13+ Tutors in Leicester: 2027 Entry Guide

Search for a 13+ tutor in Leicester and every result assumes the same thing: that you are coaching a child through a "late transfer test" into a state grammar school. That assumption is not just badly worded — it describes a system that has not existed in Leicestershire for decades. In a House of Commons debate on Leicestershire school building on 21 March 1963, MP John Farr described the county's own "Leicestershire Plan" — locally known as the "Mason Plan", after the county's director of education — as having "no 11-plus examination and every child entitled to go to a grammar school" (Hansard, 21 March 1963). Leicestershire abolished selective entry to grammar school at 11 and never brought it back. There is no state grammar school anywhere in Leicester or Leicestershire today for a 13+ candidate to sit an entrance exam for. Leicester Grammar School is an independent, fee-paying school that has simply kept the word "Grammar" in its name. If your child is preparing for 13+ (Year 9) entry in or around Leicester, they are applying to one of five fee-paying schools, not a state selective system, and each one runs its own exam, deadline and fee. This guide sets out exactly which schools, what each actually tests, when applications close for September 2027 entry, and which of the five extend scholarships or bursaries to Year 9 candidates at all.

Is 13+ entry in Leicester really a "late transfer test into grammar school"?

No. Every one of the tutoring companies ranking for this search — Adnan Khan Tutoring's "Late Transfer Test Leicester" page, Teachers To Your Home, Superprof, TutorsValley and GLECTA — talks about 12+ and 13+ preparation as though Leicester still ran a selective grammar-school system. Leicestershire's postwar secondary system was built around the opposite idea: every child who wanted a grammar school place would get one, without sitting a competitive exam at 11. By the early 1960s this was already being defended in Parliament as a national model. Hansard records MP John Farr telling the Commons that pupils moved from primary school to a high school at 10 or 11 and then, "provided that their parents give an undertaking that they will continue at a grammar school for at least two full years, they are by right entitled to go on to a grammar school." That structure — entitlement by right, not by exam — is still the basis of Leicestershire's state secondary education today.

What does exist locally is Leicester Grammar School Trust, which runs three fee-paying schools under one governing body: Leicester Grammar Junior School (ages 3–11), LGS Stoneygate (ages 4–16) and Leicester Grammar School itself (ages 10–18). None of the three is state-funded, and none uses "11-plus" or "13-plus" to describe a selective state process — the Trust uses the terms the way any independent school does, to describe the age at which a candidate sits its own private entrance assessment. The same is true of the four other schools covered below. If your child needs to sit a genuine 13+ exam near Leicester, it is because you are applying to one of five independent schools, not because Leicestershire runs a "late transfer" route into a state grammar.

Which schools around Leicester actually take pupils at 13+ (Year 9), and what do they cost?

Five schools in and around Leicester take pupils into Year 9 at 13+, and only two of them are inside the city itself. Leicester Grammar School and LGS Stoneygate are both in Leicester, run by Leicester Grammar School Trust. Loughborough Grammar School and Loughborough High School are in Loughborough, a separate market town roughly a dozen miles north of Leicester, both part of the Loughborough Schools Foundation. Ratcliffe College is at Ratcliffe on the Wreake, a village northeast of the city with a Leicester postal address (LE7 4SG) but its own identity outside the city boundary. None of the five is a state school, and none is free to attend.

Leicester Grammar School Trust also runs a sibling discount across all three of its schools: a 5% reduction for a second child attending at the same time, 7.5% for a third, and 10% for a fourth. It's worth knowing about if a Year 9 candidate at Leicester Grammar School has a younger sibling already at LGS Junior or Stoneygate. Full current fee tables are published on the Leicester Grammar School fees page and the Ratcliffe College fees page.

How the Year 9 entrance assessment differs from school to school

The tutoring companies selling generic "12+/13+ Verbal and Non-Verbal Reasoning" packages are preparing children for the wrong test in most cases. Among these five schools, no two set exactly the same assessment, and one offers a route none of the others do.

Leicester Grammar School's Years 8 (12+) and 9 (13+) assessment day sets English comprehension (45 minutes), creative writing (45 minutes) and Maths, followed by group activities and a 15-minute interview that explicitly asks candidates about their "reasons for moving school" — confirmation that LGS treats Year 9 as an ordinary lateral transfer, not a special late-entry scheme.

Loughborough Grammar School is the only one of the five where a Year 9 candidate has a genuine choice of route: entry at 13+ "can be via the Independent Schools' Common Entrance Examination, held in June each year, or via our own entry procedure" — an in-house English (45-minute comprehension, 30-minute writing) and Maths (60 minutes, Key Stage 3 level) test. A candidate must be 13 by 1 September of the year of entry. If your child is at a prep school already teaching towards Common Entrance, this is the one school in the group where that preparation transfers directly — and the only genuine ISEB Common Entrance route among the schools covered in this guide.

Loughborough High School, the girls' school in the same Foundation, does not offer the ISEB option and instead assesses in "Mathematics, English, and an on-screen computer assessment analysing a range of subjects and skills" — the only one of the five with a computer-based component. Candidates in Years 7, 8 and 9 sit the maths paper without a calculator.

Ratcliffe College does not publish a fixed Year 9 paper format on its admissions pages; its process runs to a standard assessment window, "normally in January or February, before the September your child is due to start."

Deadlines, registration fees and September 2027 Year 9 entry

These dates move every year, and a family acting on last year's deadline can miss the window entirely. Here is what each school currently publishes for entry in September 2027.

At Leicester Grammar School, decisions are confirmed by the end of January 2027 and the deadline for accepting a place is expected in early March 2027 (exact date to be confirmed). At Loughborough Grammar School, an acceptance deposit of £500 applies for day pupils, rising to £1,000 for boarding pupils from the UK or EU and £5,000 for boarders from outside the EU. See the school's own entrance examinations page and Loughborough High School's assessment page for the current cycle before applying, since these dates are reconfirmed annually.

Scholarships and bursaries at 13+ — who actually offers them at Year 9

Many independent schools nationally treat Year 9 as a second-tier entry point for financial help — scholarships and means-tested bursaries reserved for the main Year 7 intake, with 13+ candidates quietly excluded. That is not the pattern here: three of the five schools in this guide extend real financial support to Year 9 entrants on the same terms as a Year 7 candidate.

Leicester Grammar School's own scholarships page states plainly that awards "are awarded to pupils joining the school at any age from Year 7 upwards... based on pupil performance and are not related to parental income" — a Year 9 candidate competes on exactly the same footing as an 11+ entrant.

Ratcliffe College runs named "Year 9 and Year 12 Scholarships" every year, typically worth a fee remission of around 5% at the Headmaster's discretion; this year's application deadline is Friday 27 November 2026. Its separate means-tested bursaries, for low-income families, can cover "up to 100% of a student's school Fee."

Loughborough Grammar School goes furthest of all. Its Lorraine Simmons Scholarship — named after a former Assistant Matron remembered fondly by generations of pupils — provides 100% tuition fees for a bright local boy from Year 7 through to Year 13, "with a strong preference for a pupil from a disadvantaged background in Loughborough or Shepshed." A Year 9 (13+) candidate is eligible for full fee remission on exactly the same terms as a Year 7 applicant, provided he lives locally.

Loughborough High School and LGS Stoneygate did not, at the time of research, publish a Year 9-specific scholarship or bursary route beyond the wider Foundation and Trust policies described above — worth confirming directly with admissions if cost is a deciding factor. Details of Ratcliffe's own awards are on its scholarships and bursaries page.

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