Private Candidate 11+ Registration: The Complete Guide for 2027 Entry

Registration windows are short, exact and unforgiving. Buckinghamshire closes at 3pm on 2 June, Bexley at midnight on 31 March with no appeal, and Kent closed on 1 July. One of those areas does not automatically register even its own primary pupils, which undoes the assumption most guidance for private candidates is built on.

What does "private candidate" mean for 11+ registration?

For grammar school entrance it means a child who sits outside whatever registration route an authority runs for the schools it knows about. Three groups usually fall into it: children at independent or preparatory schools, home-educated children, and families living outside the county or borough they are applying into. All three sit exactly the same paper on the same day as everyone else. The difference is administrative, and it is entirely a matter of who presses submit.

It does not mean applying through a private examination company. The test is administered by the authority or the school, and there is no separate private-candidate paper, venue or standard. Kent makes the boundary of a registration explicit rather than leaving it to be assumed: "The test is only valid for Kent grammar schools. Medway Council has its own Medway Test and London Borough of Bexley has its own Bexley selection test." Registering in one area buys nothing in the next one.

Kent also asks out-of-county families to be deliberate about it: "If you live outside Kent Register your child for testing, but only do so if you intend to apply for a place at a Kent grammar school. Every year, time and resources are wasted when children who are not going to apply sit the test." That is worth reading as guidance rather than as discouragement — a speculative registration in three counties is three sittings a ten-year-old has to actually turn up for.

Which areas register a child automatically, and which do not?

The usual advice is that state primary pupils are registered for them and everyone else is not. That holds in Buckinghamshire and fails in Bexley, and a family that carries the assumption across a borough boundary loses the sitting.

Buckinghamshire is the version most guidance describes. If a child "attends a state funded Buckinghamshire primary school (this does not include children who attend schools in Milton Keynes) they are automatically registered for the Secondary Transfer Test". Everyone else has to act: "If your child goes to a Partner school or any other school, including state-funded schools in Milton Keynes, you need to register your child for testing." Note where the line actually falls — it is not state versus independent, it is inside the county versus outside it.

Bexley does the opposite and says so twice. "During the registration process, it is your responsibility to register your child online. This includes children who attend Bexley primary schools", and again in its list of things to consider: "Children attending Bexley primary schools will not automatically be registered." In Bexley every family is effectively a private candidate. If you take one habit from this page, make it checking that sentence for your own authority rather than assuming either pattern.

Kent sits between the two and adds a condition that has to be met before registration rather than after. Where a child has a disability or special educational need affecting access to testing, the family "need to discuss this with their primary school's special educational needs coordinator (SENCO) before you register them for the test as the school will need to apply for any necessary access arrangements". For a private candidate with no such school relationship, that conversation has to be started early and deliberately — our guide to exam access arrangements for the 11+ covers what each area asks for.

What are the actual registration windows?

They are published as dates and times rather than as months, and two of the three below close with an explicit statement that lateness is fatal. Every one of these windows falls in Year 5, a full year before a secondary place is offered.

Look at what Buckinghamshire specifies: not a date but a time on a date, and a single narrow exception for a very recent house move. That is the shape of most of these windows once you read the page rather than a summary of it. Bexley then makes the consequence explicit by naming the absence of an appeal, which is the sentence a family discovers too late.

One further deadline sits outside all of this and catches people who did everything else right. Sitting the test does not apply for a school place. The secondary application goes through your home local authority in the autumn of Year 6, separately, and a child who is assessed as selective but is not named on that form receives no offer. Two processes, two deadlines, both compulsory.

It is worth knowing what the registration buys before spending a year on it. Bexley publishes the clearest numbers of any authority we checked: in 2025, 5,866 candidates sat the test and 2,070 candidates achieved the selective standard, against 800 grammar school places, and the borough puts the top 180 candidates by total age-standardised score into one of its highest priority groups. Buckinghamshire expects "about 37% of children" to reach its qualifying score of 121, and the Slough Consortium states that a score of 111 or above puts a child "in the top 35% of the cohort sitting the examination". None of those proportions describes an offer — they describe qualification, after which oversubscription criteria decide.

Who sets the test where you are registering?

For years the answer given to private candidates was "GL or CEM, find out which". It no longer describes the landscape. Of the admissions authorities checked for this update, none sets a CEM 11+, and Cambridge's surviving product markets its 11+ and 13+ versions to independent schools while describing only a late-transfer test "suitable for entry into years 8, 9 and 10" for grammar schools. Our guide to CEM and GL Assessment traces where the name went, area by area.

GL Assessment remains the largest supplier and is straightforward to prepare for, because it publishes material. Its own admissions page says "We are the largest provider of 11+ tests to schools in England and deliver over 300,000 papers every year", and its parent-facing site offers "practice papers in four specific areas: verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, English and maths". One detail there is worth more than the rest to a prep school family: GL describes its admissions papers as assessing "areas taught up to the end of Year 5 (P6 in Northern Ireland)". That is narrower than the whole of Key Stage 2, and it changes what is worth revising in the summer before the test.

The practical point for a private candidate is the right-hand column. Where the provider publishes material, format familiarity is cheap and worth buying early. Where it does not — FSCE, Cambridge Select Insight, and a school that writes its own papers — there is nothing to drill, and the preparation that pays is reading, reasoning and timed writing. Confirm which column your target school sits in before spending anything on practice packs. Our 11+ school guides set out what each school publishes.

How do you apply to grammar and independent schools at the same time?

Most private candidates are doing both, and the two calendars barely overlap. Grammar registration happens in the spring and summer of Year 5 and the test is sat in the autumn of Year 6. Independent registration opens in the autumn of Year 5 and those exams fall in January. The trap is that families begin thinking about secondary school when the independent calendar starts, by which point the grammar windows have closed.

Sequencing solves it, and the sequence is fixed by the dates rather than by preference. Register for the state grammar schools first, in the spring and summer of Year 5, then turn to independent registration in the autumn of the same year. Nothing about the grammar registration commits a family to anything: Buckinghamshire notes that "The test is not compulsory" and that a registered child can be withdrawn — "If you do register your child for testing and then change your mind, tell us straight away and we will withdraw them." Registering and deciding later is possible; deciding later and then registering is not.

Preparation follows the same order, because the grammar papers come first. Work to the grammar format through the summer and the first weeks of Year 6, then shift to the independent format afterwards. The underlying skills carry across — comprehension, reasoning, arithmetic under time — but the question style and pace differ enough that a single undifferentiated programme serves neither well. Our 11+ preparation timeline maps the whole run.

Which mistakes actually cost private candidates the sitting?

Assuming the prep school handles it. Most prep schools run their admissions expertise around independent entry at 11+ and 13+, and state grammar registration sits outside that calendar entirely. Verify directly with each authority that your child is registered rather than assuming a school has done it.

Assuming the pattern from the last area you read about. Buckinghamshire auto-registers its own state primary pupils; Bexley registers nobody automatically. Reading either as the national rule loses a sitting, and both statements are one sentence on the authority's own page.

Using a month instead of the published time. "June" is not a deadline; "3pm on 2 June" is. Forum posts and roundups age by a cycle without changing their wording, which is why every date on this page is quoted from the authority and dated.

Confusing the two applications. The registration puts a child in the exam hall. The common application form, submitted through your home local authority in the autumn of Year 6, is what asks for the place. Both are compulsory and they have different deadlines and different owners.

Preparing for the wrong body's paper. A child registered in Bexley is sitting a Quest paper; one registered in Buckinghamshire is sitting a GL one; one registered with CSSE is sitting neither and will meet no reasoning questions at all. Confirm the provider for each target school before buying material or booking tuition, and if you would like help mapping that, book a free consultation. The pass marks by region guide shows what each area's threshold then measures.

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