Grammar School Index

What is the 11+?

A plain explanation of England's grammar school entrance test — who sets it, what it covers, and why it looks different depending on where you live.

The “11+” isn’t one exam. It’s a catch-all name for whatever entrance test a grammar school — or a group of them — uses to decide who gets a place, and the details vary enormously depending on where you live.

Who actually sets the test

Three providers cover most of the country:

  • GL Assessment is the most widely used. It sets the Kent Test, the Buckinghamshire Secondary Transfer Test, and the shared tests used by consortiums in Gloucestershire, Trafford, and Bournemouth/Christchurch/Poole, among others.
  • CEM (the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring, run by Durham University) built its reputation on being harder to coach for, since it leaned more on reasoning than curriculum recall — but CEM stopped supplying 11+ tests to schools in recent years, and areas that used it (including Trafford, until 2023, and Torbay, until 2024) have switched to GL Assessment or other providers.
  • ISEB’s pre-test is mostly an independent-school tool rather than a grammar school one, though a handful of grammar schools use commercial providers with a similar adaptive, online format.

A meaningful number of schools don’t use any of the big three. Colyton Grammar School and both Plymouth girls’ grammars, for instance, contract Quest Assessments directly rather than going through a county-wide provider.

What it actually tests

Historically, an 11+ paper covered up to four areas: verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, maths, and English. That combination is getting less common. Several areas — Essex and Southend’s CSSE consortium, Devon’s Colyton, the Torbay schools — now test only English and maths, having dropped reasoning papers entirely. Where a paper is still used, it’s usually because the local system hasn’t switched, not because reasoning content is coming back into fashion.

The one thing that trips people up: there’s rarely a real “pass mark”

Most areas don’t set a fixed score you need to beat. Instead:

  • Local-authority-coordinated systems (Kent, Buckinghamshire) publish a qualifying threshold that determines whether you’re “grammar-eligible” at all, but getting a place at a specific school then depends on catchment, distance, or — at a genuinely superselective school — how you rank against everyone else.
  • Schools acting as their own admissions authority (most of London’s superselectives, the Gloucestershire and Trafford consortiums) usually rank every candidate and take the top of the list until places run out. The “pass mark” is just whatever score the last-admitted child happened to get that year — which moves depending on how many people apply and how well they do.

That’s why you’ll see “verify with school” on a lot of qualifying-score fields across this site rather than a number: for a large share of grammar schools, no fixed number exists to report. It isn’t a gap in our research — it’s how the system is actually designed.

Last updated 2026-08-30.