Super-Selective Grammar Schools: London and Near-London Guide

A super-selective grammar school allocates places in rank order of test score rather than by distance. Queen Elizabeth's School in Barnet is the purest example in London: it states that it has no catchment, gives no priority to Pupil Premium candidates, siblings or aptitude, and uses distance only to break a tie between equal scores. Its 180 places go to the 180 highest scores above an eligibility mark of 225.

What Makes a Grammar School Super-Selective?

The definition is mechanical, not reputational. An ordinary selective grammar school sets a qualifying standard and then allocates its places among the children who reach it, usually by distance. A super-selective sets a qualifying standard and then allocates its places by score, so a child two miles away and a child twenty miles away are treated identically.

Queen Elizabeth's School Barnet states the position more plainly than any commentary could. Asked whether distance or catchment affects admission, it answers that the school has no catchment, and that where two or more applicants score the same mark the rank order is settled by straight-line distance from the child's home to the main school gate. Asked separately about Pupil Premium priority, a sibling policy and music, sport or drama aptitude tests, it gives the same answer to all three: no, admission is based solely on entrance test results.

That is what a fully super-selective school looks like. The interesting part is that almost none of the others match it.

How Each London Super-Selective Actually Ranks Candidates

Set the published criteria side by side and the category dissolves into a spectrum. Of the eight schools below, one allocates every place on test score alone. The other seven each publish at least one criterion — distance, disadvantage, free school meals or aptitude — that moves a place away from pure rank order.

Three of those rows are worth reading twice.

Henrietta Barnett is routinely described as super-selective and its own admission FAQs say that candidates reaching the second round are subject to the oversubscription priorities in its admissions policy, under which looked-after children, Pupil Premium candidates and those living within three miles rank ahead of everyone else. A girl four miles out can out-score a girl two miles out and not be offered a place. That is a distance criterion, and it is not a tie-break.

Nonsuch splits its intake explicitly. Of 210 places, 85 go on entrance test score irrespective of home address, and up to 125 are linked to a catchment circle of 5.25 km from the school's front door. Whether a family should think of Nonsuch as super-selective depends entirely on which of those two pools they are competing in.

Wilson's reserves 14 places for boys eligible for free school meals, 9 for demonstrated aptitude in sport and 9 for music, out of an admission number of 186. Those are small numbers against the total, but they are decided on criteria the entrance test does not measure.

Where Does a Lower Score Still Win a Place?

Two of the Sutton schools publish a concession that is rarely mentioned and is worth a great deal to the families it applies to. Nonsuch High School for Girls reserves up to 35 places for children eligible for Pupil Premium or income-related free school meals who reach the pass mark or whose score is up to 20% below it. The school's own worked example is a pass mark of 200 admitting an eligible child on 160. Wallington High School for Girls publishes the same concession on the same terms.

The concession is not uniform even within one consortium. Wallington County Grammar School reserves up to 25 Pupil Premium places but attaches no score concession at all: the candidate must still meet the combined qualifying standard. Sutton Grammar School reserves up to 10 Pupil Premium places, and separately restricts 75 of its 150 places to named postcodes — SM1 to SM7, KT4, KT17, CR0 4 and CR4.

Three schools, one shared entrance test, three different treatments of the same eligibility. A family reading a general article about “the Sutton grammars” will not learn any of this.

When Are the 2027-Entry Tests?

The London super-selectives are not on a common timetable, and several of them test twice. A family applying across two or three of these schools is managing several separate sittings, in different formats, across five weeks.

The compression is real for 2027 entry. Henrietta Barnett's First Round opens the season on 2 September; the Sutton second stages fall on 26 September and 3 October; Henrietta Barnett's Second Round runs in the week commencing 5 October; and The Tiffin Girls' School holds Stage Two in November. A girl applying to Henrietta Barnett, Nonsuch and Tiffin faces four separate test days between early September and November, and only the first of them is the one most preparation is aimed at.

Registration for most of these closed in July. The Tiffin Girls' School is the exception: its Stage One registration runs to 12.00 noon on 1 September 2026, and the school states that no late registrations are accepted.

What Does the Score Actually Have to Clear?

Almost none of these schools publishes a pass mark, and the ones that do publish an eligibility mark rather than an offer threshold. Queen Elizabeth's Barnet is the clearest: a combined score of 225 or higher is deemed to have met the standard set by the governors, which makes a candidate eligible to be considered. It does not make an offer likely. With 180 places allocated in rank order from a much larger eligible field, the number that decides the outcome is not the eligibility mark but the score of the 180th boy, and that is not published in advance.

This is the practical difference between a super-selective and an ordinary grammar school, and it changes what preparation is aiming at. Where a school qualifies and then ranks by distance, the target is a threshold, and a mark above it is a mark wasted. Where the school ranks by score, there is no threshold to reach, only a queue to climb, and every additional mark is doing work right up to the last one. Our guide to 11+ pass marks sets out which schools publish a figure and which publish none.

How Should Preparation Differ for a Super-Selective?

Three things follow from rank ordering, and none of them is about working harder.

The first is that accuracy matters more than coverage at the top of the range. In a field where the qualifying standard is met by a large number of candidates, places are separated by a handful of marks, and those marks are lost to carelessness far more often than to unknown content. Timed practice with the errors analysed is worth more than another topic.

The second is that format varies more than families expect, and preparing for the wrong one is expensive. Queen Elizabeth's is two multiple-choice papers in English and Maths in a single session, with no reasoning at all. Henrietta Barnett's First Round is verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning and English, and its Second Round is English and Mathematics. A child prepared on a reasoning diet for Queen Elizabeth's has prepared for a paper the school does not set.

The third is that the second stage deserves its own preparation. At Sutton the second-stage papers are written rather than multiple choice; at Henrietta Barnett the Second Round changes subject entirely, from reasoning and English to English and Mathematics. Families who treat the first sitting as the finish line arrive at the second one under-prepared, three weeks later, against a field that has already been narrowed to the strongest candidates.

Our QE Boys, Henrietta Barnett, Nonsuch and Tiffin Girls preparation pages each work from that school's own published format, and our national super-selective guide covers what the term means outside London.

Reviewed August 2026: admission numbers, oversubscription criteria, Pupil Premium concessions, test formats and 2027-entry test dates checked school by school against each school's own admissions pages or determined admission arrangements. Where a school publishes no pass mark, this page says so rather than estimating one.

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