13+ Tutors in Manchester

Search this term and every result assumes there is one Manchester 13+ exam to prepare for. There isn't. Manchester's academically selective schools — The Manchester Grammar School (MGS), Manchester High School for Girls (MHSG), Withington Girls' School (WGS), Stockport Grammar School (SGS) and Cheadle Hulme School (CHS) — each treat Year 9 entry as its own separate, occasionally-opened process, with a different assessment, notice period, fee and contact. One is full and takes late applicants only "in exceptional circumstances." Three treat Year 9 as an availability-dependent vacancy rather than a scheduled sitting. Only one, Stockport Grammar, runs a standing assessed route with its own English and Maths paper. This page sets out exactly what each school does for 2026-2027, and — because it matters on a page searched under "Manchester" — exactly where each one actually sits.

Does 13+ Entry Actually Exist at Manchester's Leading Schools?

None of these five schools runs a dated, nationally-advertised "13 plus" sitting the way many Home Counties independent schools run a shared Common Entrance exam. What exists instead is five separate school policies, ranging from essentially closed to genuinely assessed. Here is the current position at each, for 2026-2027:

The pattern is clear once it's laid out this way: two of the five (MHSG and WGS) explicitly describe their main entry points as ages 4/7, 11 and 16+, with Year 9 treated as an exception rather than a route. MGS's Senior School is full outright. Only Stockport Grammar and Cheadle Hulme run something you could reasonably call a "13+ process" — an assessment or a dedicated application form respectively — and even these depend on a place existing at all.

How Does Year 9 Entry Actually Work at Each School?

The Manchester Grammar School. MGS's own admissions pages are unambiguous: "The School is currently full and therefore, Late Entry will only be considered in exceptional circumstances," and "bursary funding is not available for Late Entry applications." For any Year 8-10 enquiry, the school asks families to "contact the Admissions Office before application to check the availability of places" — there is little point submitting a form on spec. The realistic route into MGS remains Year 7: the deadline for September 2027 entry (the cycle a child currently in Year 5 would be applying for) is Wednesday 18 November 2026.

Manchester High School for Girls. MHSG states plainly that there are "three main entry points" — the Preparatory School at age 4, the Senior School from age 11, and Sixth Form at 16+ — and that "occasional vacancies in other year groups" are filled "depending on availability," not on a published timetable. There is no Year 9 assessment date to prepare for in advance; the only way to know if a place exists is to ask. The Admissions Team can be reached on 0161 224 0447. For context on the standard a Year 9 entrant would be joining, MHSG's 2025 results show 86% of A-level grades at the "gold standard" of A*-B and 78% of GCSE grades at 9-7.

Withington Girls' School. WGS is direct about the hierarchy: "Year 7 (age 11) is our main point of entry for the Senior School. If you are looking for a place in Years 8, 9 and 10, the process is slightly different." Families are asked to contact the Admissions team directly rather than follow a published Year 9 timetable — there is no separate exam date published for later-year entry.

Stockport Grammar School. SGS is the outlier in a useful way: it runs an actual assessment for later-year applicants. "An assessment in English and Mathematics is taken by children who apply for entry to Second and Third Year (Year 8 and 9)," and families are "normally… notified of the outcome within 48 hours" — a fast turnaround compared with the months-long Year 7 process. There's no verbal or non-verbal reasoning component on this route. The school's Admissions Manager, Hannah Atenyam, can be reached on 0161 419 2409 or admissions@stockportgrammar.co.uk to check current availability.

Cheadle Hulme School. CHS runs a dedicated Year 8, 9 and 10 online application form, separate from its Year 7 entrance exam. Registering requires "your £80 registration fee (non-refundable) via our secure payment gateway." CHS's standard entrance assessment — used as the model where a later-year assessment is offered — covers "online assessments in Mathematics, English, Non-Verbal, and Verbal reasoning, plus a creative writing task." The admissions team can be reached on 0161 488 3345 or admissions@chschool.co.uk.

Where Is Each School — Manchester Proper or Greater Manchester?

A page titled "13+ tutors Manchester" that lists these five schools without saying where they actually are would repeat exactly the failure this page exists to fix. We checked each school's own entry in the Department for Education's Get Information About Schools register — the official government record, not a directory listing — for its local authority.

Three schools — MGS, MHSG and WGS — are registered under Manchester City Council's local authority code, 352. They are in Manchester proper: MGS in Rusholme, MHSG on Grangethorpe Road, and WGS in Fallowfield. The other two — Stockport Grammar and Cheadle Hulme — are registered under Stockport's local authority code, 356. Stockport is a separate metropolitan borough within Greater Manchester, south-east of Manchester city centre; both schools are genuinely reasonable options for Manchester families, but neither sits inside the city boundary.

What Does Year 9 Entry Cost for 2026-2027?

Only two of the five schools publish a clear fee figure specific to the Senior School fee scale a Year 9 entrant would pay; the other three either don't publish one for this route, or explicitly withhold financial assistance from it.

Withington's fee is the highest of the two schools that publish a full breakdown, but Withington also states it "retained its position among the UK's top three for the fourth year running in July 2025" on an independent value ranking — worth weighing against the raw number. Stockport Grammar's figure already includes VAT and a termly lunch charge, which is why its "Annual cost" line reads as a single all-in figure rather than something you have to build up yourself. Cheadle Hulme's £6,126 is a straightforward per-term charge from 1 September 2026, the same whichever year group a child joins — but families applying for Year 8, 9 or 10 also pay the separate £80 registration fee, which Year 7 applicants do not.

Is This the Same as Trafford's Late-Transfer Tests?

Often, yes, in the sense that a parent searching "13 plus Manchester" may actually mean this. Trafford's late transfer tests apply to its state-funded grammar schools — the five-school Trafford Grammar School Consortium (Altrincham Grammar School for Boys, Altrincham Grammar School for Girls, Sale, Stretford and Urmston) plus Loreto Grammar School and St Ambrose College, which sit outside the Consortium — and are run through the local authority as a completely separate, free system from the five schools covered on this page.

MGS, MHSG, Withington, Stockport Grammar and Cheadle Hulme are all independent, fee-charging schools with their own individual Year 9 processes, described above. If it's Trafford's state grammar system you actually need — its own 11+ Consortium exam, deadlines and oversubscription criteria — our Trafford Grammar Schools Guide covers all seven schools in full. We don't repeat that research here because it answers a genuinely different question from the one this page answers.

How Should You Prepare for a Manchester Year 9 Assessment?

What to prepare depends entirely on which school's route is actually open, because the five don't test the same thing. Stockport Grammar's Year 8/9 assessment covers English and Mathematics only — there is no verbal or non-verbal reasoning paper on this route, unlike a typical Year 7 entrance exam. Cheadle Hulme's standard model, used as the basis where a later-year assessment is offered, is broader: Mathematics, English, Non-Verbal and Verbal reasoning, plus a creative writing task.

The bigger practical difference is timing. Because MHSG and WGS both describe Year 9 as an in-year, availability-driven vacancy rather than a scheduled sitting, and Stockport Grammar turns its own assessment around within 48 hours of sitting it, families are often working with weeks of notice, not a year. The most useful preparation is keeping English, maths and — where a school uses it — verbal and non-verbal reasoning consistently strong year-round, rather than cramming for a single fixed date that, for four of these five schools, does not exist. Our 13+ past papers are a reasonable starting point for practising the English and Maths components most of these routes actually test.

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