What the school's own ratified 2027 admission policy actually says about who gets in
Book a Free ConsultationKendrick School is a selective girls' grammar school in Reading, Berkshire, admitting 128 girls into Year 7 each September under its own designated area rather than a council-run catchment. For September 2027 entry, 96 of those 128 places go by rank order to girls living anywhere across its two Priority Areas, while the remaining 32 are offered to Priority Area 1 first, then Priority Area 2, then everyone else.
Yes, though the school's own paperwork never uses the word "catchment." Kendrick's ratified Year 7 Admission Policy for September 2027 entry calls it a "designated area," and the policy is explicit about what that means: "the designated area is made up of Priority Area 1 and Priority Area 2 and each area is determined by the postcode of the applicant's permanent home address." There is no radius, no council-drawn boundary line and no distance formula behind the designation itself — a postcode is either listed in Appendix 1 of the policy or it isn't.
The Admission Number for Year 7 in September 2027 is 128 places, unchanged from the 128 places set for September 2026 entry. Whether the designated area actually decides who fills those places depends entirely on how oversubscribed the school is in a given year — and Kendrick has been oversubscribed every year for which records are available, so in practice the designated area does the bulk of the work.
Where Kendrick differs from schools that publish a single catchment line is that it operates two tiers inside that designated area, and — as the next section shows — those two tiers are not treated equally. A family's postcode does not just determine "in or out"; it determines which of two different allocation routes their daughter competes through.
This is the fact that gets flattened into "there's a catchment, apply early" on most guides to this school, and it is the single most useful number on this page. Kendrick's oversubscription criteria run in a fixed order, and the school's own policy sets out exactly how many of the 128 places each stage can fill.
Two small categories come first. Any applicant who is a looked-after or previously looked-after child is prioritised ahead of everyone else. Behind that sits a Pupil Premium or Service Premium category — but this one carries a geographic condition that is easy to miss: the policy states the applicant's "permanent home address must also be within Priority Area 1 or 2 of the designated area of the school." Pupil Premium status alone does not bypass the postcode test; it only earns a lower bar once a family already lives inside the designated area. Both of these categories qualify at a score "5 points lower" than the qualifying score used everywhere else, calculated "to two decimal places" each year.
Once those two categories are filled, the real split begins. The policy states plainly: "offers will then be made from the ranked list, according to the ranked order until up to 75% (96) of places have been offered" to any applicant "within Priority Area 1 or 2 of the designated area" — meaning for the first 96 places, a girl in Priority Area 2 competes on exactly the same ranked list as a girl in Priority Area 1, with no advantage either way. Only after those 96 places are gone does the geography start to matter in earnest: "the remaining 25% (32) places will be offered" first to Priority Area 1, then to Priority Area 2, and only then — if any places remain at all — to "applicants whose permanent home address is NOT in the designated area of the school."
One further rule reduces the pool before any of this runs: children with an Education, Health and Care Plan naming Kendrick are "admitted automatically," and "the number of places available to other applicants will be reduced accordingly." The 128 figure is therefore a ceiling on total admissions, not a guaranteed number of competitive places in every cycle.
In short: 96 of Kendrick's 128 places (75%) are open to the whole designated area on rank order alone. Only the final 32 places (25%) are split by which Priority Area a family lives in — Priority Area 1 first, Priority Area 2 second, everyone else last.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppNone of the mechanics above are useful without knowing which tier a family's own postcode sits in. Kendrick publishes the full list as Appendix 1 of its Year 7 admission policy, and the same two lists appear unchanged in both the 2026 and 2027 arrangements.
| Priority Area | Postcode districts and sectors | Broad coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Priority Area 1 | RG1; RG2 0, 6, 7, 8; RG30 1, 2, 3, 4, 6; RG31 4, 5, 6, 7; RG4 5, 6, 7, 8; RG5 3; RG6 1, 5, 6, 7 | Central and east Reading, Caversham, Earley, Tilehurst |
| Priority Area 2 | RG2 9; RG4 9; RG5 4; RG6 3, 4; RG7; RG8; RG9; RG10; RG12; RG27 0; RG40; RG41; RG42; RG45; GU17 0; GU46; GU47; SL6 3, 4, 5, 6 | Woodley, Winnersh, Wokingham, Bracknell, parts of Hook, Camberley, Yateley, Fleet, Maidenhead |
The policy explains how a sector code within a district works, using the school's own address as the example: "postcode district is indicated by the first digit and the postcode sector by the second digit," so RG1 5BN sits in district RG1 and sector 5. Where the appendix lists only a district (RG1, RG7, RG8, RG9, RG10, RG12, RG40, RG41, RG42, RG45 and GU46, GU47), every sector in that district is included; where it lists specific sector numbers (such as "RG2 0, RG2 6, RG2 7, RG2 8"), only those sectors qualify and the remaining sectors of that district fall outside the designated area entirely.
A permanent home address has to sit inside one of these postcodes on 31 August 2026 for September 2027 entry, and the family needs to still be living there when term starts. The policy is specific that this must be "a single address on 31st August 2026" — a family who moves house afterwards, even into a higher-priority postcode, is assessed on the address held on that date, with re-ranking only applied after the national offer day process closes.
No. Kendrick's admission policy sets a "qualifying score" that is recalculated "to two decimal places" every year from that year's test results, and the school does not publish a fixed number that a family can treat as a permanent bar. What the qualifying score will be for the 2027 cycle depends entirely on how the roughly 128-place field of applicants performs on the day, and the school will not know it itself until results are standardised in October 2026.
What does exist is a small number of historical figures the school has released under the Freedom of Information Act, and these deserve to be read for what they are — old snapshots, not a current benchmark. In a Freedom of Information response dated 5 October 2020, Kendrick's Admissions Officer told a parent asking about the Priority Area 2 route: "the lowest score for candidates residing in PA2 who were offered a place at Kendrick School for entry into Year 7 in September 2021 was 114.88." That figure describes September 2021 entry specifically, it is now several admissions cycles old, and it is the most recent Priority Area cut-off score this research could find the school having released — no more recent figure has been published, so 2021 is a guide to how the Priority Area 2 tier has behaved historically, not a bar for 2027.
The school has also explained, in response to a separate 2023 request asking it to release scores early, why it will not do so before the national offer date: "the information would be misleading as the scores and cohort are different each year," and Kendrick has confirmed elsewhere that it publishes an anonymised list of scores on its own website each July, after the admissions round for that year has closed rather than before it. A family wanting the most current picture should look for that July publication rather than relying on any number quoted for an earlier year, including the 114.88 figure above.
Distance comes up constantly in questions about this school, usually framed as "we're only just outside the boundary, but much closer than families further into Priority Area 2 — surely that counts for something?" Kendrick's own policy answers this directly, and the answer surprises most families: it does not, except as a tie-break between two candidates who are otherwise equal.
The exact wording is worth reading in full, because it resolves the question completely: "eligible applicants living nearest to Kendrick School and within the designated area will be accorded the highest priority in the allocation of places. Distance will be from the home address to the front gate of the school calculated using grid references and Reading Borough Council digital mapping software. Applicants living nearer to the school yet outside the designated area will be ranked after those living within the designated area."
Two things follow from that wording. First, distance only ever comes into play when two or more applicants have scored exactly the same qualifying score — it is not a separate route into the school and it does not soften the Priority Area boundary in any other circumstance. Second, and more counterintuitively, being outside the designated area is a strictly worse position than being inside it at any distance, for tie-break purposes: a family five minutes' walk from Kendrick's gates but in a postcode not listed in Appendix 1 is ranked behind every equally-scoring family inside the designated area, however far into Priority Area 2 that family lives. Where two applicants living equidistant from the school are otherwise tied, Reading Local Authority supervises a random allocation between them rather than the school itself.
Everything in this section covers Year 12 (Sixth Form) entry only. None of it applies to the Year 7 admissions process described above, which uses the 96-then-32 split and has no GCSE score involved.
Families who research Kendrick for Year 7 sometimes assume the same designated area works the same way lower down the school if they return for Sixth Form, or that the geography question goes away entirely once a child has GCSEs. Neither is true, and if anything the geographic test for external Sixth Form applicants is stricter than the one at 11, not looser.
Kendrick's Year 12 policy sets an external admission number of 40 places, on top of however many Year 11 students progress internally, with "the total admission number for Year 12 not exceeding 140 (internal and external applicants)." External candidates are assessed on a GCSE points score, and the policy names an explicit threshold: "candidates with a score of 54 or above ('the cut off point') will be invited to a consultation meeting." That score is calculated from "the 8 best full course GCSE predicted grades," with Mathematics and English Language compulsory among them.
The designated-area rule bites earlier here than it does at Year 7. The policy states: "in the first round of consultations, applicants will only be invited to consultation if they are currently living within the designated area unless there are exceptional circumstances." At 11, a family outside the designated area still competes for whatever of the 32 tiered places remain; at Sixth Form, an out-of-area family with a qualifying GCSE score may not even reach a first-round consultation meeting unless the school judges their case exceptional. The same Priority Area 1 and Priority Area 2 postcode lists apply, and the same looked-after-child and Pupil Premium priority categories carry over from the Year 7 policy.
Families comparing what they read about last year's Year 6 cohort to their own child's cycle should know that, on the substance of the policy, almost nothing changed. Kendrick's Year 7 Admission Number for September 2026 entry was also 128 places, and the 2026 policy runs the identical waterfall: "up to 75% (96) of places" by combined-area rank order, then "the remaining 25% (32) places" to Priority Area 1, then Priority Area 2, then outside the area. The Priority Area 1 and Priority Area 2 postcode lists in the 2027 policy's Appendix 1 are, sector for sector, the same lists that appeared in the 2026 policy.
What does move year to year is the calendar and the competitive picture, not the mechanism. For the 2026 cycle, the school reported on its own admissions page that "the waiting list has moved 4 places since 2nd March 2026" — a small but real sign that places continue to turn over well after the national offer date, through declines and late reallocations, right up until the point a waiting list closes. For the 2027 cohort, that waiting list is due to run "until 31st January 2028," so a family not offered a place on 1 March 2027 is not necessarily out of contention for almost another year.
Kendrick's most recent Ofsted inspection, carried out on 8 and 9 November 2022 and published on 13 January 2023, rated the school Outstanding in every category assessed: quality of education, behaviour and attitudes, personal development, leadership and management, and Sixth Form provision. The Department for Education's own record lists a school capacity of 920 against a current roll of 939 pupils, with 68 pupils (10.6%) recorded as eligible for free school meals.
| Stage | Date |
|---|---|
| Registration for the entrance test opens | Friday 1 May 2026 |
| Registration closes (midnight) | Wednesday 1 July 2026 |
| Entrance test day (in-area candidates) | Friday 18th September 2026 |
| Out-of-designated-area test day | To be confirmed separately |
| Test results issued to families | Before 31 October 2026 |
| Common Application Form deadline to home LA | 31 October 2026 |
| National Offer Day | Monday 1 March 2027 |
| Waiting list for this cohort runs until | 31 January 2028 |
None of the figures above describe what tutoring can achieve — they describe how Kendrick allocates its own places, and they stay true whether or not a family works with a tutor. Separately, and kept deliberately apart from any of Kendrick's own admissions statistics: across the families Leading Tuition has supported preparing for 11+ entry, 91% have gone on to secure a place at one of their target schools. That figure is our own first-party outcome for our tuition work, not a claim about Kendrick's applicants-per-place or oversubscription rate.
For families further into preparation, our Kendrick School 11+ preparation page covers how we support the entrance test itself, and our wider 11+ tuition in Reading page sets out how we work with families across both Priority Areas. We also support families throughout Reading preparing for the area's other selective schools.
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128 places. That figure is unchanged from the Admission Number set for September 2026 entry, and it sits alongside a small, separate allowance for any child named on an Education, Health and Care Plan, who is admitted automatically and reduces the number of places left for other applicants.
No. After the looked-after-child and Pupil Premium categories are filled, 96 places (75%) are offered by rank order to any applicant across both Priority Area 1 and Priority Area 2 combined. Only the final 32 places (25%) are split by tier — Priority Area 1 first, then Priority Area 2, then anyone outside the designated area.
The address must be the applicant's permanent home address with their parent or carer on 31 August 2026, and the family must still be living there at the time of admission. The school asks for documentary evidence to support the application and states it will investigate any change of address, including carrying out random checks that may involve a home visit.
Yes, but only after every applicant inside the designated area has been offered a place from among the 128 available, under category 6 of the oversubscription criteria. Because Kendrick is heavily oversubscribed within its own designated area most years, an out-of-area offer is possible but should not be assumed, and distance to the school makes no difference to this category's priority.
Friday 18th September 2026, for candidates living inside the designated area, sat as two papers of roughly one hour each covering English, Mathematics, verbal and non-verbal reasoning. A separate date, still to be confirmed by the school, applies to candidates who live outside the designated area.
No current, standing pass mark exists — the qualifying score is recalculated to two decimal places from that year's results. The most recent Priority Area figure released under the Freedom of Information Act, dated 5 October 2020, put the lowest Priority Area 2 score offered a place at 114.88 for September 2021 entry; no more recent Priority Area cut-off has been published since.
No, and it is stricter in one respect: external Year 12 applicants need a GCSE points score of 54 or above to be considered, and in the first round of consultations only candidates already living in the designated area are invited, barring exceptional circumstances. The external Year 12 admission number is 40, within a total Year 12 number of 140 including internal progression.
Sources: Kendrick School's Year 7 Admission Policy for September 2027 entry and its Guide to the Admission Procedure, the school's Year 7 Admission Policy for September 2026 entry, Ofsted's most recent inspection report, the Department for Education's Get Information About Schools record, and a Freedom of Information response published via WhatDoTheyKnow.
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