13+ Tutors in Cambridge for September 2027 Entry

A search for "13 plus tutors Cambridge" currently returns two different Cambridges. Cambridge Tutors' own homepage blends "Cambridge and Oxford experts" and Oxbridge admissions coaching into the same hero copy as its 11+/13+ tutoring, and Owl Tutors lists "13 Plus" as a line item under its "Cambridge Admissions tutors" page — a page about University of Cambridge admissions, not school entry. If you are here because a thirteen-year-old is applying to a senior school in the city of Cambridge, neither of those is what you need. This page is about the other Cambridge: the independent day schools that actually take pupils in at Year 9, what each one requires, when, and for how much. Four schools currently run a 13+ route in Cambridge — The Perse, Stephen Perse, The Leys and St Mary's — and every date, format and fee below is taken directly from that school's own admissions pages, not from a tutoring directory. For the wider Cambridge tutoring picture beyond 13+, see our Cambridge tutoring hub.

Which Cambridge Schools Actually Take Pupils at 13+ (Year 9 Entry)?

None of the pages ranking for this search name a single Cambridge school. That is the first gap, because before a deadline or a fee means anything, a parent needs to know which schools in the city actually run a Year 9 intake at all. In Cambridge, that is a short, specific list — three co-educational or boys' day schools, one girls' school, and one feeder prep school whose own leavers supply a meaningful share of the places.

The Perse already has a well-established 11+ intake and a separate sixth-form (16+) entry point on this site — see our Perse School 11+ guide and Perse School 16+ guide for the school's wider profile, results and those two routes in full. This page covers The Perse's 13+ (Year 9) route specifically, sourced from the school's own Upper School admissions pages: registration closes at 12 noon on 1 December 2026 for September 2027 entry, with a £240 registration fee. The entrance assessment is a two-part day — 70 minutes of computer-based testing (adaptive Maths, non-adaptive English, adaptive Non-Verbal and Verbal Reasoning) delivered by Quest, plus a 30-minute handwritten creative writing task — held on Saturday 16 January 2027. Results are communicated in early February with an acceptance deadline in early March. School fees for 2026/27 are £9,482 per term, plus a £368 termly lunch charge; accepting a place adds an £840 securing and induction fee. If Year 12 turns out to be the more realistic entry point, our guide to 16+ tuition in Cambridge covers the thresholds the city’s sixth forms set, including Hills Road’s minimum Admissions Score of 58 and Long Road’s five grade 5s.

Stephen Perse Cambridge names Year 7 (11+) and Year 9 (13+) as its two main entry points into the Senior School. Its Senior School application deadline for 2026/27 enrolment is Friday 20 November 2026 — ten days earlier than The Perse's — with the entrance assessment day on Saturday 9 January 2027 (a standalone session is available on Thursday 7 January 2027 for unavoidable clashes). Like The Perse, Stephen Perse partners with Quest for its computer-based testing. Senior School fees for 2026-27 are £9,145 per term, with an application fee of £200, an acceptance fee of £360 and a £500 deposit; lunch is £357 per term and optional.

The Leys School runs the most flexible route of the four: families can pre-test in Year 6, Year 7 or Year 8, so a place can be secured up to two years before entry. Whichever year testing begins, the general timeline is the same — reports are requested from current schools in October, entrance tests take place in early January, scholarship assessments follow in mid-January, offers go out in early February, and the acceptance deadline is the first Monday in March. The Leys is also the only one of the four with boarding: day fees for Year 9 to Sixth Form in 2026/27 are £11,835 per term (£35,505 for the year), while boarders pay £18,276 per term. The application fee is £200 and the entry deposit, payable on accepting an offer, is £600.

St Mary's School, Cambridge takes the earliest approach of all: its annual entrance assessment is held every year on the last Saturday of January, and a girl can sit it either in Year 6 or Year 7 to secure a Year 9 place. The two years use genuinely different formats — Year 6 candidates sit an online adaptive assessment plus a 30-minute handwritten creative-writing piece and an interview, while Year 7 candidates instead sit a one-hour handwritten English paper and a one-hour handwritten Maths paper, plus an interview. St Mary's day fees for Year 7 to Upper Sixth from September 2026 are £8,815 per term — the lowest of the four day fees. Application fees are £120 for a day place or £180 for boarding, with a £500 deposit for a day place.

Registration Deadlines and Assessment Dates for September 2027 Entry

This is where a tutoring decision actually turns: missing a registration deadline removes a school from consideration entirely, regardless of a child's ability. The four schools' deadlines fall inside a five-week window between 20 November and 1 December 2026, with assessment days a further five to seven weeks after that.

The practical effect is that a family targeting both Stephen Perse and The Perse as back-up options for the same child needs to have registered for Stephen Perse before most people have even started thinking about The Perse's 1 December cutoff. Families keeping St Mary's or The Leys open as options have far more room, since both allow testing a full year or two ahead of the September 2027 start date — but that flexibility only helps if it is used; leaving pre-testing until the child's actual Year 8 removes the advantage entirely.

What the 13+ Assessment Actually Involves in Cambridge — And Why It Isn't ISEB Common Entrance

Simply Learning Tuition, which ranks in the real top five for "13 plus tutors cambridge", states plainly that "the majority of independent senior schools use the Common Entrance for their 13 Plus assessments," naming Dulwich College, Harrow and Winchester as the small minority that set their own papers instead. That claim is simply not true of Cambridge's two largest 13+ day schools. Neither The Perse nor Stephen Perse Cambridge uses ISEB Common Entrance for 13+ entry. Both schools' own admissions pages describe a Quest-delivered computer-adaptive assessment — Maths, English, Non-Verbal and Verbal Reasoning, sat on a screen with a live timer — plus a separate handwritten creative writing task, and neither page mentions ISEB, Common Entrance or the Independent Schools Examinations Board at any point. The Leys and St Mary's run their own tests too, in their own formats, rather than ISEB's. For a Cambridge family, "Common Entrance" is the wrong thing to prepare for at every one of the four schools that actually take pupils in at 13+ in this city — a parent following a generic national 13+ guide, however thorough, would be practising the wrong exam.

What each school actually tests instead: The Perse's Part 1 is 70 minutes of adaptive computer testing (20 minutes Maths, 30 minutes English, 10 minutes each of Non-Verbal and Verbal Reasoning), followed by a 30-minute handwritten creative writing task marked on creativity, vocabulary and accuracy. Stephen Perse uses the same Quest platform for its own Senior School assessment day. St Mary's splits by year group — Year 6 candidates get an online adaptive test plus creative writing, Year 7 candidates get handwritten English and Maths papers instead, so the right preparation depends on which year a family chooses to test in. None of this is ISEB Common Entrance, and none of it involves the optional subject papers (History, Geography, Theology, Classics, modern languages) that a Common Entrance guide would tell a family to prepare for a 13+ entry.

Fees for 13+ (Year 9) Entry, 2026/27

Termly fees vary noticeably across the four schools, and boarding at The Leys costs considerably more again. All figures below are each school's own published 2026/27 (or 2026, for St Mary's) rate, taken from its own fees page.

St Mary's is the least expensive of the four on termly fees alone, and The Perse's headline fee sits roughly midway once its termly lunch charge is added on top of Stephen Perse's. The Leys' day fee is the highest of the day-only comparisons, reflecting a school that is built around boarding as much as day places — its boarding fee is more than double its own day fee.

Where Cambridge's Year 8 Leavers Actually Go at 13+

This is the one figure no competing page for this search carries at all: real conversion numbers between a Cambridge prep school and the named senior schools above, sourced to the prep school's own published leaver data rather than to any tutoring agency. King's College School, Cambridge — the West Road prep school for ages 3 to 13 — publishes exactly which senior schools its Year 8 leavers move on to each year, including how many places each senior school offered the cohort and how many of those offers were actually taken up.

In King's College School's July 2025 Year 8 leaver cohort, pupils were awarded 43 scholarships to senior schools between them. Of the places offered to that cohort by Cambridge's own 13+ schools: The Perse offered 20 places to King's leavers, and 13 of those leavers took their place up; Stephen Perse offered 22 places, and 10 leavers took theirs up; The Leys offered 11 places, and 1 leaver took theirs up; and 1 King's leaver joined St Mary's (the school does not publish a separate offer count for that cohort). The remaining leavers who received offers at The Perse and Stephen Perse but did not enrol mostly went further afield — King's names Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, Uppingham, Haileybury, Wycombe Abbey, King's Ely and others among that cohort's destinations, alongside a smaller number who moved to local state schools, Comberton Village College and the Cambridge Academy of Science and Technology.

Read carefully: these are leavers who took up an offered place, not raw application or admission-rate figures — 13 of 20 offered places accepted is not the same claim as "13 out of 20 applicants got in," and King's College School's own page does not publish how many pupils applied to each school in the first place. What the numbers do show clearly is that a meaningful share of families who are offered a place at The Perse or Stephen Perse via this particular Cambridge feeder route choose not to take it, most often in favour of a boarding school considerably further from home.

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