Haberdashers' Adams is a selective state grammar school in Newport, Shropshire, taking boys and girls from eleven on the shared West Midlands entrance test, and offering boarding to boys. This page covers Haberdashers' Adams entry at eleven by the GL Assessment test, for children now in Year 3 to Year 5, and not sixth form, fees or A levels.
What kind of school is Haberdashers' Adams?
It is a selective state grammar school for boys and girls aged eleven to eighteen, sitting in what it calls the rural market town of Newport in Shropshire. It is also one of a very few selective state schools in the country with a boarding facility, and it states that there is no charge for tuition.
The foundation is old and unusual. William Adams, a merchant Haberdasher with family connections in the area, founded the school in 1656, leaving money and estates to the Haberdashers' Company and installing the Master and Wardens of that Company as Governors. Today the school is part of the Haberdashers' West Midlands Academies Trust.
Its strapline, traditional values and a modern approach, is a fair summary of how it presents itself, and pupils are organised into houses. For families across Shropshire and the counties beside it, the draw is usually the combination: a grammar entry route with a boarding option attached and no fees standing behind it.
Who is admitted, and who can board?
Day places are open to boys and girls. Boarding is not. The school welcomes boys and girls aged eleven to eighteen as day pupils and offers boarding for boys only, which is worth settling early if you have a daughter and the boarding was the reason you started looking here.
None of it changes the academic route in. Boarding and day places sit behind the same entrance test at eleven. How the school handles boarding applications is set out in its own published arrangements, and that document, not this page, is the one to read before deciding anything.
How does entry at eleven work?
Adams does not set its own paper. It belongs to the West Midlands Grammar Schools Partnership, and one shared entrance test covers the whole group. Your child sits it once, in September of Year 6, and the result reaches every partnership school you have named. The paper itself is set by GL Assessment, the assessment publisher the partnership uses, so the format is the same at every school in the group.
There are two multiple-choice papers, each timetabled at roughly fifty to sixty minutes, with the instructions and the worked examples coming out of that rather than being added to it. Neither paper belongs to one subject: both move between comprehension, verbal reasoning, mathematics and non-verbal work with spatial questions in it. English and verbal reasoning together carry half the marks, mathematics a quarter, non-verbal reasoning the last quarter.
Answers go on a separate sheet. Slip a row and a run of correct answers is recorded as wrong, and children almost never notice until the marks come back.
Register in Year 5, apply in Year 6: registration for the entrance test is done online by a parent during the summer term of Year 5, in a short window that primary schools neither manage nor reliably flag. Applying for a school place is a separate step, taken with your local council in the autumn of Year 6.
Check this first: this page carries no intake figures, no qualifying score, no catchment description and no dates, because all four move from year to year and the copies circulating on tutoring forums contradict each other. Two sources are worth your time:
Haberdashers' Adams official website and the partnership's own site. Check the school's official admissions page for this year's figures.
Pathway Eleven has no connection to Haberdashers' Adams, to the partnership or to any admissions authority. We cannot register a child, confirm eligibility, or say anything about catchment or your chances. Pathway Eleven is an independent service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by GL Assessment.
What should we practise first?
Weight your effort the way the test weights its marks. Reading and vocabulary do the heaviest lifting, because comprehension and verbal reasoning decide half the outcome between them, and neither improves quickly. A child who has been reading widely since Year 4 starts from a place one summer cannot reach.
Non-verbal reasoning behaves differently. Progress is fast at the start, once a child has met the question types, and then it levels off. Meeting it early collects most of what is available. Mathematics is usually about pace and multi-step problems rather than unfamiliar content.
The specific thing to rehearse is the switching. A single paper will move a child from a passage to a word puzzle to arithmetic to a shape sequence, and holding accuracy across those turns is a skill that only comes from doing it against a clock.
Questions parents ask about Haberdashers' Adams
Is Haberdashers' Adams a boys' school?+
Not at eleven. It is a selective state grammar school for boys and girls aged eleven to eighteen, so day places are co-educational. Boarding is the part that is boys only, which catches out families who assume the two things go together.
Does the school charge for boarding?+
The school states that there is no charge for tuition. That is the point of a state boarding school, and it is not the same as saying boarding itself costs a family nothing. The school's own boarding pages are the only reliable place to check what you would pay.
Does Adams set its own entrance exam?+
No. It uses the shared West Midlands Grammar Schools entrance test, sat once in September of Year 6. The same result is sent to every partnership school a family has named, so there is no separate Adams paper to prepare for.
Other schools in this consortium
Haberdashers' Adams is one of the partnership's Shropshire, Wolverhampton and Walsall schools. The shared entrance test covers all of them, so naming more than one costs a family nothing extra in preparation.
- Newport Girls' High School, girls, in Newport, Shropshire.
- Queen Mary's Grammar School, boys, in Walsall.
- Queen Mary's High School, girls, in Walsall.
- Wolverhampton Girls' High School, girls, in Wolverhampton.
Where to go next
- The West Midlands 11 plus entrance test, the shared test in full, with every partnership school listed.
- What the 11 plus actually is, the whole process from registration to offer, in order.
- 11 plus preparation in Year 5, the year the registration window opens and closes.
- 11 plus English comprehension, half the marks start with reading a passage properly.