West Midlands 11 plus exam dates and deadlines

The shared timetable

One registration covers all nineteen partnership schools and a child sits the test once. These dates are published identically by the consortium, by the King Edward VI Foundation, by Queen Mary's Grammar School in Walsall, by Newport Girls' High School and by Birmingham City Council, so they are the spine of the cycle.

Only children born between 1 September 2015 and 31 August 2016 could register for this cycle, a rule Birmingham City Council states alongside the Foundation.

This is the detail most summaries get wrong. The test is shared, the marking is shared and the registration is shared, but the two Telford and Wrekin schools sit it on a different day from everyone else, and both dates are published by the schools themselves.

When does the council application close?

31 October 2026, for entry in September 2027, everywhere in England. Registering for the entrance test is not an application for a school place: the application goes to the council where you pay your council tax, on the common application form, and it is a separate job with its own deadline. The opening date, the exact closing time and the number of schools you may name differ by council, and all eleven West Midlands authorities are set out row by row on secondary transfer in the West Midlands, along with national offer day on Monday 1 March 2027 and what follows it.

Dudley has no selective schools of its own. Its admissions pages describe grammar schools as an option outside the borough, so a Dudley family registers through the same shared portal, sits the test at an allocated centre elsewhere, and applies to Dudley on the Dudley form.

Working backwards from the September of Year 6? Start a free week of Pathway Eleven and let the daily plan handle the sequencing.

Put the dates in your calendar

A calendar file with the shared timetable above, including both test dates, is here: download the West Midlands 11 plus dates (.ics). It is a plain static file, it asks for nothing and it opens in Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook and anything else that reads iCalendar. Each entry names the source it came from.

Two of the entries are worth a reminder a few weeks early rather than on the day: the registration deadline, because it cannot be recovered from, and the council preference deadline, because it is a separate step that the schools do not do for you.

What is not on this page, and why?

Everything above is a transcription of a date published by a school, the consortium or a council. Where a body has not published, we have left the cell empty and said so rather than borrowing a plausible date from a sister school. As at 31 August 2026 the gaps were these.

• Queen Mary's High School, Walsall. Its website could not be read at the time of checking, so no date is shown for it. Its brother school, Queen Mary's Grammar School, publishes the shared timetable, but assuming the two match is inference rather than evidence. Check the school's own site.
• Wolverhampton Girls' High School. The school publishes its Year 7 2027 timeline as an image rather than as text, so its individual dates could not be read and are not reproduced. It is a named partnership school, so the shared registration deadline applied to it. Check the school's admissions page.
• Results, application and offer dates for Haberdashers' Adams. Its Year 7 page publishes the registration window and the test date but describes the rest of the year only in months, so only the two specific dates are shown here.
• Qualifying scores for this cycle. Most schools set and publish these after the test. Where a school has published one, it is covered on our page on Birmingham standardised scores, alongside the published cut-off history.
• Walsall and Telford and Wrekin council dates, as noted in the table above.

Pathway Eleven has no connection to any admissions body and cannot register a child, confirm eligibility or advise on catchment. Dates change, and the page you are reading may have aged. Before you act on anything here, open the source link in the row and read it for yourself.

What does this mean in Year 4 or Year 5?

Look at the shape rather than the specific dates. Registration falls in the May and June of Year 5. The test falls fifteen weeks later, at the very start of Year 6, which means the last full term of useful preparation is the summer term of Year 5 and the holiday after it. Results and the council form land within six weeks of the test, and the whole thing is decided by the following March.

The practical consequence is that the work has to be done before the year that carries the exam, not during it. A family that starts in the autumn of Year 5 has three terms. A family that starts in Year 4 has six, which is the difference between building reading and vocabulary properly and trying to compress them.

The one date to hold on to is the registration deadline. Everything else in the cycle is a consequence of it, and it is the only one that preparation cannot rescue. Put a reminder in the spring of Year 5 to check the consortium site for that year's published window, and diarise the closing time as well as the closing day.

Pathway Eleven is an online 11 plus preparation service that gives each child a personalised daily plan of revision, guided teaching, timed practice and full mock papers, with every question reviewed and approved by a qualified teacher. A Starting Assessment finds the level first, so the plan gives more attention to whichever area is weakest rather than spreading time evenly out of habit. One monthly price covers all of it, and the first week is free.

The dates above are the same for every school in the partnership. What differs is the school itself, and each page below covers one of them.

The West Midlands 11 plus entrance test page explains the papers themselves, and links every school in one place.

The dates above are the region's. What differs is the area: two registration portals with different closing times, two test dates, and thresholds published in some places and not in others. Those live on the area pages: the Birmingham 11 plus, the Walsall 11 plus, the Wolverhampton 11 plus, the Warwickshire 11 plus and the Shropshire and Telford 11 plus.

Two more pages cover the moments the cycle turns on: how to register for the West Midlands 11 plus, and what a West Midlands 11 plus result means and what happens next.