Emanuel School 13+ Past Papers

We hold two Emanuel School 13+ past papers: an English sample paper and a 2023 non-calculator Maths sample paper. Both come from the older Year 8 arrangement rather than the assessment Emanuel is now re-introducing, which is explained further down this page. Each downloads as a free PDF.

Emanuel is bringing 13+ entry back, and it will not look like these papers

This is the single most useful thing on this page, and it comes from Emanuel rather than from us. The school's Year 9 (13+) entry page, read on 8 September 2026, says Emanuel will be re-introducing its formal Year 9 entry assessment in autumn 2026 for pupils seeking entry from September 2029. Crucially, it is a deferred entry process: the assessment is taken when applicants are in Year 6, at the same point as Emanuel's standard Year 7 assessments, and a successful candidate then stays at their current school for Years 7 and 8 before joining in Year 9.

The examination Emanuel describes for that route is Maths of 45 minutes, English of 1 hour and verbal reasoning of 30 minutes, sat towards the end of the autumn term of Year 6, followed by an interview and a group experience designed to let candidates show creative skills and the ability to work in a small team. Emanuel expects between 14 and 16 new Year 9 places each year from September 2029. Applicants cannot enter for both Year 7 and Year 9 deferred entry and must choose one route when registering. For the first cohort the school lists registration opening in May 2026, a registration deadline of midday on Friday 16 October 2026, the entrance exam on Friday 27 November 2026, interviews and the group experience on Saturday 16 January 2027, offers on Thursday 11 February 2027 and an acceptance deadline of midday on Wednesday 3 March 2027.

Hold that against the two papers on this page. Our Maths paper is a one-hour, 26-question, non-calculator paper of the sort a Year 8 child sits; the new Maths assessment is 45 minutes and sat by a child in Year 6. There is a verbal reasoning component in the new assessment and we hold no reasoning paper for Emanuel or for any other school. The English paper is closer — an hour of English is an hour of English — but it is still pitched at a candidate two school years older. Always check Emanuel's own admissions pages for what applies to your child's year of entry, because everything above is a scheme in its first cycle and first cycles move.

What deferred entry means for a child in Year 6

Deferred entry is an unfamiliar idea to most families and it changes what preparation is for. A child assessed in Year 6 who is offered a Year 9 place does not move school; they stay where they are for Years 7 and 8 and arrive at Emanuel two years later. Emanuel describes the offer as conditional on a satisfactory report for Year 7 and Year 8 from the pupil's current school and on their continued good conduct over that period, with an acceptance deposit due in February 2028 for the first cohort. Before the exam the school asks parents for the applicant's end-of-Year-5 school report and requests a reference directly from the current head teacher during the autumn term.

Two practical points follow. First, the exam is sat at the same point in Year 6 as an 11+ assessment, so the preparation window is the Year 5 to Year 6 one, not a Year 7 to Year 8 one, and a family choosing this route is committing early. Second, Emanuel says the registration fee is not payable if the child qualifies for pupil premium or the family receives universal credit, and asks parents to contact the admissions team with written evidence before registering rather than paying and claiming afterwards. Educational psychologist reports supporting extra time or the use of a computer have their own earlier deadline, listed as Friday 23 October 2026 for the first cohort.

What is in the two papers

13+ English Sample Paper. Two sections, 25 marks each, 50 in total, with no time printed on the booklet. Section A is a comprehension on an extract from Laurie Lee describing his village primary school and a teacher the children christened Crabby — “a bunched and punitive little body” with “a sour yellow look”. The seven questions are almost all analytical rather than retrieval, which is unusual at this level:

• The one thing the class successfully learned because of Miss B (2 marks).
• Identify three different language techniques in a single highlighted sentence and explain how each makes her seem frightening (6 marks).
• Explain what Lee means by describing a morning greeting as “like a rattling of swords” (2 marks).
• Explain two things that are humorous in one paragraph (4 marks).
• Explain why a boy would shout Crabby's words in the middle of a playground fight (3 marks).
• Explain the meaning of “we sat locked in our stocks” (2 marks).
• Identify and explain three ways the final paragraph conveys the children's longing to be outside (6 marks).

Section B is an essay written on a fresh sheet of paper, marked for clarity, content, interest and accuracy, choosing between a letter to the head teacher arguing a case about a proposed four-term school year, and an extended essay on whether the candidate's education so far has, on balance, been a positive experience. Both are argument tasks rather than story-writing tasks, which is worth knowing: a child who has practised descriptive fiction all year has practised the wrong thing for this paper.

13+ Maths Sample Paper, 2023 — one hour, non-calculator. Twenty-six questions, no marks printed against any of them, and a single instruction: answer all questions showing your working clearly. The coverage is broad and deliberately unglamorous. Long multiplication and decimal arithmetic; adding and subtracting mixed numbers; angles on a diagram with five unknowns; a fraction of a quantity; substitution into S = a(b + c); the mean of five numbers; a fraction, decimal and percentage conversion table; areas of compound shapes and of a triangle; indices and standard form; probability from the first twelve positive numbers and from the letters of the word TRANSLATION; rounding to significant figures and decimal places; percentages of a class of thirty; simplifying and expanding brackets; two sequences of number patterns including one with a changing difference; dividing an amount in a ratio; a fractions-of-a-class problem with three teams; solving four linear equations; a perimeter problem equating a square and a rectangle; substitution with negative values into two formulae; a map scale of 1 : 25 000; and finally a table-and-graph question plotting y = 2x + 1 and x + y = 4 on the same axes.

Because no marks are printed, this paper is best used as a checklist rather than as a test. Twenty-six questions in sixty minutes is a little over two minutes each, and the useful output is a list of the four or five topics that stopped your child rather than a score out of anything.

Does Emanuel publish its own papers?

No, and we checked in two ways. The Year 9 (13+) entry page carries no linked papers and no PDFs at all. We then read every one of the 168 pages listed in Emanuel's own page sitemap and found no page whose address contains “paper”, “specimen” or “sample”. As a control we requested an address on the same host that cannot exist, and the server returned a proper 404 rather than quietly serving the homepage, so an absence here is a real absence rather than an artefact of how the site answers requests.

That is a perfectly reasonable position for a school that is rebuilding an entry route from scratch: there is not yet a paper in the new format to publish. It does mean that these two papers are, as far as we can tell, the only Emanuel 13+ papers a parent can get hold of, and that nobody at all publishes the marking for them.

How to use these two papers

• Use the English comprehension as it stands. Identifying language techniques and explaining their effect is exactly what Emanuel's new English paper will ask for, whatever the format. The Laurie Lee passage is as good a text for that as any published this year.
• Practise the argument essay, not a story. Both Section B options are persuasive or reflective. If your child only ever writes fiction, this is the gap.
• Treat the Maths paper as a topic audit. Work through it untimed, mark which of the 26 questions stalled, and revise those. The clock on it belongs to a different exam.
• Find reasoning practice somewhere else. Thirty minutes of verbal reasoning is a fifth of the new assessment and neither of these papers touches it. We do not hold a reasoning paper for any school, and we would rather say so than sell you two papers as though they covered it.

What is missing from this set

No reasoning paper, no science paper, no year on the English booklet, no time allowance on the English booklet, and no paper at all in the format Emanuel will use from autumn 2026. That is a lot of caveats for two papers, and they are all worth having before you decide how much preparation weight to put on this page. The wider collection has the same boundaries: 36 papers across Maths, English and Biology only, from 23 institutions, with no languages, humanities or reasoning papers anywhere in it.

What the £50 covers

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 a paper like Emanuel's English, where six marks turn on naming three language techniques in one sentence and explaining the effect of each, the answer key is the whole exercise. A parent can tell whether their child spotted a metaphor; telling them whether the explanation would have earned the second mark is a different job, and it is the one the keys are written to do.

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.

Questions parents ask before buying