What Score Do You Need to Pass the 11+ in 2026?

There is no national 11+ pass mark. Two admissions authorities publish one: Buckinghamshire qualifies children who score at least 121, and Kent required a total of 332 or more in 2025 with no single score below 108. Most selective schools publish nothing, and several state plainly that no mark can be given before the papers are marked.

Is There a National 11+ Pass Mark?

No. Selective admission in England is run school by school and authority by authority, and there is no figure that applies across them. What exists is a small number of published thresholds and a much larger number of schools that decline to publish one.

Two authorities are worth quoting exactly, because between them they cover a large share of the searches that bring people to this question.

Buckinghamshire's figure is the one most often repeated online without attribution. It is real, and it is unusually clean: a single score of at least 121 qualifies a child for all 13 Buckinghamshire grammar schools, which is why one number can do so much work there.

Kent's Threshold Has a Trap in It

Kent's rule is stricter than the headline number suggests, and the second half of it is where children are lost. A child receives three standardised scores — English, maths and reasoning — each running from 69 to 141, giving a maximum possible total of 423. The 2025 threshold was a total of 332 or more, with no single score lower than 108.

Take that arithmetic seriously for a moment. A child who scores the maximum 141 in two papers and 107 in the third has a total of 389. That is 57 marks clear of the threshold, and comfortably inside the top of the range. It does not qualify, because 107 is one mark below the per-section floor.

The threshold itself is demanding in a way the raw number hides: 332 out of 423 is 78.5% of the maximum available aggregate, on a scale where the average child scores around 100 per paper. But the floor is what makes an uneven profile dangerous. A child who is strong in two areas and weak in the third is at more risk in Kent than a child who is evenly good across all three at a lower total.

Which Schools Publish No Pass Mark at All?

Several of the most competitive schools in the country publish no threshold, and are explicit that they cannot. The Sutton consortium's own admissions FAQ says it is not possible to state a pass mark in advance of the test, that the mark will be decided by the participating schools after the papers have been marked, and that each school may determine its own. The same applies to its second stage.

This is not evasiveness. A standardised test produces a distribution that shifts slightly each year, and a school filling a fixed number of places has to set the line where the places run out. Publishing a number in advance would either be wrong or would constrain the school to admit the wrong number of children.

It has a practical consequence for families. If your target school is on that list, no amount of searching will produce the number you are looking for, and any site that gives you one has invented it. The useful question becomes not “what is the pass mark” but “how many places are there, how many sit, and where did the line fall last year” — and for most schools the honest answer to the last part is that they do not say.

Where Does a Lower Score Still Win a Place?

Two 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% lower than it. The school gives its own worked example: where the pass mark is 200, an eligible child scoring 160 is considered.

A 20% concession on a pass mark of 200 is a gap of 40 standardised points. To put that in perspective, it is larger than the entire distance between Kent's per-section floor of 108 and the top of its scale at 141. Wallington High School for Girls publishes the same concession on the same terms.

The concession is not uniform across the consortium, and the difference matters. Wallington County Grammar School reserves up to 25 Pupil Premium places but attaches no score concession to them: the candidate must still meet the combined qualifying standard. Two schools sitting the same test, in the same borough, treat the same eligibility differently.

Where Does a Higher Score Not Get a Place?

The score is one input to an oversubscription policy, and at several schools it is not the first one applied.

The Henrietta Barnett School is the clearest example. Its admission FAQs state that candidates reaching the second round are subject to the oversubscription priorities in its admissions policy, and that looked-after children, Pupil Premium candidates and those living within three miles rank ahead of everyone else in score order. A child four miles away can out-score a child two miles away and still not be offered a place.

Nonsuch splits the difference in a different way. Of a published admission number of 210, 85 places are awarded on the entrance test score alone, irrespective of home address, and up to 125 are tied to a catchment circle of 5.25 km from the school's front door. Roughly three fifths of the intake is therefore address-dependent, and for the other two fifths the only thing that counts is the score. Whether a family should be optimistic depends entirely on which pool they are in.

So What Score Should You Aim For?

The honest answer is that the target is set by the school, not by the test, and for most schools it is not published. That is unsatisfying, so here is what to do with it.

Start by finding out which of the three situations your target school is in for 2027 entry: a published threshold, like Buckinghamshire and Kent; no published threshold with places filled in rank order, like Sutton and Queen Elizabeth's; or a published threshold overlaid with criteria that move it, like Nonsuch and Henrietta Barnett. That single question changes what preparation is aiming at.

Where there is a floor, as in Kent, the priority is evenness rather than peak performance: the weakest of the three papers is the one that decides the outcome, and time is better spent on it than on the strongest. Where places are filled purely in rank order, the target is not a number at all but a margin, and every mark above the line is doing work. Where the criteria move the line, the address and the eligibility have to be established first, because they change the size of the pool a child is competing in.

For school-specific admission numbers and criteria, our 11+ school preparation guides carry each school's own published arrangements, and the Kent, Buckinghamshire and Sutton pages set out how each of those three systems ranks candidates.

Reviewed August 2026: the published qualifying scores for Buckinghamshire and Kent checked against those councils' own pages, and the no-published-mark position, the Pupil Premium concessions and the distance criteria checked against each school's own admissions pages or determined admission arrangements. Kent's 2026 threshold had not been published when this page was checked; the council states it will appear in October 2026.

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