Free 13+ Past Papers by Year

What is actually in this collection

Thirty-six 13+ past papers, from 22 independent schools and ISEB, running to 330 pages of question paper. They divide evenly across three subjects: 12 Maths, 12 English and 12 Biology. There are no languages, humanities or reasoning papers here, and we would rather say that at the top than have you discover it after scrolling.

Arranged by date, the collection has an obvious shape and a couple of gaps. Nine papers were collected in the current 2026 cycle. Then it thins out: three from 2023, one from 2020, and a cluster of fifteen between 2015 and 2019. There is nothing at all from 2021, 2022, 2024 or 2025, and six papers carry no date. The earliest are from 2015.

Eight of the 36 are scholarship papers rather than standard entrance papers — five from Radley College, two from Westminster and one from St George’s College Weybridge. They are flagged in the table, because a scholarship paper is a harder exam than the one most candidates sit and comparing your child against it will give you a needlessly bleak reading.

All 36 papers, newest first

The “year printed on paper” column is the one worth reading. It says whether the year in the left-hand band is printed on the document itself, or is simply the year we collected it. Only twelve of the 36 carry their own date. The section under the table explains what that means for you.

Why only twelve of these papers carry a printed year

We checked. Every one of the 36 PDFs was opened and its first two pages searched for a four-digit year. Twelve print the year on the paper — the Haberdashers’ Aske’s 2015 Biology paper says “13+ Entrance Examination 2015” on its cover, the Westminster papers are dated by the year of The Challenge, the ISEB paper says it is a specimen for first examination in Autumn 2017. The other twenty-four print nothing.

That is not sloppiness on the schools’ part. A specimen paper is meant to sit on a school’s admissions page indefinitely and describe the format rather than a particular sitting, so putting a year on it would date it before it needed to be. Chigwell’s 13+ Maths specimen is headed simply “13+ Maths, Specimen Paper, 45 Minutes”. Truro’s says “13+ MATHEMATICS, SAMPLE”. Emanuel’s says “Mathematics, 13+ Sample Paper, Non-Calculator, 1 hour”.

So the year in our table means one of two things, and the column tells you which. Where it says Yes, the paper says so itself. Where it does not, the year is the year we collected the paper, which is the year the school was publishing it. The nine papers in the 2026 band are all of the second kind: they are the current specimens, not papers dated 2026. Anyone selling you “2026 13+ past papers” without that distinction is selling you a filename.

Does the year of a 13+ paper matter?

Less than parents assume, and more than sellers admit. It depends entirely on one question: has the school changed how it assesses since the paper was written?

When the year barely matters. A school that still sets a written English paper made of a comprehension and a piece of writing is testing in 2026 what it tested in 2016. The passage changes; the skill does not. The same is true of a maths paper pitched at the end of Year 8: number, algebra, angles, ratio, area and probability do not move about. A 2016 paper from a school that has not changed its format is worth exactly as much practice as this year’s, and the older ones have an advantage — your child has almost certainly not seen them.

When the year matters a great deal. If a school has moved to an online adaptive test, or to the ISEB Common Pre-Test sat in Year 6, then its old written paper is a historical document. It will not tell your child what to expect, and worse, it will tell them to expect the wrong thing. That has happened at several schools in this collection since 2020. A pre-test is adaptive, multiple-choice and taken two years earlier than a 13+ paper, and no amount of practice on a Year 8 written paper prepares anyone for it.

The rule that follows is simple. Use these papers for practice at the right level, in the right subject, at the right pace. Do not use them to work out what a particular school will do next year. For that, read the school’s own admissions page, and we have written up which schools publish anything of their own so you know where to look.

Why there is nothing from 2021, 2022, 2024 or 2025

We can tell you what we know and not more. Most independent schools do not maintain a past-paper archive at all. They publish one specimen per subject, and when they replace it the previous version simply disappears from the site. So for most of these schools there is no 2022 paper to have collected — there was one specimen, and now there is a different one.

The exception proves the point. Sevenoaks School keeps a genuine run of Year 9 entrance papers going back several years, and that run is continuous rather than gappy. Where an archive exists, the years fill in; where it does not, you get one snapshot per school and the date of the snapshot is whenever somebody looked.

That is a description of how this collection was built, not an explanation of every missing year. We do not have a documented reason for each gap, and we would rather leave one honestly unexplained than invent a tidy story about it.

What the six undated papers actually are

Six papers carry no date in our catalogue and none on the document: five English papers — from Alleyn’s, Dulwich College, Emanuel and two from Forest School — and one Biology scholarship paper from St George’s College Weybridge.

We could have guessed at years for them from file timestamps and made the table look tidier. We have not, because a guessed year on a past paper is worse than no year: it invites you to treat a paper as current when nobody knows whether it is. Undated means undated.

Which paper should your child sit first?

Start with the subject that worries you, not the school you want. These papers are a diagnostic before they are anything else, and the school on the cover matters far less than the level.

For a first sitting, pick a standard entrance paper rather than one of the eight scholarship papers, and pick one with a stated time limit so the sitting is realistic. Several here are short enough to do on a weekday evening: the Aldenham Biology paper is 20 minutes and 28 marks, the Westminster Challenge Biology paper is 30 minutes. The Maths papers are mostly an hour, and Epsom’s runs to an hour and a half.

Once you have a paper marked, the useful next step is not another paper. It is going through the one you have with the working in front of you — which is what the answer keys are for, and we have printed two of them in full so you can see what that looks like before deciding whether it is worth £50. The same collections exist for 11+ and across the wider resources library. If you want the interactive version of this table, with filters by school and subject, it is on the 13+ papers hub.

A note on what “13+” means here

13+ means entry into Year 9, and the papers are sat in Year 8. That is why a Year 8 past paper is the right level to practise on and a Year 6 pre-test paper is not, even though both get described as “13+” in ordinary conversation.

The one ISEB paper in this collection is a Common Entrance Level 2 Biology specimen. ISEB sets Common Entrance at 13+ for pupils in Year 8, with three examination sessions a year — November, January and May/June — and English, mathematics and science compulsory for every candidate. Everything else here is a school’s own paper.

Questions about the 13+ papers by year