Where to Find Free 13+ Past Papers

The short answer

We took the 22 independent schools whose 13+ papers sit in our own collection and checked every one of them at source on 8 September 2026. The question was narrow: does this school publish a 13+ or Year 9 paper that anyone can download free, and does it publish a mark scheme with it?

Ten of the 22 publish at least one paper free. Three publish a mark scheme. And of the ten, five publish only scholarship papers, which are a harder exam than the one most candidates sit.

That is the whole landscape, and it is worth knowing before you spend an evening searching. Below is the table, then how we checked, then what to do if your school is one of the twelve that publishes nothing.

School by school: who publishes what

Every link below was loaded on the day of writing. Where a school publishes nothing we say so plainly rather than sending you to a page that will waste your time.

How we checked, and why a working link proves nothing

A link that loads is not evidence that a file exists. Some sites answer every URL with a page, so a fetch that appears to succeed can have returned nothing at all. If you have ever followed a promising past-paper link and landed on a school’s homepage, this is why.

So before trusting any result from a host, we asked that host for a URL we knew could not exist — a made-up path with a random number on the end — and recorded what came back. A host that answers 404 is telling the truth about what it does and does not have. A host that answers 200 is not, and every result from it has to be confirmed by looking at the content rather than the status code.

Twenty-two of the twenty-four hosts passed. Two did not, and they are exactly the sort of thing that produces a confidently wrong answer:

Forest School’s apex domain quietly discards whatever path you asked for and serves the homepage with a 200. Any forest.org.uk/<anything> link therefore looks alive while returning nothing you asked for; the www host behaves properly. St George’s College Weybridge is the harder case: it returns the same 3,848-byte page for every URL, including the deliberately impossible one, because the site is assembled in the browser rather than on the server. Its 13+ papers are genuinely there — we opened the page in a browser and read them out of the expanded panel — but no ordinary link check could have told you that.

The same discipline applies to search results. Several schools still have 13+ paper URLs sitting in search engines that now return 404, and several more have old PDFs that do still load but are linked from no current page and describe an exam the school has since replaced. A file that resolves is not the same as a file the school is offering you.

The three schools that publish a mark scheme

Dulwich College is the most complete. Its Year 9 entry page carries a Maths specimen paper and an English specimen paper, and a separate mark scheme for each. If Dulwich is your school, that is everything you need and it costs nothing.

St Francis’ College publishes a Year 9 English practice paper with marking information, and a Year 9 Maths practice paper with answers. Both pairs are on one page, clearly labelled.

Sevenoaks School is the only school here keeping a real archive: Year 9 English and Maths entrance papers across a run of years rather than a single specimen. It publishes one Maths mark scheme, described on its own page as an example to show how the papers are assessed. One mark scheme across a dozen papers is not full coverage, but it is more than nineteen other schools offer.

ISEB: free specimens with mark schemes, and past papers for sale

ISEB, which sets Common Entrance, splits the difference in a way worth understanding. It publishes a free specimen set for each subject, and the mark schemes come with them — the Common Entrance 13+ Maths specimen, for instance, downloads as a single package whose own filename says it contains both the papers and the mark schemes. At 13+ that covers ten subject areas: Maths, English, Science, French, German, Spanish, History, Geography, Classics and Theology, Philosophy and Religion.

The real past papers are sold, not given away. ISEB’s own Common Entrance page says its online shop is now the only place to order past papers for Common Entrance and for the CASE scholarship exams.

One thing we will not tell you, because it is not ours to predict: what happens to Common Entrance next. ISEB has said it is consulting schools about the future of Common Entrance and prep school assessment. A consultation is not a withdrawal, and anyone telling you the 13+ Common Entrance is being scrapped is going further than ISEB has. Check ISEB’s own pages rather than a forum.

Scholarship papers are not entrance papers

This is the trap in the middle of the table. Five of the ten schools that publish anything publish only scholarship material: Epsom College, Radley College, St Albans, St George’s Weybridge and Westminster. Radley’s archive in particular is enormous — well over a hundred papers across most subjects — and it is genuinely free and genuinely useful. It is also an academic scholarship examination.

A scholarship paper is written to separate the strongest candidates from each other, not to decide whether a child can cope with Year 9. Sitting one cold and marking it against an ordinary expectation will produce a score that frightens a parent for no good reason. Use them as stretch work once the standard papers are comfortable, and do not read a low mark on one as a verdict.

Our own collection has the same hazard, and we flag it the same way: eight of the 36 papers we hold are scholarship papers, and they are marked as such in the table by year.

What if your school publishes nothing?

Twelve of the twenty-two publish nothing at all for 13+, and for some of them the reason is simply that they no longer admit at 13. Bancroft’s lists its standard entry points as 7+, 11+ and 16+. Colfe’s lists 3+, 4+, 7+, 11+ and 16+. Merchant Taylors’ has admissions pages for joining at 11 and joining at 16, and none for 13. If a school is not admitting at 13+, no amount of searching will produce a 13+ paper, and the sensible move is to check the entry points before you look for papers at all.

Where the school does still admit at 13+ but publishes nothing — Chigwell, by contrast, lists 13+ as a full senior-school entry point and does publish — there are three honest options. Write to the admissions office and ask; some send a specimen paper on request even when they do not host one. Practise on another school’s paper at the same level, since a Year 8 maths paper is a Year 8 maths paper whoever set it. Or use a collection like ours, which exists precisely because this gap is real.

What we would not do is trust a third-party site that has scraped a school’s paper and cannot tell you when, or whether the school still uses that format. If you cannot trace a paper back to the school that set it, you do not know what you are practising for.

Where that leaves our own pack

We are not going to pretend this table makes the case for buying. For a family applying to Dulwich College alone, it makes the opposite case, and we would rather say so than have you find out afterwards and feel sold to.

What the table does show is the shape of the problem for everyone else. Papers are findable; answers are not. Nineteen of these twenty-two schools publish no mark scheme, and five of the ten that publish papers publish the wrong sort. A parent sitting four or five papers across several schools ends up with a stack of unmarkable material and no way to turn a wrong answer into a lesson.

That is what the 36-paper collection is for: every paper free, and a worked answer key for every one of them for £50 in total, which is £1.39 a paper with access for a year. Before deciding, read two of those answer keys printed in full, so you are judging the thing rather than the description of it. The same collections exist for 11+ and across the rest of the resources library.

Questions about finding free 13+ papers