Radley School 13+ Past Papers

We hold five Radley School 13+ past papers. Every one is Biology, every one is a scholarship paper, and every one runs to 33 marks. They are listed below with the year printed on the paper and the format we found inside it, and each downloads as a free PDF.

What is actually in each of the five papers

These are not question-and-answer science papers. Every Radley Biology scholarship paper we hold opens with a long piece of prose — usually a page and a half of natural-history writing — and then asks a child to work on it. A candidate who has revised photosynthesis and respiration but never read a science article for pleasure will find the format harder than the content.

2015 — Parrots: The Lost and the Last. The passage covers the cage-bird trade, deforestation and the extinction of Spix's macaw. Eleven questions follow, worth 33 marks. They include the ten-word vocabulary question described below, two one-mark counting questions taken straight from the text, a two-mark question on why island species are prone to extinction, a five-mark persuasive paragraph answering the line “Conserving parrots is pointless — why bother?”, a labelled parrot cell, and a food chain and food web built from a short block of information the paper supplies.

2016 — Arctic canids. Headed Scholarship Examination, SCIENCE – BIOLOGY, March 2016, this is the only one of the five that states the whole science timing: 90 minutes for all three science papers. Eight questions, 33 marks. The paper asks for an Arctic food web, an explanation of whether North American canid species coexist or compete, two conservation problems with a suggested solution for each, and an unusual four-mark question asking why fox fur ranching was acceptable in 1886 and is an animal-welfare issue now. The paper also tells candidates in writing that they are expected to write accurate, grammatical, well-punctuated prose throughout.

2017 — Game of Thorns. A passage on the saguaro cactus, Harris's hawk and the loggerhead shrike. Eight questions, 33 marks. Three adaptations of the saguaro; two birds and two mammals named from the passage; two differences between reptiles and amphibians; whether frogs or lizards should be commoner in a desert, with a printed hint to think about life cycles; a food chain involving the hawk; and a six-mark open question inviting the candidate to pick any habitat and describe how its plants and animals are adapted to it.

2018 — Père David's Deer. Thirty minutes, 33 marks, six questions. The passage is the story of a French missionary naturalist finding an unknown deer in the Imperial Hunting Park outside Peking in 1865. The questions ask why European scientists took so long to find the species, what made it vulnerable, and — for ten marks, the single biggest question on any of the five papers — a two-column table of good points and bad points about zoos. It closes by asking what class of animal a deer is and naming the four other vertebrate classes.

2019 — the K–T extinction event. Thirty minutes, 33 marks, nine questions. The passage is a vivid reconstruction of the last day of the Cretaceous. Candidates are asked for three ways Tyrannosaurus rex was adapted to the top of the food chain, two predators and two herbivores from the text, two differences between reptiles and birds, whether ankylosaurs were predators or prey, a four-organism food chain, three things that wrecked the ecosystem within fifteen minutes of the impact, which organisms survived and why, and a five-mark answer on climate change today.

The one pattern that runs through all five

Question 1 is the same question every year. It lists ten words picked out in bold in the passage — threatened, deforestation, gene pool and inbreeding in 2015; niche, latitude and hybrids in 2016; cooperatively, raptors and dismember in 2017; zoologically, poaching and perished in 2018; Cretaceous period, retinas and gliding in 2019 — and asks what each means. It is worth 10 marks out of 33 on all five papers.

That is close to a third of the paper, every year, for vocabulary. It is the single most reliable thing we can tell you about preparing for a Radley Biology scholarship paper, and it is available to anyone who reads five papers side by side, which is exactly why we say it here rather than pretending it is a secret. Two of the papers go further and repeat their structure almost question for question: 2017 and 2019 both run ten words, then “three ways X was adapted”, then “name two of these and two of those”, then “two differences between”, then a hinted reasoning question, then a food chain.

Why a scholarship paper is the wrong yardstick

All five of these are scholarship papers, and that matters more than it sounds. A scholarship paper is set to separate the strongest candidates in a field that has already been selected; an entrance paper is set to find out whether a child can cope with the school. They are different instruments, and a child who scores 60 per cent on a scholarship paper has not failed anything.

Use them as stretch material. If your child is preparing for a standard 13+ science paper somewhere else, these are good for reading stamina, for the discipline of answering from a passage, and for the habit of writing in sentences under time pressure. What they are not good for is deciding whether a child is on track, because the reference point is wrong. If you want a fair yardstick, use a standard entrance paper — there are 13+ Biology entrance papers from other schools in the wider 13+ science past papers collection.

Does Radley publish its own 13+ papers?

Yes, and generously. Radley's academic scholarship information page, which we read on 8 September 2026, carries a past-paper archive running from 2020 to 2026. Each year lists an Academic Scholarship Report and papers in Maths (two of them), English, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, French, a Common Paper and a Language Aptitude Test, with History, Geography and Religious Studies appearing in several years too.

So if you want the most recent Radley Biology scholarship paper, go and get it from Radley. Our five run from 2015 to 2019 and fill in the years before Radley's own archive starts. What Radley does not publish anywhere on that page is a mark scheme or a set of answers — we checked, and there are none. That is the gap the £50 key fills, for these five and for the 31 other papers in the collection.

What Radley sets at 13+ now

These are past papers, not a forecast. Radley's own scholarship pages, read on 8 September 2026, describe an Academic Scholarship for 13+ entry assessed in the Michaelmas and Lent terms of Year 8, in two stages. Stage One is sat at the candidate's current school and includes a two-hour English paper and a one-hour Maths Paper 1. Stage Two is sat at Radley — 25 February 2027 for that year's round — and includes a 90-minute Science paper, a 60-minute Maths Paper 2, interviews and a whole-group activity. Candidates who are not shortlisted for Stage Two still sit the Science and Maths papers at their own school, and Radley says that candidates who have performed well at both stages are exempt from Common Entrance.

The 90-minute Science paper in that description is the same shape as the one our 2016 paper describes, which is why the Biology sections are 30 minutes and 33 marks. Always check Radley's own admissions and scholarship pages for what applies to your child's year of entry, because the timetable and the shortlisting arrangements are the parts most likely to move.

How to use these five papers

The obvious way is one paper a week under timed conditions, and it is not the best one. Because Question 1 is worth ten marks for ten words, and because it comes first, a child who does not know the vocabulary loses a third of the paper before reaching any biology. Try it the other way round: read the passage aloud together with no clock, stop at every bold word, and only then start the thirty minutes.

• Read for the format, not the topic. Parrots, cacti, deer and dinosaurs are interchangeable. The skill being tested is reading a piece of adult science writing and answering from it.
• Do the food-chain questions on paper. Four of the five papers ask for a food chain or a food web drawn from the passage. It is the most repeated content skill in the set.
• Practise the long open question. Every paper ends with something worth five or six marks that has no single right answer — habitats, zoos, climate change. These are where a worked answer earns its keep, because a parent can see what a marker was actually crediting.
• Do not mark it out of 33 and panic. See the section above on why a scholarship paper is not a yardstick.

What the £50 covers

The question papers are free — all five here and all 36 in the collection. The £50 unlocks the worked answer key for every one of them, which works out at £1.39 a paper, paid once, with no subscription and nothing above it to buy. Access lasts a year and you can download any key again during that time.

The keys are written out, not tabulated. For a paper like Radley's, where a question asks for three ways a cactus is adapted to a desert and awards three marks, the difference between “spines, shallow roots, stem storage” and a sentence explaining what a marker is crediting in each is the whole value. That is what you are paying for.

If Radley is not the only school on your list, the rest of the collection is on the 13+ past papers hub, with the Biology papers gathered on the 13+ science page. We keep the same free-papers-plus-paid-answers arrangement for 11+ past papers, and everything else sits in the resources library. If you are hunting more widely, ISEB publishes one free specimen set per subject with its mark scheme.

Questions parents ask before buying