Year 6 (Age 10-11): Final Year 11+ Preparation Guide for 2027 Entry

For September 2027 entry, The Henrietta Barnett School tests on 2, 3 or 4 September 2026 and Queen Elizabeth's School Barnet on 16 and 17 September. Registration for both had closed in July, before Year 6 began. This page sets out the dated calendar, what each paper actually contains, and what the schools' own published admissions data says about a child's realistic chances.

Why is most of the Year 6 timetable already decided before Year 6 begins?

Preparation is the part of Year 6 that a family controls. The part that decides whether a child sits a test at all is administrative, it runs on published deadlines, and for the best-known selective routes almost all of it happens during Year 5. For September 2027 entry the gates ran like this. Watford Grammar School for Boys, through the South West Herts Consortium, accepted registrations from 1 April 2026 to 5 June 2026 — a window that closed before the end of the summer term. Sutton's Selective Eligibility Test opened on 1 May 2026 and closed at midnight on Friday 31 July 2026. Queen Elizabeth's School Barnet required its entrance test request form by noon on 8 July 2026, and states that without it the school will be unable to invite a boy to sit the test in September. The Henrietta Barnett School's entry form closed at 5pm on 1 July 2026. Only Tiffin School was still registering candidates into the new academic year, and it shut at 12 noon on Tuesday 1 September 2026.

None of those windows is negotiable, and the schools say so in terms. Sutton states that no late registrations will be accepted under any circumstances. Tiffin states that no late applications will be accepted. There is no appeal route against a missed registration, because there is nothing to appeal: the child was never a candidate in the first place. This is the single most consequential fact about Year 6, and it is the one no general preparation guide mentions.

The tests themselves are barely further away. The Henrietta Barnett School holds Round One in morning or afternoon sessions on 2, 3 or 4 September 2026, allocates each girl to one session, and states that the allocation cannot be changed under any circumstances. Watford Grammar School for Boys lists its Year 7 admissions test on 5 September 2026. Sutton's Selective Eligibility Test is on Tuesday 15 September 2026. Queen Elizabeth's School Barnet tests on 16 and 17 September 2026. Four of the six test dates on this page therefore fall inside the first three weeks of the autumn term.

That is the honest frame for a Year 6 plan. It is not a nine-month runway with a summer of revision at the end of it. For a family targeting these schools it is a short stretch of consolidation on work that should already be secure, followed by an autumn of forms, second-stage tests and preference decisions. If your child is still in Year 5, our year-by-year preparation timeline sets out where the earlier work belongs. This page assumes the earlier work is done and asks a different question: what is left to decide, and by when.

What does the September 2027 entry calendar actually look like?

The table below is drawn only from what each school publishes on its own admissions pages or in its admissions policy. Where a school does not state a date, the cell is left blank rather than filled in from a neighbouring school's calendar. That matters more than it sounds: the local authority common application deadline is widely assumed to be the same everywhere, but only two of these schools state it on the pages we hold, and a family should confirm it with their own authority rather than with a school.

A few threads in that table are worth pulling out. Sutton splits its second stage by sex and by date, with girls sitting on 26 September 2026 and boys on 3 October 2026, and Wilson's School running its aptitude day on 10 October 2026. Sutton also deliberately times the outcome of those second-stage tests to reach parents by the end of October, ahead of the common application deadline, and is careful to add that success in the examinations does not mean a place will be offered. The Tiffin Girls' School notifies Stage Two invitations on or around 14 October 2026 and names Saturday 31 October 2026 as the deadline for the local authority form.

The whole sequence lands on Monday 1 March 2027, when local authorities release secondary offers. In London those arrive in the evening through the eAdmissions system, and The Tiffin Girls' School emails Stage Two scores the following day, Tuesday 2 March 2027, to parents of girls who have not been offered a higher preference school and are on the waiting list. Families also considering the independent sector should note that those schools run their own senior school pre-tests on separate calendars that do not align with any of the dates above.

Do these tests contain verbal and non-verbal reasoning?

Nearly every general 11+ guide tells families to practise four things: English, Maths, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning. For the schools on this page that advice is not merely incomplete, it is wrong, and it consumes weeks of a child's autumn on material that will never appear in front of them.

Sutton is the most direct about it. Its admissions FAQ states that the Selective Eligibility Test is made up of two papers, a multiple-choice Maths paper and a multiple-choice English paper, and that the tests do not include verbal reasoning or non-verbal reasoning. There is no ambiguity in that sentence, and it applies to every school that admits through the SET. A child preparing for Sutton with a stack of non-verbal reasoning workbooks is preparing for a different examination.

Tiffin School says the same thing in different words. Its Stage One tests are in English and Maths. Answers are recorded on an OMR answer sheet and marked by computer, and the papers run about 40 to 60 minutes each with a short break in between. That format has two practical consequences that no amount of reasoning practice addresses: the child needs to be fluent at transferring answers to a separate sheet under time pressure, and there is no credit anywhere for method or working, because a machine is reading the page.

Queen Elizabeth's School Barnet brings boys in on one of 16 or 17 September 2026 to sit multiple-choice tests in Maths and English. Its bar is fixed rather than relative: candidates achieving a combined score of 225 or higher are deemed to have met the standard the governors require to be eligible for consideration. The Henrietta Barnett School's Round Two is likewise a test in English and Mathematics, held in school on one day in early October 2026. Round One is set, in the school's own wording, by a nationally recognised body, and the school links familiarisation material from its admissions pages.

None of this means reasoning is obsolete. Plenty of grammar schools elsewhere in England still set reasoning papers, and where they do, reasoning practice is exactly the right work. The point is narrower and more useful: preparation should be chosen after you know which paper the child is sitting, not before. If you are unsure what a particular school sets, our admissions test preparation pages break the formats down school by school, and the school's own admissions page is always the authority.

This is also why the old provider-first framing had to go from this page. Choosing practice material by guessing at an exam board is a poor substitute for reading what the school publishes about its own papers, and in this run the school documents were clear, current and freely available in every case.

How competitive is entry, on the schools' own numbers?

Most selective schools publish nothing about how many children sit their tests. Tiffin School is the exception: it publishes a three-year Patterns of Admissions table that shows candidate numbers, offers, qualifying scores and appeal outcomes side by side. It is the single most informative document any London super-selective puts in public, and it is worth reading before deciding how many schools to put on a preference form.

Read across the top row and the pressure is obvious. For September 2026 entry, 1,866 boys sat Stage One and 186 places were offered: 1,866 divided by 186 is 10.03 candidates for every seat. Of those sitters, 665 went through to Stage Two, which is 665 of 1,866, or 35.64 per cent. From that group, 186 received an initial offer — 186 of 665, or 27.97 per cent. Taken end to end, 186 offers from 1,866 sitters is 9.97 per cent.

The trend matters as much as the level. Stage One candidates rose from 1,654 for 2024 entry to 1,675 for 2025 and 1,866 for 2026. That is 1,866 minus 1,654, or 212 more candidates in two years, a rise of 12.8 per cent. Over the same period the intake did not move at all: 186 places offered in each of the three years. Nothing in that data says the test got harder. It says more families entered for the same number of seats, which is a different problem and one no amount of preparation solves for everybody.

The intake figure for September 2027 is unchanged again at 186 students, spread across six forms of 31. A parent building a preference list should treat that stability as the fixed point: the competition varies, the number of places does not. That is also the argument for a realistic second and third preference rather than three super-selectives, a point the national offer figures in a later section make in a blunter way.

Does where you live still decide it?

Selective schools are often described as purely meritocratic, and for one of the four on this page that is close to true. For the others, geography is a hard filter that operates independently of the test score, and it is the reason two children with identical results can get different answers on 1 March.

The Tiffin Girls' School is the clearest case. It operates a Designated Area made up of 44 postal districts, and states that since that area was introduced in September 2014 all places have been offered to children living inside it. That is not a preference or a tie-break. On the school's own published record, an outstanding score from outside the Designated Area has not produced a place in more than a decade.

The Henrietta Barnett School has no catchment area in the conventional sense, but it does have a distance criterion, and the timing of that criterion catches families out. Its third criterion covers candidates who currently live within 3 miles of the school at the point when they submit their application to the local authority in October. The measurement is taken at application, not at test, not at offer. A family planning to move should read that sentence twice.

Queen Elizabeth's School Barnet is the genuine outlier. It has no catchment area, and gives no priority for siblings, for Pupil Premium, or for aptitude in music, sport or drama. Admission is decided by test score against a fixed bar of 225 or higher, with distance used only as a tie-break, against a Published Admission Number of 180. If a family is looking for a school where the address does not shape the outcome, this is the one, and that is also why its applicant pool behaves differently from its neighbours'.

Tiffin School adds a route that has nothing to do with the academic papers at all. From September 2025 entry the school introduced a Sporting Aptitude Assessment and a Music Aptitude Assessment, and up to 10 per cent of places are awarded on aptitude: 5 per cent for Sport and 5 per cent for Music. Critically, earlier deadlines apply to register for those assessments than for the main Stage One test, so a family that decides in September has already missed them. If your child has a genuine strength in either area, that decision belongs in Year 5. Our grammar school entrance preparation pages set out how the academic and aptitude routes interact for individual schools.

What does the 31 October application form actually do?

Every year, families who have done the hard part fall at the easy one. Sitting a test and being told your child has reached the required standard is not an application. The application is the local authority common application form, and if a school is not named on it, no offer can be made whatever the child scored.

The schools that spell this out do so carefully. Sutton times the outcome of its second-stage examinations to be emailed to parents by the end of October, explicitly in advance of the deadline for completing the common application form, and adds in the same breath that success in the examinations does not mean a place will be offered. That sentence exists because parents read a pass as an offer, and it is not one.

Watford Grammar School for Boys requires two forms rather than one: the local authority application and the school's own information form, with both due by 31 October 2026. The school states plainly that both must be submitted by the deadlines given. The Tiffin Girls' School names Saturday 31 October 2026 as its stated deadline for the local authority form.

Watford is also a useful corrective to the idea that a selective school is selective throughout. The school offers 56 places, which it states is 25 per cent of total admissions, to boys selected by academic ability through the Consortium test. Working that back, 56 places at 25 per cent implies a full intake of 224, so roughly three in every four places at the school are allocated on criteria other than the test. A family that treats the Consortium result as the only route into that school has misread the admissions arrangements.

The practical instruction is dull and it is the one that matters: put the form in early, name every school you would genuinely accept, and rank them honestly. Ranking a school lower does not improve the odds at a higher one, and leaving a realistic school off the list is how families end up with none of their preferences.

What happens on 1 March 2027?

National Offer Day for September 2027 entry is Monday 1 March 2027. In London, offers are released that evening by the local authority through the eAdmissions website, and The Tiffin Girls' School emails Stage Two test results the next day, Tuesday 2 March 2027, to parents of girls who have not been offered a higher preference school and who sit on the waiting list.

It is worth correcting a claim this page itself used to make. National Offer Day is not fixed to 1 March. The Department for Education records that the previous round was run on the national offer days of 2 March 2026 for secondary and 16 April 2026 for primary, because 1 March 2026 was a Sunday. The rule is 1 March, or the next working day where that date falls at a weekend. For 2027 the two happen to coincide.

Those national figures are reassuring in a way that selective school figures are not, and both are true at once. Across England, 83.6 per cent of secondary applicants were offered their first preference for September 2026 entry, and 96.4 per cent were offered one of the schools they had ranked. The overwhelming majority of families get a school they chose. What the national data cannot tell you is the chance at one named super-selective, where a published ratio of roughly ten candidates per place applies instead.

The sensible reading is to hold the two numbers apart. Use the national picture to keep the day in proportion for your child, and use the school-level data to build a preference list that has somewhere realistic on it. Whatever lands on 1 March 2027 is also not the end of the process, which is the subject of the next section.

What do waiting lists and appeals really deliver?

Offer day produces a snapshot, not a settlement. Places are declined, families move, and lists move with them. A small number of schools publish how far, and those published positions are the only honest basis for deciding whether to hold on to a place on a list or to accept the school you have been offered and move on.

Set those side by side and the shape becomes clear. The Henrietta Barnett School had worked down to number 40 on its list by 18 August, having made second round offers back on 26 March — substantial movement across a full admissions cycle. Queen Elizabeth's School Barnet had reached position 20 for the same entry year. A family sitting at number 15 on either list has a real prospect; a family at number 80 is planning around a different school whether they like it or not.

Tiffin makes the same point through the score rather than the position. Its initial qualifying score — the lowest score achieved by a boy offered a place on 1 March — was 100 for 2026 entry and 100 for 2025. By the end of Year 7 the 2025 cut-off had fallen to 98. Two marks does not sound like much, but on a standardised scale with 1,866 candidates it represents a meaningful band of boys who were not offered a place in March and were by the following summer. For 2024 entry the equivalent movement was from 104 down to 102.

Appeals are the harder conversation. Nationally, 27,100 secondary appeals were heard for September 2026 entry, of which 5,300 succeeded — 19.5 per cent, the lowest rate in the series and down from 26.3 per cent in 2016. At Tiffin the picture is starker still: 3 appeals heard for 2025 entry and 9 for 2024, which is 12 across the two years, with none upheld in either. Nothing in that says appeals are futile everywhere. It says that at a school which allocates places strictly in rank order against a published score, a panel has almost nothing to work with, and that the waiting list is the more realistic route.

What should the final weeks before the test look like?

Once the registration is in and the date is fixed, the useful work narrows sharply. The best preparation in the last stretch is not more content. It is the specific paper, at the specific length, in the specific format, with the specific answer method the school actually uses.

For a Tiffin candidate that means timed English and Maths of about 40 to 60 minutes each with a short break in between, and repeated practice at recording answers on a separate OMR sheet, because that sheet is what the computer marks. A child who is fluent mathematically and slow at transferring answers loses marks that have nothing to do with mathematics. For a Sutton candidate it means multiple-choice Maths and multiple-choice English, and no reasoning practice at all. Sutton also restricts the test to children who will be in Year 6 at the date of the test on 15 September 2026, with an expected date of birth range of 1 September 2015 to 31 August 2016, and states that a child can only sit it once and that a younger child cannot sit it in an earlier year as practice. There is no dress rehearsal available.

That constraint is why familiarisation has to come from practice papers and mock conditions at home or with a tutor rather than from the real thing. The components worth rehearsing are narrow and specific: reading a multiple-choice stem accurately under time, deciding when to leave a question and come back, keeping the answer sheet aligned with the question number, and finishing rather than perfecting.

The wellbeing argument has not changed and it is not soft advice. A child who is doing three papers a week in August is usually being tested rather than taught, and the marks stop moving. Two well-chosen timed papers, properly reviewed afterwards, will do more than five that nobody goes through. Reviewing means identifying the two or three recurring reasons for lost marks and working on those, which is ordinary subject tuition rather than exam drilling.

It is also worth saying plainly what this page cannot fix. If the registration window has closed on the school you wanted, no preparation plan reopens it. What preparation can still do is put a child in the strongest position for the tests they are entered for, and for the schools whose deadlines are still ahead of them. That is a smaller claim than most guides make, and it is the accurate one.

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