13+ Tutors in Bristol: Which Schools Take Year 9 Entry, and How They Test

Five Bristol independent schools run a genuine Year 9 (13+) entry route: Clifton College, Badminton School, Bristol Grammar School, Queen Elizabeth's Hospital and Redmaids' High School. Each runs its own admissions cycle, sets its own test, and works to its own deadline — none of them share a single national exam, and none of the pages currently ranking for “13 plus tutors Bristol” name more than one of them by name. This guide sets out what each school actually tests, when to register, what a place costs for 2026/27, and what a 13+ tutor should actually be preparing your child for.

Which Bristol Schools Actually Take Pupils at 13+?

All five sit alongside Leading Tuition's wider Bristol tutoring service, but their Year 9 routes are genuinely distinct:

• Clifton College — Year 9 is the start of its Upper School, which spans ages 13 to 18. Entry is via an online assessment, not a shared national paper.
• Badminton School — a girls' school in Westbury-on-Trym that names its route explicitly: “Admission for Year 9 (13+) and Year 10 (14+)”.
• Bristol Grammar School — assesses Years 9 and 10 entrants with its own papers, run alongside its main Year 7 intake in January.
• Queen Elizabeth's Hospital (QEH) — a boys' school that runs Year 9 entrance examinations as a separate admissions round from Year 7, with its own exam date and registration fee.
• Redmaids' High School — the oldest girls' school in the country, which has a dedicated Year 9 Registrar and assesses Years 8, 9 and 10 entrants by appointment.

That is at least five live 13+ routes into Bristol's independent sector, only one of which (Badminton) appears at all in the closest competitor page we found, Owl Tutors' national 13+ schools guide — and even there, only as a single line of entry points, with no dates, format or fee.

Families searching “13 plus tutors Bristol” are rarely all after the same thing. Some are looking at a genuine late transfer after an unsuccessful 11+ attempt two years earlier. Some are moving into Bristol from another city or from overseas partway through Key Stage 3, with a child already settled into a school elsewhere. Others are current Bristol state-school parents considering an independent move for GCSEs, using Year 9 as the natural transition point rather than waiting for sixth form. All three groups need the same starting information — which schools actually have a live Year 9 route, how each tests, and by when — before a tutor can usefully help, which is exactly what none of the pages currently ranking for this search provide.

How Each School Tests at 13+ — and Why It Isn't the ISEB Pre-Test

It would be reasonable to assume Bristol's 13+ routes run on the ISEB Common Pre-Test, the shared, adaptive assessment used by many leading UK senior schools — ISEB's own site confirms it can be used “for entry into Year 7, or for deferred entry into Year 9”. It's also reasonable to assume a Bristol 13+ candidate is sitting a form of traditional Common Entrance. Neither assumption held up against the five schools' own admissions pages. Every one of them sets its own bespoke test:

• Clifton College: an online CAT4 assessment for Years 9-11, distinct from the entrance paper it sets for Years 12-13.
• Badminton School: an online Maths paper (45 minutes) and an English paper (30 minutes), plus a Cognitive Ability Test — CAT4 — lasting 90 minutes, and an interview.
• Bristol Grammar School: papers in English, Mathematics, Science and a Modern Language (French, German, Spanish or Russian), sat in the same January assessment round as its Year 8 candidates.
• Queen Elizabeth's Hospital: English, mathematics, verbal and non-verbal reasoning, delivered as an online test on computers the school provides.
• Redmaids' High School: assessments by appointment for Years 8, 9 and 10, coordinated by the school's dedicated Year 9 Registrar rather than a shared national test date.

Two schools (Clifton and Badminton) lean on the same underlying tool, CAT4, but even then Badminton bolts on its own subject papers first. Neither uses the ISEB Common Pre-Test at 13+, and none of the five uses a traditional, shared Common Entrance paper marked by the receiving school. That single fact changes what a Bristol 13+ tutor should be preparing a child for, which we come back to below.

It also means a prep-school reference or a school report carries different weight depending on the route. Where a test is largely cognitive-ability-based, as at Clifton and Badminton, a current school's view of a child's general ability and work ethic is often taken alongside the CAT4 score. Where the test is subject-based, as at Bristol Grammar School, current attainment in that specific subject matters more directly — a child who has never formally studied a Modern Language at school, for instance, needs targeted preparation well before January, not a generic reasoning course.

2026-27 Registration Deadlines and Assessment Dates, School by School

None of the marketplace pages ranking for this search name a single date. The five schools' own cycles run to genuinely different timetables — some for the current 2026/27 year, some already looking ahead to September 2027 entry — so check each row against the year it actually applies to before assuming a deadline has or hasn't passed.

Badminton's own admissions page is explicit that its standard round for the coming September has already closed by the time a deadline of Wednesday 28th October passes, and that the school will still consider a late application where a place is open — worth knowing before assuming the door is shut. Queen Elizabeth's Hospital's Year 9 exam date of 16 January 2027 is set for everyone sitting that year's round; Bristol Grammar School and Clifton College instead register candidates on a rolling basis and set the test date individually once an application is in.

What 13+ Actually Costs: Fees Per School, 2026-27

Fees vary substantially across these five schools before any boarding premium is added, and none of the pages ranking for this search names a single figure for any of them — a parent cannot judge whether 13+ tutoring is a sound investment without knowing what the place itself costs.

Read that Clifton College boarding column carefully: the £19,835 figure is the full, 7-nights-a-week boarding rate, not a day fee — Clifton's day fee for Years 9-11 is £12,950 per term. Its flexi-boarding option, at 4 nights a week, sits between the two at £17,795 per term. Badminton School is the only other school in this group offering boarding at Year 9, at £16,565 per term for UK/EEA pupils.

13+ Scholarships and Grants Worth Knowing About

Three of the five schools run 13+-specific financial support that a family budgeting against the fees above would otherwise miss entirely — and it appears on none of the competitor pages we reviewed.

• Bristol Grammar School offers scholarships for entry into Years 7, 9, 10 and Lower Sixth, assessed alongside (or ahead of) the standard entrance papers.
• Badminton School runs Year 9 scholarships and awards that, in the school's own words, “can carry remission on fees”, on top of its standard means-tested bursary scheme.
• Redmaids' High School makes every Year 9 pupil eligible to apply for a Development Grant, supporting their personal development through Years 9 to 11 — a benefit that isn't means-tested in the way a bursary is, and applies simply by virtue of joining in Year 9.

None of these are automatic. Each requires a separate application, usually alongside — or shortly after — the standard entrance assessment, so it's worth asking the admissions office what the scholarship timeline is at the same time as registering for the test itself.

What a 13+ Tutor in Bristol Should Actually Prepare Your Child For

This is where the marketplace pages selling “13+ tuition” as a single, undifferentiated subject get it wrong: because these five schools test five genuinely different things, what a tutor should be doing with your child depends entirely on which school you're targeting.

• Targeting Clifton College or Badminton School? Both routes are built around CAT4, a cognitive ability test. Past papers in individual subjects matter less here than practice with CAT4-style verbal, non-verbal, quantitative and spatial reasoning items — Badminton adds a timed Maths paper (45 minutes) and English paper (30 minutes) on top, so subject fluency under time pressure still matters there too.
• Targeting Bristol Grammar School? This is the outlier: live subject preparation across four areas at once — English, Maths, Science and a Modern Language — sat in a single January sitting. A generic “13+ reasoning” course does not prepare a child for this; they need genuine subject revision in all four.
• Targeting Queen Elizabeth's Hospital? Verbal and non-verbal reasoning practice alongside English and maths, delivered in an online, timed format on the day — familiarity with sitting a test on a screen, not just on paper, is worth building in beforehand.
• Targeting Redmaids' High School? Because assessments are by appointment rather than a single test morning, preparation can be paced around the family's own registration date rather than a fixed January cram — but the underlying content still needs confirming directly with the school's Year 9 Registrar, since the exact assessment format is set individually.

The practical upshot: before booking a 13+ tutor in Bristol, find out which of these five (or a similar independent school outside the city) your child is actually sitting for, and check that school's own admissions page for its current assessment format rather than assuming it matches a neighbouring school.

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