Redbridge's own three-year data show how many girls register from outside it — and why the answer has been zero for a decade.
Book a Free ConsultationWoodford County High School for Girls is a selective girls' grammar school on High Road in Woodford Green, Redbridge, that fills its 180 Year 7 places for September 2027 through a single 11+ Common Catchment Area (CCA) shared with Ilford County High School. Every candidate needs a standardised score of at least 104, and Redbridge's own 2026 data show 865 of the 1,064 who sat the test already lived inside the CCA.
Redbridge Council defines the shared catchment covering the whole borough: "The 11+ Common Catchment Area is used to prioritse applications for testing in to Ilford County High School for boys or Woodford County High School for girls." Woodford's own admissions page adds the practical boundary: "Our catchment area includes the entire London Borough of Redbridge (LBR) as well as part of neighbouring areas." The same catchment covers Ilford County High School, the boys' grammar it shares the arrangement with.
For September 2027 entry, Woodford's Year 7 Published Admission Number (PAN) is 180. No candidate is ranked at all, inside the catchment or outside it, unless she first reaches the minimum standardised score of 104 — a threshold set jointly for both Redbridge grammar schools and unchanged across at least the last three published admissions cycles, back to September 2024 entry.
Living outside the Common Catchment Area does not disqualify a candidate from being ranked. The determined arrangements explicitly allow for it, as a fourth and final category behind three others. What decides whether that fourth category ever becomes real is demand from inside the catchment — and Redbridge's own three years of published data, set out below, answer that question directly.
Once the test is marked, Redbridge ranks every candidate who reached 104 in a single order, applied identically at both grammar schools. For September 2027 entry, that order runs:
Redbridge's own wording for the pupil-premium reservation is specific about the mechanism: "Places will be offered to 45 (25%) children who are entitled to the pupil premium (eligibility checks will be carried out to ascertain those who were eligible for pupil premium, including Ever6, on the date the application was made), ranked according to the total standardised score in overall order of merit." A place among the 45 that goes unfilled by an eligible candidate is not simply lost — it returns to the general catchment pool in category three rather than being offered to a candidate outside the CCA.
Redbridge Council publishes registration, sitting and score data for each grammar school separately every year. Pulled together for Woodford across the three most recently published cycles, the numbers show a school where the catchment rule is rarely tested — because demand from inside it has never run short.
| September entry | Sat the test | Inside CCA | Outside CCA | Scored 104+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 1,317 | 1,090 | 227 | 526 |
| 2025 | 1,141 | 912 | 229 | 447 |
| 2026 | 1,064 | 865 | 199 | 422 |
Two patterns stand out. Registrations have fallen in each of the last two cycles, from 1,317 candidates in 2024 to 1,064 in 2026, yet the number applying from outside the catchment has stayed remarkably stable at 227, 229 and 199 — never far from a fifth of the total in any of the three years. More importantly for a family weighing up whether to apply from outside Redbridge: the number of candidates already living inside the catchment, 865 even in the quietest of the three years, is close to five times the 180 places on offer, before a single score is checked. Reaching category four would require in-catchment demand alone to collapse to well under 180 in a single year, something with no precedent across the published record.
A further 388 of the 1,064 candidates in 2026 lived more than five miles from the school — travelling in from well beyond the immediate area to sit a test whose catchment rule, on the numbers above, has not yet needed to turn any of them away for that reason alone.
Catchment membership and home-to-school distance are two different things, and Woodford's own arrangements use them for two different jobs. Catchment membership decides which of the four ranking categories above a candidate falls into. Distance is used only once two or more candidates land in the same category with an identical standardised score: "Where there is more than one such candidate with the same score, the tiebreak will be the shortest safe walking distance, as measured by a Geographic Information System, from the child's home to the main entrance of the school using public roads and recognised footpaths."
Where flats share a building, the measurement runs to the block's own main entrance rather than an individual front door. If two candidates still tie on distance itself, Redbridge falls back to a random allocation inside its Synergy admissions database rather than any further geographic test. None of this changes who is eligible to be ranked in the first place — it only ever separates two candidates who would otherwise be indistinguishable.
The test itself is the shared Redbridge 11+, set as two papers by GL Assessment for both grammar schools. Full registration and testing details are published on Redbridge Council's own 11+ page, including special-arrangements requests, which the council states will not be considered after 15 June 2026.
The determined arrangements do not prohibit an out-of-catchment offer. Category four — candidates living outside the Common Catchment Area, ranked by standardised score — exists precisely because the rule anticipates a year in which in-catchment demand might not fill all 180 places. Woodford's own admissions page is explicit about when that category would actually be used: "Places are only awarded out of the catchment area if there are not enough students within the common catchment area who have applied for places. In practice, no places are ever awarded out of the catchment area."
That is a statement about what has happened, not a rule about what is allowed. Redbridge's determined arrangements make the same point from the local authority's side, describing a decade of outcomes rather than a policy: "Advice shall be provided to applicants to explain that only children who live in the Common Catchment Area have been admitted to the grammar schools in the last 10 years."
The three years of data set out above explain why. In-catchment demand for Woodford has run at 865, 912 and 1,090 candidates in 2026, 2025 and 2024 respectively — never less than four and a half times the 180 places on offer. For category four to be reached, in-catchment applications would need to collapse to well under 180 in a single year, something with no precedent in the published record.
None of that changes what the rule itself says. An application from outside the Common Catchment Area is accepted, registered and ranked on exactly the same standardised score as every other candidate; it has simply never yet been the application that clears the threshold Woodford has needed to fill its 180 places. A family outside the catchment is not turned away at registration — they are, in effect, deciding whether to compete for a place that a decade of published evidence says has not gone to a candidate in their position, while the rule on paper leaves the door open.
Ofsted last inspected Woodford County High on 22 November 2022 and published its report on 8 February 2023, rating the school Good overall. Two elements were assessed higher: Quality of Education and Sixth Form provision were each graded Outstanding, but neither of those sub-judgements is the school's overall Ofsted rating, which is Good.
Per the Department for Education's Get Information About Schools register, Woodford is a community school with capacity for 1,260 pupils and 1,237 currently on roll, of whom 137 (15.2%) are eligible for free school meals.
Year 12 entry runs on a separate route entirely, outside the Year 7 catchment test: Woodford's Sixth Form Published Admission Number for September 2027 is 23. The school itself expanded its Year 7 intake from four forms of entry to six in September 2016, taking its roll close to today's capacity, and marked its centenary in 2019 — around the same period it opened a new teaching block with 13 science laboratories and 11 classrooms.
What a family can influence is preparation, not which side of the catchment line they live on. That is a separate question from Woodford's own admissions figures: across every family Leading Tuition has worked with, not any single school's cohort, 91% of the families we work with secure a place at one of their target schools — our own tuition outcome, not a Woodford admissions or offer-rate statistic, and unrelated to the 1,064-candidates-for-180-places figures cited above.
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Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppYes. Redbridge's determined arrangements do not prevent a family outside the area from registering, sitting the test or being ranked; category (d) of the oversubscription criteria exists specifically for children living outside the Common Catchment Area, ranked by standardised score once categories (a) to (c) are exhausted. In 2026, 199 of Woodford's 1,064 candidates lived outside the catchment and were ranked on this basis. What the rule does not promise is that category (d) will ever be reached — and for the last ten years, Redbridge says it has not been.
Yes. They share a single 11+ Common Catchment Area, defined by Redbridge Council and used to prioritise admission to both schools identically. Woodford is the girls' school, on High Road in Woodford Green; Ilford County High is the boys' school, on Fremantle Road in Barkingside. The 104-point minimum threshold, the 45-place pupil-premium reservation and the GIS distance tie-break all apply the same way at both schools, though each publishes its own separate registration and score data — Woodford's figures are set out in the table above.
A standardised score of at least 104. Redbridge's determined arrangements state that no candidate scoring below 104 is added to the ranked list or the waiting list for either grammar school, regardless of where she lives. In September 2026, 422 of Woodford's 1,064 candidates reached this threshold; in September 2025 the figure was 447, and in September 2024 it was 526 — the same 104-point line applied in each of those three cycles.
Up to 45 places — 25% of the 180 available — are reserved for candidates who live within the Common Catchment Area and were entitled to the pupil premium, including Ever6, on the date they applied, ranked purely by standardised score among eligible candidates. Any of the 45 places left unfilled by pupil-premium-eligible candidates return to the general catchment pool rather than being offered to candidates living outside the Common Catchment Area.
Registration for September 2027 entry opens on 1 May 2026 and closes at 5pm on 15 June 2026. The test itself is scheduled for Friday 18 September 2026, with results emailed to families in the middle of October 2026. Families must still name Woodford on their home local authority's Common Application Form by 31 October 2026, and National Offer Day for September 2027 secondary places falls on or about 1 March 2027.
Not directly. Distance is used only as a tie-break between candidates who finish with an identical standardised score within the same oversubscription category, measured as the shortest safe walking distance from home to the school's main entrance. It plays no part in whether a candidate clears the 104-point threshold or which of the four ranking categories she falls into. A candidate living two miles inside the catchment and one living twenty miles inside it are ranked purely on score against each other.
Good overall, following an inspection on 22 November 2022 and a report published on 8 February 2023. Two areas were assessed above the overall rating — Quality of Education and Sixth Form provision were each graded Outstanding — but the school's headline Ofsted judgement is Good, not Outstanding. Families comparing schools should check the figure against Ofsted's own published report rather than a third-party summary, since the two are not always the same.
23, for September 2027 entry — a separate Published Admission Number from the 180 Year 7 places, governed by Woodford's own sixth form entry criteria rather than the Common Catchment Area test. Year 12 places at both Redbridge grammar schools sit outside the coordinated secondary transfer scheme entirely, so the catchment, the 104-point threshold and the GIS distance tie-break described above have no bearing on sixth form admission.
For what we do to prepare girls specifically for Woodford's own entrance test, see our Woodford County High 11+ tuition page. For local tutoring options in the Woodford area more broadly, see our Woodford tutors page. For how catchment and designated areas work across London's other grammar schools, see our London grammar school catchment areas guide.
Our specialist tutors prepare girls for the GL Assessment papers shared across Redbridge's grammar schools, with a clear focus on clearing 104 comfortably rather than narrowly. Rated 4.8/5 on Trustpilot from 58 reviews. See also our Woodford 11+ tuition page.
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