Liverpool's real 13+ landscape: four schools, and not one of them sets a Common Entrance exam.
Book a Free ConsultationLiverpool's 13+ market is smaller than the search results suggest, and it works differently to what most Common Entrance guides describe. Four independent schools cover the city and its immediate area at Year 9 age: Merchant Taylors' School in Crosby, Liverpool College, St Mary's College in Crosby, and Birkenhead School across the Mersey in Wirral. Not one of them sets the ISEB Common Entrance exam that a “13 plus tutors” search usually implies. Two run a Cognitive Abilities Test plus interview instead, one runs a waiting list rather than a test at all, and one treats Year 9 as an afterthought behind Year 7 and Year 10. This page sets out exactly how each school handles it, with 2026/27 fees and the dates each one actually publishes.
Search “13 plus tutors Liverpool” and the assumption baked into the phrase is that somewhere in the city a school sets a 13+ Common Entrance exam — the ISEB papers that dominate 13+ preparation in London and many other cities — and that a tutor's job is to drill a child through past papers for it. That assumption does not hold for a single school on this list.
Merchant Taylors' School in Crosby lists its entry points as Reception, Year 7 or Sixth Form; nowhere on its admissions pages does “13+” or “Year 9” appear as a named intake. Liverpool College treats Year 9 as one of nine year groups that sit on an “In Year Application” waiting list rather than a fixed entrance point — every year group except Reception, Year 7 and Year 12. St Mary's College in Crosby is explicit that its second entry point, after Year 7, is Year 10, “when pupils commence their GCSE studies” — not Year 9. And Birkenhead School's own enquiry form, the one families use to register interest, offers only two options: “Assessment Days – Year 7 Entry” or “Taster Day – Prep Entry.” There is no Year 9 box to tick.
These four are the whole of the market. A fifth Merseyside-area day school that once spanned the 13+ age within one all-through structure, Kingsmead School in Hoylake, closed in 2020, so it is not an option today either.
What follows is not a list of exam dates to revise for. It is a school-by-school account of what actually happens if a family wants to move a child into Year 9 at any of the four, because none of it looks like the Common Entrance process the search term implies.
Merchant Taylors' is the most-searched Crosby name, and it is worth stating plainly: since September 2025 there is only one Merchant Taylors' School, not two. Merchant Taylors' Girls' School and Merchant Taylors' Boys' School — previously run under a shared governing board but with separate admissions processes — merged into a single co-educational Merchant Taylors' School for pupils aged 4 to 18. A parent still searching for “Merchant Taylors' Girls' School 13+ entry” is searching for a process that no longer exists separately; it now runs through the same admissions team the boys' school always used.
That combined school's entry points are Reception, Year 7 and Sixth Form. There is no separate 13+ assessment day built for Year 9 the way there is a dedicated Cognitive Abilities Test morning for Year 7 applicants in November. Instead, a family applying at Year 9 goes through what the school calls Mid-Year Entry, covering Years 7 to 10 together: a Taster & Assessment Day that includes a CAT test, time sitting in on lessons, and an interview with a senior member of staff, plus a reference from the child's current school. It is assessment by availability and fit rather than a competitive sitting with a fixed pass mark.
The fee band that would apply from Year 9 is the Senior School rate: £6,218 per term for 2026/27, the same figure that applies right through to Sixth Form (the school's fee table only breaks out Infants at £4,510 and Juniors at £4,622 as separate, lower bands). Families exploring a Year 9 move can reach the admissions team directly on 0151 949 9366 or admissions@merchanttaylors.com; the school is on Liverpool Road, Crosby, L23 0QP.
Not sure whether your child needs Common Entrance-style preparation, reasoning-test practice, or simply an early waiting-list application? Talk it through with a Leading Tuition tutor who knows Liverpool's four schools individually, not a generic 13+ syllabus.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppLiverpool College is the one school on this list where the word “tutoring” needs a different meaning altogether at Year 9, because it is not fee-paying. The school describes itself on its own homepage as “a unique academy”, and — as The Guardian reported — it converted from an independent school to a state-funded academy and stopped charging fees for day places, a change that required it to grow its class sizes from twenty pupils to twenty-five.
Because it is state-funded, Liverpool College's admissions run on oversubscription criteria rather than an entrance exam, and Year 9 is no exception. Its admissions page states plainly that the school is “heavily oversubscribed” and that admission to year groups other than Reception, Year 7 and Year 12 is rare, though it holds “In Year Application” waiting lists covering Years 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10. A Year 9 place, in other words, depends on whether a family already there leaves — not on how a child performs in a test.
The scale of demand elsewhere in the school gives a sense of how competitive that waiting list is likely to be. For September 2026 entry, Liverpool College received 1,697 applications for 177 available Year 7 places. Its Reception 2026 intake saw 520 families list the school as a preference for just 90 places. No competing tutoring page mentions either figure, because none of them checked the school's own admissions page.
What this means for tutoring: a family targeting Liverpool College at Year 9 is not preparing for a test at all. They are registering interest, staying on a waiting list, and being ready to move quickly if a place opens — a completely different kind of support to exam preparation.
St Mary's College in Crosby is upfront about where its second entry point actually sits, and it isn't Year 9. Its admissions page states: “If places are available, individual admission is possible at other levels of entry, especially into Year 10, when pupils commence their GCSE studies.” Year 9 isn't excluded — the school's own enquiry form does let a family select Year 9 as a proposed year of entry — but it is not the year the school builds a process around, the way it does for Year 7 or Year 10.
For Year 7, the process is a proper fixed sitting: the entrance examination for 2027 entry is set for Friday 13th November 2026, with interviews the week before and Art, Music and Sport scholarship assessments the week before that. The school runs an equally fixed process for its other named entry point, Sixth Form — its Sixth Form Scholarship Examination for 2027 entry took place on Friday 30th January 2026. A Year 9 mover falls between those two structured gateways and is handled case by case, on space and a reference, rather than on a named test date.
Fees for 2026/27 in the Senior School — the band a Year 9 place falls into — are £6,192 per term, or £18,576 for the year, inclusive of 20% VAT, plus a £48 (£40 + VAT) registration fee due with the application. One small but telling detail: school lunches are compulsory for Year 7 and Year 8 pupils, at £258 per term, but from Year 9 onward pupils move to a cash cafeteria or can bring a packed lunch — a minor administrative marker that the school treats Year 9 as the start of a more independent phase, even without a dedicated entrance test to match.
Birkenhead School shows up regularly in Merseyside 13+ searches, and it is worth saying plainly where it actually is: Birkenhead is on the Wirral peninsula, reached from Liverpool through the Mersey Tunnels or by ferry across the river — not inside the City of Liverpool. Families searching “13 plus tutors Liverpool” who land on Birkenhead's admissions pages are looking at a school in a different local authority area, Wirral, not Sefton or Liverpool itself.
Like the Crosby schools, Birkenhead's admissions process is built around Year 7, not Year 9. Prospective pupils attend a Taster & Assessment Day — held in June for children currently in Year 5, or January for children in Year 6 — where they complete what the school calls an “Adaptive Admissions Test” and a short group interview. The school's own Register Your Interest form, the one a family fills in to start the process, offers exactly two options: “Assessment Days – Year 7 Entry” or “Taster Day – Prep Entry.” There is no Year 9 entry option listed on the form at all.
Where Birkenhead does differ from the Crosby schools is on price at the point a 13+ move would happen. Its 2026/27 fees step up sharply between Years 8 and 9: Seniors in Years 7 and 8 pay £5,546 per term, while Seniors in Years 9 to 11 pay £6,301 per term — a rise that lands exactly at the age a family searching this term is likely to be considering. Sixth Form fees rise again to £6,379 per term. On the positive side, from September 2026 the school is offering a year of free transport to new entrants joining Seniors — Year 7 through Upper Sixth — from Liverpool-based families, which would apply to a Year 9 mover from Liverpool as much as a Year 7 starter.
Given that none of Liverpool's four schools sets ISEB Common Entrance papers at 13+, the honest answer to “what should a 13+ tutor prepare my child for here” is different from what the search term implies. Nationally, the Common Entrance format tested by ISEB — English, Mathematics, Science and a range of further subjects, set and marked against a national syllabus — is what most 13+ tutoring pages assume by default; our own guide to that format is at /13-plus/common-entrance-exam for families comparing what other cities' schools actually require.
In Liverpool, three of the four routes run instead on a Cognitive Abilities Test — verbal, non-verbal and quantitative reasoning, adaptive rather than syllabus-based — combined with an interview and a reference from the child's current school. That is a genuinely different preparation target: reasoning-test familiarity and interview readiness matter more here than subject-specific Common Entrance drilling. At St Mary's, a Year 9 mover also lands in the middle of the school's GCSE options process, meaning the more useful preparation may be making sure a child is ready to choose and start GCSE subjects immediately, not just pass an entrance assessment. At Liverpool College, the most useful thing a family can do has nothing to do with academic preparation at all — it is registering an in-year application early and staying near the top of the waiting list.
Set side by side, the four 2026/27 fee positions for a Year 9 place look like this. Liverpool College's £0 is not a mistake — it is the clearest evidence on this page that Liverpool's 13+ market has one genuinely non-fee-paying route sitting alongside three fee-paying ones, and that the usual assumption that “13+ tuition” always leads to a fee-paying school does not hold in this city.
| School | Location | Year 9 fee (2026/27, per term) | Year 9 entry route |
|---|---|---|---|
| Merchant Taylors' School | Crosby | £6,218 | Mid-Year Entry: CAT test, interview, reference |
| St Mary's College | Crosby | £6,192 | Space-permitting; Year 10 is the named 2nd entry point |
| Birkenhead School | Hoylake, Wirral | £6,301 | No published Year 9 route; Year 7 Adaptive Admissions Test only |
| Liverpool College | Liverpool | £0 (state-funded academy) | In-Year Application waiting list |
None of the five pages ranking for “13 plus tutors Liverpool” names Merchant Taylors', Liverpool College, St Mary's or Birkenhead School even once — not one of the four schools this page has just covered gets a mention on any of them. What they offer instead is marketplace pricing.
Superprof lists 12 13+ tutors in Liverpool, with lessons quoted from £15 an hour and a platform-wide rating of 4.7 out of 5 from 1.9 million student reviews (a company-wide figure, not specific to Liverpool or to 13+). Teachers To Your Home, which covers the wider Merseyside area rather than Liverpool specifically, prices a qualified teacher's 13+ tuition from £50 an hour at home, £44 an hour online, or £17.50 an hour in a small group of two or three pupils sharing the cost. Klasu's example Liverpool 13+ tutor profile is priced at £44 an hour. None of these figures is wrong, and a marketplace tutor can genuinely help with reasoning-test practice or interview technique — but none of the five pages tells a parent which of Liverpool's four schools that practice should actually be aimed at, because none of them checked.
No. None of Liverpool's four schools that take pupils at Year 9 — Merchant Taylors' School in Crosby, Liverpool College, St Mary's College in Crosby, or Birkenhead School in Wirral — runs the ISEB Common Entrance papers that many 13+ guides assume as standard. Merchant Taylors' and Birkenhead assess Year 9 movers with a Cognitive Abilities Test plus an interview and a school reference. Liverpool College allocates Year 9 places from an in-year waiting list rather than a test at all. St Mary's College treats Year 10, not Year 9, as its named second entry point. A tutor preparing a child for ISEB-style Common Entrance papers in Liverpool is preparing for an exam none of these schools sets.
No. From September 2025, Merchant Taylors' Girls' School merged with Merchant Taylors' Boys' School in Crosby to form a single co-educational Merchant Taylors' School for pupils aged 4 to 18, run by one admissions team. There is no longer a separate Girls' School application process to check for Year 9 entry. Families should use the combined school's Mid-Year Entry route for Years 7 to 10, which involves a Taster & Assessment Day, a Cognitive Abilities Test, time in lessons, and an interview with a senior member of staff, plus a reference from the child's current school. The 2026/27 Senior School fee that applies from Year 9 is £6,218 per term.
No. Liverpool College converted from an independent school to a state-funded academy and stopped charging fees for day places, according to both the school's own description of itself as “a unique academy” and contemporary reporting on the conversion. A Year 9 place comes from an “In Year Application” waiting list covering Years 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10, not from sitting a test or paying fees. The scale of demand elsewhere at the school is a useful guide to how competitive that waiting list is: for September 2026, Liverpool College received 1,697 applications for 177 available Year 7 places.
No. Birkenhead School is on the Wirral peninsula, reached from Liverpool through the Mersey Tunnels or by cross-river ferry, and it falls under Wirral local authority rather than Liverpool or Sefton. It shows up in Merseyside-wide 13+ searches because it is the nearest school across the water that takes pupils through Year 9, but a family living in Liverpool itself is looking at a commute across the Mersey, not a local school. Its Year 9 to 11 fee for 2026/27 is £6,301 per term, up from £5,546 for Years 7 and 8, and its only published assessment route is the Year 7 Adaptive Admissions Test — there is no separate Year 9 entry process.
It varies from £0 to £6,301 a term depending on the school. Liverpool College, a state-funded academy, charges no fees for day places. Among the fee-paying schools, St Mary's College in Crosby charges £6,192 per term (£18,576 a year, inclusive of VAT) for its Senior School, which covers Year 9; Merchant Taylors' School in Crosby charges £6,218 per term for the same band; and Birkenhead School in Wirral charges £6,301 per term for Years 9 to 11, up from £5,546 for Years 7 and 8. None of these schools publishes a separate “13+ entry fee” — the figure is simply the standard Senior School termly fee that applies once a child joins, whichever year they start in.
Not Common Entrance papers, because no Liverpool school sets them at 13+. Three of the four routes — Merchant Taylors', Birkenhead and, informally, St Mary's — lean on a Cognitive Abilities Test covering verbal, non-verbal and quantitative reasoning, plus an interview and a reference from the child's current school, so reasoning-test familiarity and interview confidence matter more than subject-specific exam drilling. At St Mary's, a Year 9 mover also has to be ready to choose GCSE options almost immediately. At Liverpool College, the most useful preparation has nothing to do with tutoring at all — registering an in-year application as early as possible matters more than any academic preparation, because places come from a waiting list, not a test.
Possibly, but it isn't the school's named route. St Mary's College's admissions page states that individual admission outside Year 7 is possible “if places are available, especially into Year 10, when pupils commence their GCSE studies” — Year 9 is not ruled out, and the school's own enquiry form does let a family select Year 9 as a proposed year of entry, but there is no fixed Year 9 assessment day the way there is for Year 7, where the entrance examination for 2027 entry is set for Friday 13th November 2026. A family moving to Liverpool mid-way through Year 8 should contact the admissions team directly rather than wait for an advertised 13+ round, because none exists.
For Liverpool tutoring across other subjects and stages, see our Liverpool tuition hub, or explore our wider 13+ preparation guides for schools that do set a Common Entrance exam.
Whichever of Liverpool's four schools you're aiming for, the preparation that actually helps depends on knowing whether you're facing a reasoning test, an interview, a waiting list, or a GCSE-options conversation — not a Common Entrance paper. Leading Tuition's tutors work from that school-specific detail, not a generic 13+ syllabus.
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