One school confirms eligibility on 1 October 2026. The other withholds every score. The form is still due on 31 October.
Book a Free ConsultationThe Common Application Form for September 2027 secondary entry is due on 31 October 2026, and by that date Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet and The Henrietta Barnett School will have told you very different amounts about your child. QE confirms whether a boy has cleared its 225 eligibility standard. Henrietta Barnett tells girls in its top 300 nothing at all — no score, no rank, no band. You rank both anyway.
The asymmetry is the whole problem, and it is not obvious until you lay the schools side by side. Every one of these is the school's own published position for the September 2027 cycle.
| School | What you are told before the CAF deadline | When |
|---|---|---|
| Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet | Whether your son met the standard required by the Governors. Nothing else — no rank, no position | Provisionally Thursday 1 October 2026 |
| Henrietta Barnett, girl not in the top 300 | Her overall standardised score, and the cut-off score for the top 300 | Before the CAF deadline |
| Henrietta Barnett, girl in the top 300 | That she "may be eligible for the offer of a place". No score, no rank, no band | Late October 2026 |
| Henrietta Barnett, Looked After or Pupil Premium candidate in the top 300 | That if you apply, she will be offered a place, subject to the tie-break | Late October 2026 |
Source: Queen Elizabeth's School admissions guide for September 2027 entry, page 10; The Henrietta Barnett School Admissions Policy 2027-2028, section 5.
Read the second and third rows together, because they are the sentence families find hardest to believe. At Henrietta Barnett, a girl who missed the cut is told her exact score and the exact number she needed. A girl who made the cut is told neither. The school's reason is in the policy: scores are withheld "on the basis that those who may eventually be offered a place at the School should arrive as equals".
Queen Elizabeth's is only slightly more forthcoming. Its guide says the October letter states one of two things — that your son has met the standard, or that he has not. Since 764 boys reached the standard for September 2025 entry and the school offers 180 places, "he met the standard" is a long way from "he has a place".
The thing to accept before you start: for both of these schools, you will complete the form without knowing whether either offer is coming. That is by design, and no amount of emailing the admissions office changes it.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppOne thing, and it is worth being exact about it. The local authority works out every school on your form for which your child qualifies, and then offers the single place that sits highest in your stated order. It discards the rest.
Queen Elizabeth's states the mechanism plainly in its guide: "you will be offered a place at the school which you have ranked highest (provided your application meets that school's admissions criteria). You are therefore strongly advised to rank the schools to which you are applying in your genuine order of preference."
The consequence people miss runs the other way. If you place a school you would take reluctantly above a school you actually want, and you qualify for both, you are given the reluctant one. Qualifying for the school below it becomes irrelevant. This is the failure mode behind most "we got the wrong offer" posts every March: the form was completed as a hedge rather than as a ranking.
No, and Queen Elizabeth's says so in its own admissions guide rather than leaving families to work it out.
Two sentences carry it. First: "the order of preference in which you rank the schools will not be passed on to the schools themselves." No admissions office sees where it sat on your form. Second, addressing the fear directly: "if you place QE as your first preference and then you are not offered a place, you will not jeopardise your chances of being given a place at other schools you have named."
This is the equal preference system working as intended, and it has been the law in England for two decades, but the belief that a first preference is "used up" persists because the pre-2007 system did work that way in some authorities. It does not now. A school cannot rank you lower for having ranked it second, because it is never shown the ranking.
There is one real cost, and it is not the one people fear. Every line you spend on a school you will not get is a line you have not spent on a school you would. That is an arithmetic problem, not a strategic one, and how bad it is depends entirely on where you live.
Both of these schools sit in the London Borough of Barnet. Neither of them decides how many lines you have on the form. Your home local authority does, and the difference across the ordinary catchment for these two schools is substantial.
| Home local authority | Preferences on the CAF |
|---|---|
| London Borough of Barnet | Up to six — "select up to six schools — you can include schools within and outside the borough of Barnet" |
| Hertfordshire County Council | Up to four — "you can list up to 4 schools in order of preference" |
Source: London Borough of Barnet secondary transfer guidance and Hertfordshire County Council secondary and upper school places guidance, both read on 19 August 2026.
A family in High Barnet and a family in Potters Bar can be ten minutes apart, apply to the same two schools, and be playing a different game. The Barnet family can name both super-selectives and still have four lines for realistic alternatives. The Hertfordshire family who names both has two lines left.
Hertfordshire also publishes what its form achieves in practice: 94 per cent of Hertfordshire children were offered one of their four preferences for 2025-26 entry, and 77 per cent received their first preference. Those figures are dominated by ordinary comprehensives rather than super-selectives, so do not read them as your odds at Henrietta Barnett. Read them as the reason the last two lines matter.
If your daughter sat Round Two, you are ranking blind on rank order. There is exactly one circumstance in which you are not.
Henrietta Barnett's oversubscription criteria run in four tiers: Looked After and Previously Looked After Children first, then Pupil Premium candidates, then girls who "currently live within 3 miles of the school at the point when they submit their application to the Local Authority in October", then everyone else in rank score order. For the first two tiers the school writes to you in late October to say that if you apply, she will be offered a place. That letter is as close to certainty as this process produces.
Families in the third tier do not get that letter, but the criterion still puts them ahead of every rank-order candidate, and the qualification is low: in that category "a candidate will be considered to have the necessary capability if they sit the Round Two test". The school's FAQ document tempers this, noting that the rank-order group "has so far been the substantial majority" of admissions — so most places do go on score. We set out how the three-mile rule is measured, and when the address is fixed, in our guide to the Henrietta Barnett catchment question.
For everyone else the honest planning position is this: an invitation to Round Two puts your daughter in a group of roughly 300 competing for 120 places. The school's appeals disclosure records 3,121 applications for 104 Year 7 places in 2025. Rank Henrietta Barnett where you genuinely want it, and build the rest of the form as though the offer will not come, because on those numbers it usually does not. What the second round involves is covered in our guide to the Henrietta Barnett Round Two test.
At Queen Elizabeth's, the address you give does nothing until two boys finish on the same mark, at which point the straight-line distance from the Ordnance Survey address point for your home to the main school gate separates them. At Henrietta Barnett, the same address decides whether you are in the third tier or the fourth, and it is fixed at the point you submit the CAF in October rather than at any later date.
Barnet applies the address rules to both, and applies them strictly. Its guidance requires the child's main address at the time of application, refuses relatives' addresses, business addresses and childminders' addresses, and states that a temporary address "will normally not be accepted if you still own a property that was previously used as a home address". Applicants upload a council tax number plus two supporting documents. Barnet's own wording on the consequence of getting this wrong is unambiguous: "providing false information to secure a school place is a criminal act."
Rank in genuine order, then check the form does three things.
It should name every selective school your child has actually qualified for, in the order you would take them, with no hedging. Nothing is lost by putting the least likely first.
It should include at least one school where the offer is close to certain on the criteria as published, not on hope. For most families that is the local comprehensive on distance, and its position on the form should be below every school you would prefer, not above.
And it should not include a school you would refuse. An offer discharges the authority's duty; a refused offer does not put you back at the front of anything. Our guide to choosing an insurance school works through how far down the list that place should sit, and the CAF and National Offer Day timeline covers what happens after 1 March 2027. Barnet's own secondary transfer guidance is the authority for the address and preference rules, and should be checked each cycle.
In the 2025 admissions cycle we worked with 40 students sitting selective entrance examinations at 11+ and 13+. Ten took up places at Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet and seven at The Henrietta Barnett School. Across that cohort, 38 of the 40 received at least one offer from a school the family had genuinely targeted.
We publish the cohort size beside the counts because 40 is a small number and a rate quoted without it means nothing. We do not hold a school-by-school pass rate we could evidence, so we do not claim one. 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.
No, and Queen Elizabeth's addresses it in its own admissions guide. It states that "the order of preference in which you rank the schools will not be passed on to the schools themselves", and that "if you place QE as your first preference and then you are not offered a place, you will not jeopardise your chances of being given a place at other schools you have named". Under the equal preference system a school never sees where it sat on your form, so it cannot rank you lower for placing it second.
No, not if she reached Round Two. The Admissions Policy withholds scores and rankings from Round Two candidates "on the basis that those who may eventually be offered a place at the School should arrive as equals". Girls who did not make the top 300 are told more: the policy says they receive their overall standardised score and the cut-off score for the top 300, before the CAF deadline. Looked After and Pupil Premium candidates in the top 300 are written to in late October confirming an offer will follow if they apply.
It depends on your home local authority, not on the schools. The London Borough of Barnet lets applicants "select up to six schools", inside or outside the borough. Hertfordshire County Council allows four: "you can list up to 4 schools in order of preference." Both Queen Elizabeth's and Henrietta Barnett sit in Barnet, so a Hertfordshire family who names both super-selectives has only two lines left for realistic alternatives, while a Barnet family in the same position still has four.
You are offered the one you ranked higher, and the other is discarded. Queen Elizabeth's puts it this way: "you will be offered a place at the school which you have ranked highest (provided your application meets that school's admissions criteria)". This is why hedging backfires. If you place a school you would take reluctantly above a school you actually want, and you qualify for both, the reluctant school is the offer you get, and qualifying for the one below it becomes irrelevant.
Only as a tie-break. Queen Elizabeth's has no catchment, so the address does nothing until two boys finish on exactly the same combined score, at which point the straight-line distance from the Ordnance Survey address point for the home to the main school gate decides the rank order. Henrietta Barnett treats the same address very differently: living within three miles at the point you submit the CAF in October places a girl in the third of four oversubscription criteria, ahead of every rank-order candidate.
The Common Application Form is due on 31 October 2026 and National Offer Day is Monday 1 March 2027. Both schools publish those dates. Queen Elizabeth's sends entrance test outcomes provisionally on Thursday 1 October 2026, and Henrietta Barnett issues Round One results and Round Two invitations by 28 September 2026 with Round Two in the week commencing 5 October 2026. Every result a family receives therefore lands in the four weeks before the form is due.
No. An offer discharges your local authority's duty to find your child a place, and refusing it does not restore any priority you gave up. Every school named on the form should be one you would accept if it were the only offer that came. Hertfordshire publishes the practical context: 94 per cent of Hertfordshire children were offered one of their four preferences for 2025-26 entry and 77 per cent got their first preference, and those figures rest on ordinary comprehensives rather than on super-selective places.
Barnet operates a Change of Preference Form, and families living outside the borough are told to contact their own local authority for its policy. Late changes carry a real cost: an application altered after the on-time deadline is processed only once every on-time application has been dealt with. Barnet's guidance also warns that a temporary address "will normally not be accepted if you still own a property that was previously used as a home address", and states that providing false information to secure a school place is a criminal act.
We work through the form with families every autumn, and we will tell you plainly where a child is competitive and where the line is being spent for nothing.
Families rate us Excellent on Trustpilot — 4.8 out of 5 from 57 reviews. Read our QE Boys 11+ tuition and Henrietta Barnett 11+ tuition pages for how we work.
Book a Free Consultation