Stratford-upon-Avon Grammar School for Girls 11+ Guide 2026: Admissions, Exam & Prep

Stratford Girls’ Grammar School (SGGS), on the Shottery Manor site on the edge of Stratford-upon-Avon, is a fully selective state grammar school for girls aged 11 to 18, founded in 1958 to give Stratford girls the same academic grammar-school opportunity that boys had long had at King Edward VI School in the town centre. For September 2027 entry, girls applying to SGGS must register with Warwickshire County Council for the shared Warwickshire 11+ test — the same GL Assessment test sat by applicants to King Edward VI School and Warwickshire’s four other grammar schools — and reach the required standard to be considered for one of the school’s 120 Year 7 places. This guide covers SGGS’s history and character, exactly how the shared Warwickshire test and priority-area admissions system work, the 2026 key dates for September 2027 entry, the school’s oversubscription criteria, and how to prepare effectively for a test that — unlike some regional consortium exams — includes both English and mathematics alongside verbal and non-verbal reasoning.

Key Facts: Stratford Girls’ Grammar School

About Stratford Girls’ Grammar School: History and Character

Stratford Girls’ Grammar School owes its existence to a specific act of local campaigning for girls’ education. In the mid-1950s, Miss E. B. Williams, headmistress of the Hugh Clopton School for Girls, and Alderman Mrs T. Waldron, chair of governors, argued to Warwickshire’s Education Committee that the lack of a dedicated academic grammar-school opportunity for girls in Stratford-upon-Avon — in a town whose boys had been served by King Edward VI School since the sixteenth century — was “both unjust and divisive.” The school opened in September 1958, initially operating from the existing Hugh Clopton School site on Alcester Road, with a first Year 7 cohort of 60 girls drawn from Stratford-upon-Avon.

The decisive step in giving the new school its own identity came with the purchase of The Manor at Shottery in 1958, which the school used first as an annexe, with staff and pupils moving between the two sites via Shottery Fields, before the school formally opened on its own grounds in June 1959. Successive building programmes since then have added classroom, science and administration blocks around the original Manor House, which remains the architectural and symbolic heart of the school today. Because SGGS was founded specifically to widen access rather than descending from an ancient endowment, its history reads very differently from many English grammar schools: rather than a centuries-old foundation, SGGS is fundamentally a product of the mid-twentieth-century expansion of girls’ academic education, and is more than four hundred years younger than King Edward VI School, its boys’ counterpart in the same town, which was re-founded by royal charter of Edward VI in 1553 and whose former pupils reputedly include William Shakespeare.

SGGS has continued to develop its academic specialisms in the decades since: it gained Specialist Language College status in 2002, achieved High Performing School and Science College status together with an International School Award in 2007, and added an Artsmark Silver Award in 2008. The Hargreaves building, a further expansion of the school’s facilities, opened in 2016, and the school marked its Diamond Jubilee — 60 years since opening — in 2018. Headteacher Mrs Jacqui Cornell leads the school today, which continues to admit girls only from Year 7 to Year 11 with a fully co-educational Sixth Form.

Does Stratford Girls’ Grammar School Share Its 11+ Test With King Edward VI School?

Yes — and this is one of the most important practical facts for families to understand. Stratford Girls’ Grammar School sits within a consortium of Warwickshire’s six grammar schools: SGGS itself, King Edward VI School (also in Stratford-upon-Avon), Alcester Grammar School, Lawrence Sheriff School (Rugby), Rugby High School, and Ashlawn School (Rugby, selective stream). All six schools share a single common entrance test administered centrally by Warwickshire County Council, rather than each school setting its own separate exam. Since the cohort applying for September 2023 entry, that shared test has been set by GL Assessment, following a joint procurement exercise run alongside the Schools of King Edward VI in Birmingham foundation — which replaced the previous test set by CEM. Warwickshire’s own guidance on the change describes GL Assessment as “well established, providing similar tests used in other areas such as Buckinghamshire, Kent and Lincolnshire.”

In practical terms, this means a girl registering for the Stratford Girls’ Grammar School 11+ sits exactly the same test, on the same dates, marked to the same standard, as a boy applying to King Edward VI School across town, or a child applying to Alcester Grammar School, Lawrence Sheriff School or Rugby High School. Registering once with Warwickshire County Council allows a family to apply to any combination of these schools on their Common Application Form using the single resulting score — there is no need to sit separate tests for each school. Each school then applies its own published oversubscription criteria and priority area to that shared score, which is why two schools using an identical test can still have very different practical chances of success depending on where a family lives.

Both SGGS and King Edward VI School use identical language in their published admissions policies to describe their priority area — a circle drawn from “the Fountain in Rother Street, Stratford-upon-Avon” — reflecting their shared history as the girls’ and boys’ grammar schools serving the same town. The outer radius at both schools is 16.885 miles to the county boundary south of Long Compton, though King Edward VI School additionally uses an inner 13-mile circle as an extra priority tier, a distinction SGGS’s own policy does not include. For the wider regional picture, see our 2026 grammar school league tables and our guide to what the 11+ exam involves nationally.

What Does the Warwickshire 11+ Test Cover?

The Warwickshire 11+ entrance test used for Stratford Girls’ Grammar School is the West Midlands Grammar Schools’ entrance test, provided by GL Assessment and sat over two papers of around 50–60 minutes each, entirely on multiple-choice answer sheets. Unlike Lincolnshire’s consortium test, which covers only verbal and non-verbal reasoning, the Warwickshire test assesses four distinct areas across its two papers: English comprehension, verbal reasoning, mathematics, and non-verbal/spatial reasoning.

The four components are not weighted equally. English and verbal reasoning together typically account for around 50% of the overall score, with mathematics contributing roughly 25% and non-verbal/spatial reasoning the remaining 25%. This means strong literacy and verbal reasoning skills carry disproportionate weight in a girl’s overall standardised score compared with many other regional 11+ tests, making reading comprehension and vocabulary work a particularly high-value area of preparation for Stratford applicants specifically. All raw scores are age-standardised, so that a girl born in the summer term is not disadvantaged relative to a classmate born in the autumn who has had almost a year’s extra schooling by the time of the test.

Because Warwickshire does not publish a single fixed pass mark equivalent to Lincolnshire’s 220, the council instead refers to two thresholds: a Required Minimum Academic Standard, which is the baseline needed even to be considered, and a higher Automatic Qualifying Score, which most successful applicants to Stratford’s 120 places will need to reach or exceed once the school’s priority-area and category-based oversubscription criteria are applied.

What Are the Key 2026 Dates for Stratford Girls’ Grammar School Admissions?

For girls seeking September 2027 entry to Year 7 at Stratford Girls’ Grammar School, the following 2026 timetable applies across the Warwickshire consortium:

Test registration is completed directly through Warwickshire County Council’s Admissions Service, but families must separately submit a Common Application Form naming their preferred schools, including SGGS if desired, by the 31 October 2026 deadline. Missing the CAF deadline means a child will not be considered through the coordinated admissions process even if she sat and qualified in the 11+ test. Official arrangements are published on Stratford Girls’ Grammar School’s own admissions page and on Warwickshire County Council’s school admissions page. For the national context, see our 11+ exam dates 2025–2026 guide.

How Does the Oversubscription Criteria Work at Stratford Girls’ Grammar School?

With 120 Year 7 places and a large priority area, Stratford Girls’ Grammar School is regularly oversubscribed among girls who reach the qualifying standard. The school’s determined admissions policy applies the following priority order:

1. Children with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) naming Stratford Girls’ Grammar School, provided they meet the Required Minimum Academic Standard
2. Looked-after and previously looked-after children scoring at or within 20 marks below the Automatic Qualifying Score
3. Pupil Premium-eligible girls (via Free School Meals registration) living within the priority area who reach the Automatic Qualifying Score, with up to 19 places reserved for those scoring within 20 marks of it
4. All remaining girls living within the priority area who reach the Automatic Qualifying Score
5. Girls living outside the priority area who reach the Automatic Qualifying Score
6. A waiting list of girls scoring between the Required Minimum Academic Standard and the Automatic Qualifying Score, considered only if places remain

Within each of these categories, ties are broken first by straight-line distance from home to school, and then, if distances are exactly equal, by an independently-administered random number generator. The priority area itself is defined as a circle with a radius of 16.885 miles, drawn from the fountain in Rother Street in the centre of Stratford-upon-Avon, extending out to the county boundary south of Long Compton — a substantially larger catchment than many urban grammar schools use, reflecting Warwickshire’s largely rural geography. By law, any girl may register for and sit the test regardless of where she lives, but living within the priority area meaningfully improves the practical chance of an offer once the school’s categories are applied in order.

The waiting list, for any places that later become available, is typically dissolved at the end of the December following entry, after which no further offers are made from it for that admissions round.

What Is the Sixth Form and Academic Record at Stratford Girls’ Grammar School Like?

Stratford Girls’ Grammar School runs a substantial co-educational Sixth Form, drawing both its own Year 11 leavers and external applicants, including from King Edward VI School and other local schools. Academically, SGGS is among the strongest-performing schools in Warwickshire: in its most recent published results, 100% of pupils achieved grade 5 or above in English and mathematics GCSE, with an Attainment 8 score of 80.6 and 86.1% of all GCSE grades awarded at grade 9–7 — broadly equivalent to the old A*/A grades. At A-Level, 81.3% of grades were A*–B and 52.0% were A*–A, across a Sixth Form curriculum offering 19 subjects.

The school’s Outstanding Ofsted rating, awarded following an inspection on 27–28 September 2022, covered every individual judgement area — quality of education, behaviour and attitudes, personal development, leadership and management, and Sixth Form provision — each separately rated Outstanding, a comparatively rare achievement even among selective schools. SGGS also holds Specialist Language College status (2002), High Performing School and Science College status with an International School Award (2007), and an Artsmark Silver Award (2008), reflecting a broad academic and extracurricular offer well beyond core GCSE and A-Level subjects.

How Should My Child Prepare for the 11+ at Stratford Girls’ Grammar School?

Preparation for Stratford Girls’ Grammar School needs to cover all four components of the shared Warwickshire GL Assessment test, with particular attention to English and verbal reasoning, which together typically make up around half of a girl’s overall standardised score.

English comprehension rewards girls who read widely and can analyse unseen passages quickly under time pressure — wide reading across fiction, non-fiction and quality journalism builds the vocabulary and inference skills this component demands, and is difficult to build quickly through last-minute cramming alone. Verbal reasoning tests pattern recognition in language: codes, sequences, analogies, hidden words and word relationships, all of which respond well to structured, progressive practice under timed conditions.

Mathematics deserves genuine, dedicated preparation time precisely because some families researching 11+ tests assume — wrongly, for Warwickshire — that grammar school entrance exams cover only verbal and non-verbal reasoning. Solid Key Stage 2 arithmetic fluency, fractions, decimals, percentages and multi-step reasoning problems should all form part of a Stratford preparation programme. Non-verbal and spatial reasoning, while carrying a smaller 25% weighting, is highly learnable through repeated practice with matrices, series, shape rotation, reflection, and cube or net folding.

Given how competitive Stratford’s 120 places typically are once the priority-area and category-based criteria are applied, a personalised one-to-one approach is particularly valuable: it lets a tutor identify precisely which of the four weighted components — English, verbal reasoning, mathematics or non-verbal reasoning — is weakest for an individual girl, and adjust the balance of a preparation programme accordingly rather than applying a generic, evenly-split study plan. Most families begin structured preparation in Year 5, working through every question type before moving to full timed practice papers in the spring term of Year 6, ahead of the July registration deadline and the September test itself. At Leading Tuition, our specialist 11+ tutors are experienced with the Warwickshire GL Assessment test and support families across Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick, Leamington Spa and the wider county, including through online tuition.