Two real Dulwich College Year 9 entrance papers, free to download as PDFs. Dulwich publishes mark schemes of its own — we say so below before you buy anything.
The two Dulwich College question papers below are free. The £50 key covers those and every other 13+ paper we hold — 36 in all, from 23 institutions.
We hold two Dulwich College 13+ past papers: an English specimen paper and a 2023 Maths specimen paper, both from the Year 9 entrance and scholarship examination. They are listed below with the format printed on each cover, and both download as free PDFs.
| Paper | Subject | Year | Format on the paper | Free PDF |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dulwich College — Year 9 English Specimen Paper | English | Undated | 1 hour 25 minutes; Section A prose comprehension 60 marks, Section B descriptive paragraph 15 marks | Download PDF |
| Dulwich College — 13 Plus Maths Specimen Paper 2023 | Maths | 2023 | 1 hour 30 minutes, calculators allowed, 100 marks, 22 questions | Download PDF |
Read this before you buy anything: Dulwich publishes its own mark schemes.
Dulwich is one of the few schools that puts a mark scheme next to its papers, free, on its own website. If Dulwich is the only school on your list, go there first. The £50 key here is for families sitting several schools: it covers all 36 papers in the collection at £1.39 a paper, paid once.
See the full 13+ collectionYes, and more completely than almost any school in this collection. The Practice Tests section of Dulwich's Year 9 entry page, read on 8 September 2026, lists for entry to Year 9 in September 2027 a Maths syllabus, a Maths paper, a Maths paper mark scheme, an English paper and an English paper mark scheme. For the deferred route into Year 9 in September 2029 it lists a familiarisation test showing the style of the online questions and a specimen paper for the English creative writing task.
A published syllabus and two published mark schemes is an unusually generous position, and it changes what an aggregator page like this one is honestly worth. If your child is applying only to Dulwich, the school's own material is more current than ours and comes with the marking. We would rather lose the sale than have you find that out afterwards. As a control we requested an address on the same host that cannot exist and the server returned a proper 404, so the Practice Tests listing is really there rather than an artefact of a site that answers every request.
Where these two papers still earn their place is breadth. Almost nobody applies to one school at 13+. If Dulwich sits alongside Emanuel, Forest, Habs or Alleyn's on your list, the value is in having every paper in one table with a worked answer key for every one, rather than in any single paper.
English Specimen Paper — 1 hour 25 minutes. The cover is headed Year 9 Entrance and Scholarship Examination and marked “Specimen Paper [new]”, and the instructions allocate the time explicitly: ten minutes reading the passage before writing anything, sixty minutes on Section A, fifteen minutes on Section B.
Section A is a prose comprehension worth 60 marks on a passage called Miss Anstruther's Letters, set in 1941 in the aftermath of an air raid. A woman whose life has been “cut in two” sits in a rented bed-sitting-room among the broken objects she has salvaged. The questions are precise about where to look and how many points to make, which is itself a lesson in exam technique: explain in your own words what the first sentence suggests about her situation, making three separate points (3 marks); why the words on a fragment of note-paper are ironic, two separate points (2 marks); how the writer creates tension in lines 43 to 54, three separate points (6 marks); what the books she chooses to save suggest about her, two separate points (4 marks); the meaning of a set of quotations in the candidate's own words (6 marks); and what her references to her letters suggest about her past (5 marks). The section closes with a ten-mark creative task: write the letter Miss Anstruther composes to replace the ones the fire destroyed, in character, taking account of what the passage has told you about her.
Section B is 15 marks and fifteen minutes for a single detailed descriptive paragraph, choosing between “The Boathouse” and “A Medieval Castle”. The instruction is to express yourself vividly, and the paper provides a notes area first.
Maths Specimen Paper, 2023 — 1 hour 30 minutes, 100 marks. Twenty-two questions with the marks printed in square brackets and a page-total box on every page. Calculators may be used, all questions are to be attempted, and working must be shown on the paper. The first half is standard Key Stage 3 into GCSE: compound depreciation of a car over three years, reverse percentages on a postage stamp, an arithmetic sequence extended to a calendar date, three-part ratio, simplifying and expanding, area of a symmetrical shape, Pythagoras to two decimal places, drawing a line and reflecting and rotating a shape, four equations of rising difficulty, angles in diagrams, factorising, average speed with a target to prove or disprove, the length of a prism from its volume, and a unit conversion through two given equivalences.
The last third is where it separates candidates. Question 16 asks, given that the mean of eight numbers is m and removing one number drops the mean of the remaining seven to m − 4, what the discarded number was in terms of m. Question 18 places four points on a number line under four written conditions and asks for the value of an expression built from them. Question 20 defines a new operation from scratch — a ∗ b is a − b when a is at least b, and zero otherwise — then asks the candidate to evaluate it on fractions and to simplify an expression in it for a negative variable. Question 21 gives five identical circles arranged with a square through their centres and an unshaded area of (72 − 18π) cm², and asks for the radius. Question 22 asks how many digits there are in 16250 × 25500 written out in full.
None of that is on a Key Stage 3 curriculum. It is there to find the candidates who can meet an unfamiliar definition and work with it, and it is the clearest single illustration in this whole collection of the difference between a school test and a scholarship-grade entrance paper.
Two routes, and they are genuinely different exams. Dulwich's Year 9 entry page, read on 8 September 2026, describes deferred entry to Year 9 in September 2029 as an assessment sat in Year 6: candidates take it at Dulwich College on Tuesday 1 December 2026 using the College's own bespoke tests, and the page states plainly that Dulwich does not use the ISEB pre-test for deferred entry applicants. The admissions test runs about three hours including breaks and comes in two parts. Part 1 is online — Mathematics 20 minutes, English 30 minutes, non-verbal reasoning 10 minutes, verbal reasoning 10 minutes, puzzles and problem solving 15 minutes, creative comprehension 20 minutes — with the Maths and both reasoning sections adaptive, so answers cannot be revisited. Part 2 is a handwritten creative writing task of 20 minutes, five of them for planning. Fifty places are available by that route, registration closed at midday on Friday 2 October 2026, 120 boys are invited to interview and interviews run from 11 to 15 January 2027.
The second route is entry to Year 9 in September 2027, sat in Year 8, with thirty places. Candidates take written papers in English and Mathematics plus online reasoning tests on Saturday 9 January 2027; registration closes at midday on Monday 2 November 2026; forty boys are invited to interview on Tuesday 19 January 2027. Both routes post results on Thursday 11 February 2027 and confirm by email on the Friday. Applicants cannot enter for both Year 7 and Year 9 deferred entry, and the route cannot be changed after the registration deadline.
The two papers on this page belong to the second of those: handwritten English and Mathematics papers sat at the College by a candidate in Year 8. They are not practice for the Year 6 online assessment, and giving a Year 6 child a 100-mark 90-minute calculator paper because it happens to be the newest Dulwich paper you can find would be a mistake. Check Dulwich's own admissions pages for the year that applies to your child.
Two papers, two subjects. The English specimen carries no year anywhere on it, so we have left its year blank rather than infer one from the file it arrived in; only the Maths paper is dated, and it is dated 2023. We hold no Dulwich reasoning material, which matters because online reasoning tests are part of both of Dulwich's routes into Year 9, and we hold nothing at all resembling the adaptive online sections of the deferred-entry assessment. There is no Dulwich science paper in the collection either, and by Dulwich's own published description of its Year 9 entrance examinations there is no science paper to be missing.
The wider collection has the same shape: 36 papers across Maths, English and Biology only, with no languages, humanities or reasoning papers from any of the 23 institutions in it. A page that claimed to be complete preparation for Dulwich would be lying about all three of those gaps.
The question papers are free — these two and all 36 in the collection. The £50 unlocks the worked answer key for every one, which is £1.39 a paper, paid once, with no subscription, nothing above it to buy, and a year of access with unlimited re-downloads.
On the Dulwich Maths paper in particular the value is obvious. A mark scheme that gives “751” as the answer to the digit-counting question tells a parent nothing; an answer that shows how the powers are rearranged into a power of ten tells them what to say next. That is the difference we are selling, and on this page we are selling it against a school that already gives away two mark schemes of its own.
The rest of the collection is on the 13+ past papers hub, with the subject sets on the 13+ English and 13+ Maths pages. We run the same free-papers-paid-answers arrangement at 11+, and everything else is in the resources library. ISEB publishes one free specimen set per subject with its mark scheme.
Yes. Both question papers download as PDFs with no payment, no account and no email address. The £50 buys the worked answer keys, and it covers all 36 papers in the 13+ collection rather than these two alone.
It does, and this is the honest headline for this page. The Practice Tests section of Dulwich's Year 9 entry page lists a Maths syllabus, a Maths paper, a Maths paper mark scheme, an English paper and an English paper mark scheme for the Year 9 2027 entry route. If Dulwich is your only school, start there, not here.
Because most families are not applying to one school. If your child is sitting Dulwich alongside three or four others, these two sit in a set of 36 papers with a worked answer key for every one, and you do not have to visit forty admissions pages to find out which schools included the answers.
The Year 8 route. Both are headed as Year 9 entrance and scholarship papers of the handwritten sort sat at the College. The deferred route into Year 9, sat in Year 6, is a different assessment: online adaptive tests plus a 20-minute handwritten creative writing task.
Yes. The front page says calculators may be used, allows 1 hour 30 minutes and puts 100 marks on the paper. The first question actually depends on a calculator: it asks for the first ten digits the calculator displays, then the same value to three decimal places and to two significant figures.
No. These are Year 8 papers. Dulwich's Year 6 assessment for deferred entry is a set of short online tests plus a 20-minute creative writing task, which is a different exercise entirely.