QE Boys 11+ Score: What You Need for 2027 Entry

Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet is a selective boys' grammar school in High Barnet that publishes two different entrance-test numbers, and families routinely mistake one for the other. A combined standardised score of 225 makes a boy eligible to be considered. The lowest score that actually won a place was 235 for September 2024 entry, and 235 again for September 2025. Eligibility is not an offer, and the distance between those two numbers is where most parents lose their bearings.

The two numbers QE Boys publishes, and why they are not the same

Both numbers come from the school, not from a forum or a tutoring company, and both sit in the same document — the Criteria for Admission & Our Admissions Guide for Parents that Queen Elizabeth's publishes for each entry year.

The first is the standard set by the Governors. For September 2027 entry the school states that "those candidates achieving a combined score of 225 or higher will be deemed to have met the standard required by the Governors to be eligible to be considered for admission to the School". That is a floor, not a pass mark. It decides whether an application can be looked at, and nothing else.

The second is the lowest score that actually secured a place, which the school publishes retrospectively for the last five completed cycles. Those two figures have never been the same number. In the most recent cycle the floor was 220 and the lowest successful score was 235.

The school is unusually direct about the gap. Its guide warns that "meeting the standard required by the Governors is not a guarantee that a place at the School will be offered", and its admissions FAQ tells parents plainly that the school "does not quote a maximum standardised score for the tests" — so there is no denominator to convert a score into a percentage. A boy who scores 228 has met the standard and, on recent evidence, will not be offered a place.

What score has actually won a place in the last five years

This is the table parents ask each other for, reproduced from the school's own admissions guide for September 2027 entry. It covers the five completed cycles administered under the criteria the Governors currently use.

Source: Queen Elizabeth's School, Criteria for Admission & Our Admissions Guide for Parents, September 2027 Admissions, page 14. Lowest scores exclude places won at appeal.

Three things in that table are worth reading slowly.

The number sitting the test has risen every single year, from 2,928 to 3,433 — an increase of 505 boys, or about 17 per cent, across four cycles. The number of places has not moved. It is 180, and it has been 180 throughout.

The "applicants" column is smaller than the number reaching the standard in the first three years and larger than it in the last two. The school explains the second case in a footnote: some families whose sons missed the required score submitted a Common Application Form anyway. Those applications cannot succeed. In September 2025, 809 families applied and only 764 boys had cleared the floor, so at least 45 of those applications were doomed at the point they were posted.

And the lowest successful score is not a smooth line. It went 232, 234, 232, 235, 235. It moved by three marks across five years and it moved down as well as up. Anyone quoting you a precise figure for 2027 is guessing.

Why the eligibility standard moved from 210 to 220 to 225

The floor has been raised twice in recent memory, and the effect on the published table is visible.

The school's footnote records that "the minimum combined score required in order to be considered by the Governors for entry was changed from 210 to 220 from the 2024 year of admission". Look at what happens to the third column at that point: the number reaching the minimum standard falls from 1,111 in 2023 to 742 in 2024, even though 188 more boys sat the test. Raising the floor by ten marks removed roughly a third of the qualifying pool in a single year.

For September 2027 entry the floor is 225 — five marks higher again. The school has not published what that will do to the qualifying count, because that cycle has not run. On the arithmetic of the 2024 change, a further five-mark rise plausibly removes a few hundred more boys from consideration, but that is our inference from the published series and not a school figure.

What the change does not do is make a place easier to get. The floor governs who may be considered; the 180 places are still filled from the top of the ranked list downwards. Raising the floor shortens the list without shortening the queue at the front of it.

Why 235 in 2025 does not mean 235 in 2027

Queen Elizabeth's says this itself, and it is the sentence families skip: "achieving a score which has enabled an applicant to gain admission to the School in a previous year is no guarantee that a place will be offered for 2027."

The mechanism is straightforward once you see how the score is produced. QE's two papers are marked and then standardised by the company that supplies the tests, taking the candidates' ages into account, and the two results are combined into one overall figure. Standardisation places each boy relative to the rest of that year's cohort. A cohort that is larger and better prepared pushes the same raw performance to a lower standardised position.

So the cut-off is not a difficulty setting the school chooses. It is wherever the 180th-ranked boy happens to land, and that depends on 3,000-odd other families you cannot see. Three of the five published cut-offs sit at 232 or 234; two sit at 235. The honest planning assumption for 2027 is the top of that observed range, with no promise attached.

One further variable sits outside the test entirely. Boys who are offered places do not all accept them, and the school's waiting list moves as they decline. Queen Elizabeth's publishes the current position on its admissions page: for entry into Year 7 in September 2026 the waiting list had reached position 20 as at 19 August 2026. That is the practical meaning of finishing just below the line.

The floor has moved 15 marks. The winning score has moved 3.

Set the two published series side by side and something useful falls out that neither number shows on its own.

Source: eligibility floors and lowest admitted scores from Queen Elizabeth's School's admissions guide for September 2027 entry, page 14 and its footnote. The gap column is our arithmetic on those two published columns.

Across those five cycles the eligibility floor rose by 15 marks, from 210 to 225. Over the same period the lowest score that actually won a place rose by 3, from 232 to 235, and it did not rise in a straight line. The floor is a policy decision the Governors make; the winning score is an outcome the cohort produces, and the cohort has been remarkably consistent.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly, because it inverts how the two numbers are usually discussed. The floor is the number the school leads with and the number parents quote, and it is the less informative of the two. It has moved five times faster than the thing it is supposed to predict.

If we had to give a family a working target for September 2027 — and families ask, so we do — it would be 235 or better, on the grounds that the last two completed cycles both landed there and the number sitting the test has risen every year since. That is our reading of the school's published series, not a school forecast, and the school explicitly declines to make one.

How the two papers become one number

The mechanics matter here because they explain why a mock score and a QE score are not the same currency.

A boy sits two multiple-choice papers, English and Mathematics, in a single session on one of the two test days. There is no second round: the school's FAQ answers the question "Is there more than one round?" with "No. We only have one round of testing in a single session." The answer sheets are marked electronically by software supplied by the test provider.

Each paper's raw marks are then standardised by that provider, adjusting for the candidate's age so that, in the school's words, "neither advantage nor disadvantage arises as a result of the month in which candidates were born". The two standardised results are added together to produce the single combined figure — the one that gets compared to 225.

Two consequences follow. A boy who is strong in one subject and weak in the other is not filtered out by a per-paper minimum, because there is not one; only the combined total is tested against the standard. And because standardisation is relative to the cohort, a mock paper marked out of 100 at home converts to nothing. It can tell you whether he is accurate and whether he is fast. It cannot tell you whether he is above 235.

What happens between "eligible" and an offer

The two stages are separated by about a month and by a form your local authority controls, and the school's own guide sets out the sequence for the 2027 intake.

Source: Queen Elizabeth's School, key dates for the 2027 intake, admissions guide page 18.

The letter that arrives around 1 October says one of two things and only two: that your son has met the standard, or that he has not. It does not give a rank. The school then ranks every applicant by combined score and returns that list to the local authority, which allocates up to 180 places through the co-ordinated admissions scheme.

That is why the October letter feels less useful than parents expect. It tells you whether the application is live. It does not tell you whether it will succeed, and the school does not publish an in-year running total of how many boys cleared the floor.

What QE Boys will not tell you about your son's score

Four things, each of which surfaces on parenting forums every autumn.

There is no percentage. The school does not quote a maximum standardised score, so a combined 236 cannot be converted into "92 per cent" or anything else. Figures of that shape circulating online have been reverse-engineered from assumptions, not published.

There is no rank. Boys are ranked, but the ranking is not shared with families before National Offer Day.

There is no remark. The papers are marked electronically by the test provider's software, and the route for a family who disagrees with an outcome is an appeal to an independent panel, not a re-mark.

And there is no second chance in the same cycle. Repeat applications are not considered in the same academic year, and the reserve sitting on 23 September 2026 exists only for boys who missed the main dates through illness or another reason the school approves.

What to do with the letter that arrives on 1 October 2026

If the letter says your son has not met the standard, the application cannot proceed. The school is blunt about this because every year families apply anyway: it reminds parents that under the admissions criteria "such candidates cannot be considered for admission to the School". The Common Application Form is better spent on schools where he is competitive.

If the letter says he has met the standard, the question becomes how far above 225 he is, and you will not be told. What you can do is treat the published range as the working boundary. A score at or just above 225 has met a floor that several hundred other boys also cleared. A score in the mid-230s sits where recent places have actually been won.

Then rank the school honestly on the Common Application Form. Queen Elizabeth's addresses the usual fear directly in its guide: the order of preference is not passed to the schools, and placing QE first does not damage an application to any other school named on the form. We set out how the form is read, and what each North London school does and does not tell you before the deadline, in our guide to the Common Application Form timeline and National Offer Day.

Two related pages go further on the mechanics: whether QE Barnet has a designated area, which explains how distance is used only to separate boys on identical scores, and our complete QE Boys 11+ guide for the wider admissions cycle. For preparation materials specifically, what past papers exist for each school covers why QE releases none of its own. The school's Secondary Transfer Entrance Test FAQs are the primary source for the 225 standard and should be checked before every cycle.

Where our own numbers come from

In the 2025 admissions cycle we worked with 40 students sitting selective entrance examinations at 11+ and 13+. Ten of them took up places at Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet — the largest single-school group in that cohort. Across the whole cohort, 38 of the 40 received at least one offer from a school the family had genuinely targeted.

We give the cohort size beside the count deliberately. Forty students is a real number and a small one, and a success rate quoted without it tells you nothing. We do not publish a school-by-school pass rate for QE Boys, because we do not hold one we could evidence. Families rate us Excellent on Trustpilot, 4.8 out of 5 from 57 reviews read on 19 August 2026, and 91% of our students achieve their desired grades — a practice-wide figure across every level we teach, not a Barnet cohort.

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