Forest School 13+ Past Papers

We hold three Forest School 13+ past papers: two English booklets and one non-calculator Maths paper. All three describe themselves as entrance and scholarship papers, which is worth knowing before you use them. They are listed below with the format printed inside each one, and every paper downloads as a free PDF.

What is in each of the three papers

English Sample Paper 1 — one hour, 30 marks. This is a combined question paper and answer booklet: the child writes into the spaces provided, with extra space at the back. The instructions say plainly that the questions assess both reading and the quality of the writing, so a right answer written badly will not score everything. Six questions follow a passage of memoir about the day war was declared. They run from two marks for how the author captures attention in the first sentence, through a two-mark comparison of an expected picnic with the real one at lines 19 to 23, to a six-mark question on how the author describes families in books against his own, and a ten-mark closing question on how he describes his childhood, with quotations required.

One practical warning about this booklet: it is a scan. The passage is stored as page images rather than as selectable text, so you cannot copy a line out of it, a screen reader cannot read it aloud, and searching inside the PDF will not find anything. Print it if your child is going to work on it.

English Sample Paper 2 — one hour, 30 marks. A cleaner booklet. Section A holds the reading passage, a wry first-person essay called Just Walking the Dog about fifty years of walking dogs in Richmond Park and Epping Forest, with numbered lines. Then six questions: how the writer catches attention in the opening paragraph (2 marks); explaining three quoted phrases in the child's own words, including “the more recalcitrant canines who have gained a reputation for boisterous behaviour” (10 marks); why names are a tricky issue (3 marks); how the writer feels about amateur and professional dog walkers (5 marks); the benefits of dogs to mankind (5 marks); and a ten-mark question asking the child to pick four particularly effective points and say what each contributes to the argument.

Worth knowing before you mark it: the marks printed beside those six questions come to 35, while the total line on the front of the booklet reads 30. Sample papers do this. Mark to the individual questions, not to the cover.

Maths Sample Paper 1, 2023 — one hour, non-calculator. Eighteen questions with no marks printed against them, which makes it a paper to work through rather than a paper to score. Calculators are explicitly not allowed and candidates are told to show working. The first half is mechanical: long multiplication and division, decimals, negative numbers, substitution, expanding and factorising, fractions and percentages, mean and median. The second half is where it turns: a class of questions that ask a child to reason and then justify.

• Two classes take the same test; A averages 50 per cent and B averages 80 per cent. “Everyone in Class B did better than everyone in Class A.” Do you agree? Explain clearly.
• Alex throws two dice and adds; Grace throws one and doubles. Who is more likely to score 10 or more, and why?
• Given that 24 × 36 = 864, write down 12 × 72, 2.4 × 36000 and 864 ÷ 0.36.
• Three different prime numbers have a mean of 10 and a median greater than 10. What are they?
• If three chickens lay three eggs in three minutes, how many eggs do nine chickens lay in nine minutes?
• The middle sheet of a magazine has been removed to reveal pages 34 and 87. Which pages are underneath, and how many pages does the magazine have?

Those last six are the paper. A child who can do everything in the first half and none of the second half will look competent and score badly, and that is the diagnosis a parent actually wants.

The geometry and coordinate work sits in between the two halves and is worth practising separately. One question gives a regular octagon and asks for three marked angles, x, y and z, from a diagram that is explicitly not drawn to scale. Another plots A at (2, 3), B at (2, −4) and C at (−3, −2) and then asks for the equation of the line AB, the area of triangle ABC, and the coordinates of the point D that makes ABCD a parallelogram — three different skills hanging off one set of axes. A probability question sets the chance of rain on an April day in a fictional town at 0.2 and asks for the complement, the expected number of wet days in April, and then a full list of the possible three-day rain-or-no-rain sequences written as strings such as RNR. Listing outcomes systematically is a skill children are rarely taught and frequently tested on.

What these three papers do not cover

Two subjects and nothing else. There is no Forest science paper in this collection, no reasoning paper, no humanities paper and no languages paper, and we have not invented one. If your child needs science practice at this level, the 13+ Biology papers we hold come from other schools and are gathered on the 13+ science past papers page.

There is also no mark scheme with any of the three, which is the ordinary state of affairs for a school-set 13+ paper. Schools publish papers to show a format; they keep mark schemes because a mark scheme is the thing that tells a coach precisely what earns a mark. That asymmetry is why a paper on its own is only half the exercise, and it is the gap the answer keys fill.

Does Forest School publish its own papers?

No — and we looked properly. We read Forest's 13+ entry page on 8 September 2026 and found no papers linked from it and no PDFs on it at all. We then checked every one of the 203 pages listed in the school'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 means an absence.

That is not a criticism of Forest. Plenty of schools publish nothing, and some deliberately publish nothing so that candidates are not coached to a format. It does mean that if you want a Forest 13+ paper, the three above are what is available, and nobody at all publishes the answers.

What Forest sets at 13+ now

These are past papers, not a prediction, and in Forest's case the gap between them and the current exam is real. Forest's own 13+ entry page, read on 8 September 2026, says the school offers a small number of Year 9 places, with the number varying according to the size of the Year 8 cohort coming through, and that candidates should have reached 13 before 1 September in the year of entry. Selection is by entrance examination, interview and a school reference.

The examination itself has changed shape. Forest describes it as two parts: part one is a digital test, and part two is a paper-based assessment of written English for which candidates have thirty minutes. Shortlisted candidates are then interviewed by a senior member of staff about their academic and co-curricular interests. For 2027 entry Forest lists a 13+ open house on 14 January 2027, a registration deadline of midday on 18 January 2027, the entrance exam on 28 January 2027, interviews and academic scholarship interviews on 8 February 2027, offers emailed on 22 February 2027 and an acceptance deadline of midday on 8 March 2027.

Read that against the papers above and the mismatch is obvious: a one-hour handwritten non-calculator Maths paper is not what a digital test looks like, and a one-hour English comprehension is twice the length of the written English section Forest now sets. Always check Forest's own admissions pages for what applies to your child's year of entry.

How to use these three papers anyway

A changed format does not make an old paper worthless. It changes what the paper is for.

• Use the Maths paper for content coverage, not for timing. Whether the arithmetic and reasoning arrive on paper or on a screen, a child still has to be able to do them. Work through the eighteen questions untimed and see which of the reasoning questions defeat them.
• Use the English papers for the writing standard. Both booklets tell the candidate in writing that the quality of their English is being assessed alongside their reading. That has not changed with the format, and it is the single most common thing children lose marks on.
• Use Paper 2 for quotation practice. Three of its six questions ask explicitly for close reference or quotation. Thirty minutes of practice picking a short quotation and saying what it does is worth more than a full mock.
• Do not treat these as a scholarship yardstick. They carry the word scholarship, but they are the same papers Forest used for ordinary entrance, so they do not tell you where a scholarship boundary would sit.

What the £50 covers

The question papers are free — these three 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 and no tier above it. Access lasts a year and any key can be downloaded again in that time.

For a paper like Forest's English Paper 2, where ten marks hang on picking four effective points and explaining what they contribute, the answer key is the only way a parent who did not read the essay themselves can tell whether their child's four points were the right sort. That is the whole reason the keys are written out in sentences rather than set out as a list of acceptable words.

The rest of the collection sits on the 13+ past papers hub, with the subject sets gathered on the 13+ English and 13+ Maths pages. We run the same arrangement at 11+, and everything else is in the resources library. If you are looking further afield, ISEB publishes one free specimen set per subject with its mark scheme.

Questions parents ask before buying