 12 appeals heard. The Tiffin Girls' School: 10 + 5 + 8 = 23. Henrietta Barnett School: 3 + 1 + 1 + 2 = 7. Across the three schools that is 12 + 23 + 7 = 42 appeals heard, and none upheld. Tiffin School has not yet published its 2026 row, which is why no 2026 figure appears in the table.

The national baseline makes the contrast clearer rather than softening it. The Department for Education reports that "27,100 appeals were heard relating to secondary school places for 2026, representing 3.6% of new admissions", and that "5,300 secondary appeals were successful, representing 19.5% of those heard", with the success rate "declining from 26.3% in 2016 to 19.5% in 2026" — a fall of 26.3 − 19.5 = 6.8 percentage points across the decade. At the national rate, 42 appeals would be expected to produce 42 × 19.5% = 8.19, call it eight successes. These three schools produced none.

That is not an argument against appealing. If your child's school will write a letter saying, on the evidence of their classroom work, that this is a child of grammar school ability, you have exactly the kind of material the Code names, and you should use it. It is an argument against telling a child that the appeal is their chance to fix this. The honest version is: "we are going to put the case in properly, and separately we are on the waiting list, and the list is the part that has actually moved in recent years."

What if you are in Buckinghamshire?

In much of the country this conversation happens on 1 March. In Buckinghamshire it happens the previous autumn, before the application has even been submitted, and that changes both its timing and its content.

Buckinghamshire Council states that "Most parents will be informed of their child's Secondary Transfer Test result by email, after 4pm on 9 October 2026." The result therefore arrives while your preference list is still being drawn up, which means the conversation you have that evening is a planning conversation as much as an emotional one. A child who has just been told a number and is then asked to help choose schools is being asked to do two hard things at once. Split them across two evenings if you possibly can.

The threshold there is fixed and published rather than moving with the cohort: "Children who achieve a standardised score of at least 121 are eligible to be considered for a Buckinghamshire grammar school place. We call these children qualified." That single sentence makes the Buckinghamshire conversation more definite than the London one. There is no waiting to see where the bar settles, because the bar was set before the test was sat.

The consequence matters, and it is the one place where the hopeful framing in the rest of this page does not apply. Buckinghamshire does not add unqualified or untested children to a grammar school waiting list at all. So in Bucks, a child who did not reach 121 is not sitting somewhere on a list that might move — and telling them otherwise sets up a disappointment in the spring that you will have manufactured yourself. Be straight about it in October, and put the energy into the preference list, which is where your decisions still carry real leverage.

Practically, that also means the useful preparation window in Buckinghamshire closes earlier than families expect. Anyone weighing up admissions tests for a younger sibling should be working backwards from an October result, not a March one, and should assume the decision points arrive a full term ahead of the London calendar.

What should you not say?

Some sentences are worse than silence. They are usually well meant, and they usually fail because they contradict something the child can see for themselves.

"It doesn't matter." It does, or you would not have spent a year on it. A child who is told it does not matter concludes either that you are lying to protect them, or that the last year was pointless. Both are worse than the truth, which is that it mattered, it did not go the way you wanted, and it is not the last thing that will ever matter.

"You must have panicked", or "you were fine in the practice papers". This hands the child a personal failing as the explanation. At Tiffin, 665 children reached Stage Two in 2026 and 186 were offered places. Most of the children who did not get an offer did not panic. They were in a field where fewer than three in ten of the Stage Two candidates could be offered a place, which is a fact about the arithmetic, not about their nerves.

"We'll appeal, don't worry." Do not promise an outcome you do not control, especially one where the published record at comparable schools is 42 appeals heard and none upheld. Say you will make the case, not that you will win it. A child who is told the appeal will fix it and then watches it fail has lost twice.

"Your cousin got in." Anything that turns the result into a family league table converts a disappointing evening into a permanent story about who the clever one is. And do not make the child the messenger: do not send them into school to announce it, and do not put it on a family group chat before they have decided how they want to say it and to whom.

The sentence that does work is unglamorous. "Here is what happened, here is what is still open, here is what we are doing tomorrow, and none of it changes what I think of you." Four clauses, all of them true, all of them checkable.

What should you do in the first 48 hours?

Everything above turns into a short list of actions, and it is worth doing them while you are still upset rather than waiting until you feel calm, because two of the four are time-limited.

One: accept the place you have been offered, through your local authority's system, by whatever deadline they set. GOV.UK is explicit that this does not cost you anything: "You can add your child's name to a waiting list even if they have been offered a place at another school." Two: join the waiting list for every school you would still move to. There is no advantage to joining early and no penalty for joining late, since priority "must not be given to children based on the date their application was received" — but there is a very real penalty for forgetting.

Three: open the school's own admissions page and find its appeals timetable. It has been there since 28 February at the latest, because the Appeals Code requires publication by that date. Write the lodging deadline on the calendar, and note whether the school runs tranches, as Henrietta Barnett does, where the guaranteed first-tranche cut-off was 4pm on Thursday 2 April 2026 for that round. Four: find out when your authority will tell you your list position. Buckinghamshire publishes 23 March, 13 May and 17 June; if yours does not, ask the school directly and put its answer in the diary.

Then stop. There is nothing else productive to do that week, and the most common mistake after offer day is filling the vacuum with activity that communicates panic to the child. Once the appeal is lodged and the lists are joined, the honest position is that you are waiting, and waiting is allowed to look like an ordinary term.

If the outcome is that your child is going to a non-selective school, the useful work is not remedial. It is keeping the level they reached in Year 6 from drifting during Year 7, which is when most of the ground is quietly lost, and long before GCSE tuition becomes the obvious answer.

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