Westminster School 13+ Past Papers

We hold three Westminster School 13+ Biology papers. All three are papers from The Challenge, Westminster's scholarship examination, and all three run to 33 marks in 30 minutes. They are listed below with the examination date printed on each cover, and each downloads as a free PDF.

A note on what our own catalogue calls them

Two of these three arrived in our collection labelled scholarship papers and the third labelled a sample paper. That labelling is wrong, and rather than quietly fix a filename we would rather say why. Open the 2019 PDF and its cover reads WESTMINSTER SCHOOL, THE CHALLENGE 2019, BIOLOGY, Thursday 2 May 2019. The 2015 cover reads THE CHALLENGE 2015 and the 2016 cover reads THE CHALLENGE 2016. All three are Challenge papers, which means all three are scholarship papers, which means none of them is a fair measure of whether a child is at the standard for an ordinary place.

What is in each of the three papers

Every one of the three is built the same way: three questions labelled B1, B2 and B3, 30 minutes, 33 marks, answers written in the spaces provided in black or blue ink, and a total box on the front for the examiner. Inside that identical frame the style moves noticeably across the four years.

The Challenge 2015 — Thursday 30 April 2015. B1 shows six notes pinned to a garden-centre noticeboard and asks the candidate to match each to a biological principle: selective breeding, minimising competition, predator–prey interactions, preventing inbreeding, increasing the rate of photosynthesis, and asexual reproduction. Three marks, and the whole thing is an exercise in reading a real-world instruction and recognising the science underneath it. B2 gives cattle feed and asks for reasons why it is rich in protein, why amylase is sometimes added and why antibiotics are, worth two, three and two marks. B3 sets up the red and grey squirrel: one species in Britain at the start of the nineteenth century, another introduced from the USA in 1879, with the grey larger, more ground-dwelling and less frightened of people, and asks the candidate to explain the collapse in red squirrel numbers from those facts.

The Challenge 2016 — Thursday 28 April 2016. B1 is a five-mark table with one row completed as an example: given “site of aerobic respiration in the cell” the answer is mitochondrion, and the candidate must supply the missing terms and the missing definitions in both directions, including for the words gene and limewater. B2 is the menstrual cycle presented as a graph with two hormone traces labelled A and B: which maintains the uterus lining, which builds it, which triggers ovulation, where fertilisation happens, how sperm and egg cells are adapted to their functions for four marks, and a one-mark question asking the candidate to define male and female in terms of the gametes an organism produces. B3 gives plankton drawn to scale and a graph of plant plankton through the year, and asks the candidate to describe and explain what happens to the animal plankton population between January and the end of July.

The Challenge 2019 — Thursday 2 May 2019. The most modern of the three in style. B1 is seven multiple-choice questions worth seven marks, with the paper stating explicitly that there is no negative marking. B2 is data handling: scientists fed indigestible particles to 24 mammal species ranging from a 50 g elephant shrew to a 220 kg ox and timed how long the particles stayed in the gut. The candidate is given the scatter and the scientists' conclusion that food stays longer in larger mammals, and asked to discuss the evidence for and against that statement for three marks — a question about the limits of a data set rather than about digestion. B3 is biological pest control, with ladybirds preying on aphids in an arable field surrounded by hedgerows, and asks for one advantage and one disadvantage of a farmer relying on it.

Across the three papers the direction of travel is clear: away from recall and towards graphs, data and the honest evaluation of evidence. If your child is preparing for a modern selective science paper anywhere, the 2019 paper is the most representative of the three.

The Challenge has been redesigned, and Science has changed shape

This is the most important thing on this page. Westminster's bursaries and scholarships page, read on 8 September 2026, sets out a new structure for The Challenge with a first examination in 2027. There are now seven core papers — English, French, General, Geography and History, Latin, Mathematics and Science — each 60 minutes long apart from Science, which is 90 minutes. Candidates with no Latin or no French sit a Linguistics and Language paper instead. On top of the core papers, candidates choose two specialisms from a list that includes an Art practical, Drama monologues, a French oral, Greek, an interdisciplinary Humanities paper and supplementary Maths and English papers.

So the 30-minute standalone Biology paper that all three of our papers represent no longer exists in The Challenge. Science is now one 90-minute paper. Westminster also publishes, free, a syllabus and guidance document and a specimen paper for every one of those core subjects, Science included, and for most of the specialisms. If your child is sitting The Challenge in 2027 or later, download Westminster's own Science specimen paper and guidance first: it is the current thing, and it is free.

Where these three still earn their place is as extra Biology material in the format Westminster used to think in, and as a record of what its examiners chose to ask. A child who can handle the 2019 data-evaluation question will handle a modern science paper. A child who cannot has found something worth working on, whatever the paper is called.

How Westminster admits at 13+ now

Scholarship and ordinary entry are two different processes and it is easy to confuse them. Westminster's 13+ entry page, read on 8 September 2026, describes the ordinary route: parents register when a child is in Year 5, the child sits the ISEB Common Pre-Tests in Mathematics, English and Reasoning online at their prep school during October or November of Year 6, and candidates who do well are invited in mid-December for further tests in Mathematics and English of 40 minutes each in early January, followed by an interview in January or February. Westminster says it receives around 500 applications a year and invites about 250 candidates to interview, and that around 125 children join in Year 9. The first girls will enter in Year 9 in 2028.

The Challenge sits alongside that. Westminster describes it as the examination a pupil in Year 8 takes to be considered for a 13+ King's Scholarship, with Head Master's Awards for overall academic excellence and strong subject-specific performance alongside it. It is sat annually at Westminster in mid-May; the application form must be counter-signed by the candidate's current head teacher and returned by 28 February of Year 8, and the form and information booklet become available in October of Year 8 from the 13+ admissions administrator. Candidates do not need to hold a place to sit it, though a regular place will not follow if no King's Scholarship is awarded. Check Westminster's own pages for the year your child is applying, because these are the details most likely to move.

What is missing from this set

Three Biology papers and nothing else. We hold no Westminster Maths paper, no Westminster English paper, no Chemistry or Physics paper from the same Challenge sittings, and nothing at all from the ordinary 13+ entry route. Nor do we hold The Challenge papers for the years between 2016 and 2019, or anything after 2019. Three papers across four years is a sample, not an archive, and the gaps are as informative as the holdings: they mean this page is worth reading for what a Westminster Biology examiner asked, and is not worth treating as a full preparation set.

There is one more absence worth naming. Westminster's ISEB Common Pre-Test is taken online and adaptively, so there is no such thing as a Westminster pre-test past paper to find — not from us, not from Westminster, and not from anyone selling one. Westminster says on its own 13+ entry page that no special preparation is needed for those tests and points parents at the ISEB website for example questions. If a site offers you Westminster pre-test past papers, that is worth a second look.

How to use a 33-mark Challenge paper

• Give it 30 minutes, not an hour. The pressure is part of the paper. Three questions, 33 marks, half an hour: roughly a minute a mark with nothing spare.
• Do the graph questions with a pencil in hand. Two of the three papers turn on reading a graph properly, and the 2019 paper asks for evidence against a conclusion as well as for it.
• Do not skip the one-mark definitions. The 2016 paper asks for definitions of male and female in terms of gametes for a single mark, and it is the sort of question a well-taught child gets wrong by writing too much.
• Read them alongside Westminster's current Science specimen. The comparison is instructive in itself, and it is the fastest way to see what has changed.

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 of them: £1.39 a paper, paid once, no subscription, nothing above it to buy, and a year of access with unlimited re-downloads.

The keys are written out in sentences. On a question like the 2019 digestion item, where three marks are given for discussing evidence for and against a stated conclusion, a list of correct facts is useless to a parent; what helps is seeing which observation about the scatter earns which mark. That is what these keys do, and it is the reason they exist at all: the papers are easy to find, the marking is not.

The rest of the collection is on the 13+ past papers hub, with every Biology paper we hold gathered on the 13+ science past papers page. We run the same arrangement at 11+, and everything else is in the resources library. For a format-neutral comparison, ISEB publishes one free specimen set per subject with its mark scheme.

Questions parents ask before buying