The 11 plus exam is the entrance test for grammar schools and some independent schools, taken near the start of Year 6 when children are ten or eleven. It samples English, mathematics, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning, and it ranks children against everyone else sitting the same paper.
Eleven plus exams: who sits them, at what age, and how they differ by region
Eleven plus exams differ by region. The West Midlands consortium uses GL Assessment. Other areas use CEM style papers or a school's own test. If your child is applying to a West Midlands grammar school, GL Assessment is the format to prepare for, and practising the wrong format wastes months. The 11 plus tests are the same two papers for every school in the partnership.
Children sit the test in the autumn term of Year 6, at ten or eleven years old depending on where their birthday falls in the school year. Nobody is entered automatically. A parent registers their child during Year 5, before a closing date set by whoever runs the test locally, and a child who is not registered simply does not sit it.
That opt-in matters more than it sounds, because it shapes what the result means. The children in the hall are not a cross-section of the country. They are the children whose families chose to enter them, which in practice means a group that skews towards those who have prepared. A child can be well above average nationally and still finish outside the places available.
The proportion of children entered varies enormously by area. In some places a large share of a primary class sits it and the test is an ordinary part of the year. In others it is a handful of children, and a child can be the only one in their class doing it, which is its own kind of pressure.
What does the 11 plus test?
Four areas appear across 11 plus papers. Which of them a particular test uses, and how heavily each is weighted, is set locally, so the first useful thing any family can do is find out what their own test actually contains before buying anything.
| Area | What comes up | Taught at primary school? |
|---|---|---|
| English | Comprehension of an unseen passage, plus vocabulary, spelling, punctuation and grammar. Some tests add a writing task. | Yes, though the passages are longer and older in style than most children meet in class. |
| Mathematics | Number, fractions, percentages, ratio, measure, shape, position and data, usually inside multi-step word problems. | Yes, but asked faster and with the working steps hidden inside the wording. |
| Verbal reasoning | Word puzzles: codes, letter sequences, analogies, hidden words, odd ones out, compound words. | Rarely. The vocabulary behind it is taught; the question formats almost never are. |
| Non-verbal reasoning | Shape and pattern puzzles: rotations, reflections, sequences, matrices, nets and cube views. | No. Most children meet these formats for the first time in practice material. |
The two reasoning areas are where families are most often caught out. A child can be top of their class in English and mathematics and still open a verbal reasoning paper with no idea what is being asked, because nothing in the school day looks like it. That is a familiarity problem rather than an ability problem, and it disappears quickly with exposure.
Not sure which of the four your child is weakest in? Start a free week of Pathway Eleven and the Starting Assessment answers that in one sitting.
When does the 11 plus happen?
The sitting itself falls in the autumn term of Year 6, early enough that results can reach families before secondary school preferences are due. The national deadline for secondary applications in England is 31 October, and the whole 11 plus timetable is built backwards from it.
Registration is the part that catches people out. It typically opens in the spring of Year 5 and closes weeks or months before the test, and a missed closing date cannot be fixed by any amount of good preparation. Dates move year to year and differ between areas, so check the timetable your own area publishes rather than a date you read on a forum. Put the closing date in the family calendar the moment you find it.
The one date worth chasing down early: registration closes long before the test, sometimes in the summer term of Year 5. Everything else in the 11 plus calendar has some flexibility in it. That one does not.
Are grammar schools free, and who sets the test?
A grammar school is a state secondary that selects by ability. It is funded like any other state school and charges no fees, which is the difference between it and an independent school that also selects. What it does have is a test, and the point most families miss at the start is that nobody sets that test nationally.
Who writes and administers the paper depends entirely on where you live. In some areas the local authority runs the whole process for all its selective schools. In others a group of schools has formed a consortium and shares one test between them, so a child sits once and is considered by every school in the group. Elsewhere a single school runs its own arrangements and its own dates. That is why two families in different counties can describe the 11 plus to each other and find they are describing different things.
What a lot of those arrangements have in common is the publisher behind the paper. GL Assessment is an assessment publisher whose 11 plus papers a number of selective areas use, and it is the publisher behind the shared West Midlands Grammar Schools entrance test. If you have been told your child is sitting a CEM paper, is the CEM 11 plus still used sets out what is published today. So alongside the local authority paper and the single school writing its own, a third arrangement is common: a consortium that decides who may sit and how places are allocated, and buys the paper itself from a publisher.
Pathway Eleven is an independent service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by GL Assessment.
It also means there is one document that outranks anything you will read anywhere else: the admissions arrangements your own local authority and your own target schools publish each year. That is where the format, the timetable and the qualifying arrangements are actually decided.
The 11 plus grammar school test guide takes this apart properly: how the different arrangements work, what each paper tends to sample, and the two separate applications a family has to make. If your child is aiming at a West Midlands school, the West Midlands 11 plus entrance test covers the shared regional test and every school that uses it.
How is the 11 plus marked?
Raw marks are converted into standardised scores, and this is the step that confuses almost every family the first time they meet it. Standardising does two things. It puts different papers onto a common scale so that a mark from a hard paper and a mark from an easy one can be compared, and it adjusts for a child's age in months so that a summer-born child is not competing on level terms against someone almost a year older.
The number of ticks on the page is not the result.
From "How is the 11 plus marked?"
What follows from that is worth saying plainly. The number of ticks on the page is not the result. Two children with identical raw marks can finish with different standardised scores because one of them is younger. It also means a parent cannot look at a practice paper score and translate it into a place, however tempting that is.
Most areas then set a qualifying score and allocate places in rank order until the schools are full. There is no permanent pass mark. The score that secured a place last year tells you something about the shape of the competition and nothing reliable about this year's cut-off, because that moves with the size and strength of the entry.
How hard is the 11 plus, really?
Honestly: the content is not the hard part. Most of what appears in an 11 plus maths paper is primary curriculum material a capable Year 5 child has already met. The difficulty lives in three other places.
- PaceQuestions arrive faster than school work does, and a child who is accurate but slow will leave marks on the table.
- UnfamiliarityThe reasoning problem described above: formats a child has never met, because nothing in the school day looks like them.
- RankingThe one nobody can revise away. The 11 plus is a ranking exercise rather than a threshold to clear. A child is measured against other prepared children, so the standard rises whenever the field gets stronger.
None of that makes the test unbeatable, and it is worth resisting the version of the 11 plus that circulates on parenting forums, where every child is apparently working two years ahead. It does mean that steady preparation across a year beats a heroic term, and that a child who has never worked against a clock will underperform their own ability on the day.
How do children prepare for it?
Preparation that works tends to look boring from the outside: a short session on most days across a year, weighted towards whichever of the four areas is weakest, with timed work introduced only once a subject is reliable without a clock. Full papers come last, when there is still time left to act on what they show.
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 daily plan starts from what your child can actually do rather than from a generic Year 5 syllabus, and a PIN-protected parent area keeps every completed session for you to read.
One monthly price covers every subject, with no per-subject upgrade and no long contract. The first week is free.
Common questions about the 11 plus
What age do children sit the 11 plus?+
Ten or eleven. The test falls near the start of Year 6, so a child born in September sits it having just turned eleven while a child born in August sits it at ten. That gap is why marks are adjusted for age before anyone is ranked.
Is the 11 plus compulsory?+
No. It is an entrance test for particular schools, and a family opts in by registering their child before the closing date. Children who do not sit it apply for secondary places in the ordinary way, on the same national timetable as everyone else.
What subjects are on the 11 plus?+
English, mathematics, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning, though not every test uses all four and the weighting differs between them. English and mathematics follow the primary curriculum at pace. The two reasoning papers are puzzle formats that most primary schools never teach.
What is a standardised score?+
A raw mark converted onto a common scale and adjusted for a child's age in months, so that younger children are not penalised for being younger. It is the standardised total, not the number of ticks on the paper, that decides where a child sits in the order.
Is there a pass mark for the 11 plus?+
Not a fixed one that holds from year to year. Most areas set a qualifying score and then allocate places in rank order until the school is full, so the mark that secures a place moves with the strength and size of that year's entry.
How hard is the 11 plus?+
The content is mostly within reach of a capable Year 5 child. The difficulty comes from pace, from reasoning formats that are never taught in class, and from the fact that a child is being ranked against a self-selected group who have all prepared.
Can a child resit the 11 plus?+
In almost all cases a child sits the test once, in the one autumn when they are eligible. There is usually an appeals route rather than a second sitting, which is worth knowing early because it changes how much weight one morning carries.
When do 11 plus results come out?+
In most areas results arrive in the autumn of Year 6, deliberately before the national deadline for secondary school applications on 31 October, so that families know the outcome before they list their preferences. The published timetable for your own area is the one to trust.
Which schools share the West Midlands test?
In the West Midlands one shared test covers nineteen state grammar schools. Each page below explains what that school is like and what its admission route asks of a family.
Shropshire, Wolverhampton and Walsall
Birmingham
- Bishop Vesey's Grammar School
- King Edward VI Aston School
- King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys
- King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Girls
- King Edward VI Five Ways School
- King Edward VI Handsworth Grammar School for Boys
- King Edward VI Handsworth School for Girls
- Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls
The West Midlands 11 plus entrance test page explains the papers themselves, and links every school in one place.
Where to go next
- 11 plus past papers, what is published for this test, and what to use in place of a past paper.
- GL Assessment and the 11 plus test, who provides the paper, and every published description of it side by side.
- How to prepare for the 11 plus, the full parents' guide to timing, routine and the four skill areas.
- 11 plus verbal reasoning question types, every format a child meets, with the method for each.
- 11 plus non-verbal reasoning explained, the shape puzzles that school does not normally teach.
- 11 plus glossary, plain definitions for the terms that appear in official letters.
- What Pathway Eleven costs, one plan, one price, everything included.
- What is a good 11 plus score?, the published thresholds and what each of them decides.
- Does the 11 plus include creative writing?, the published answer, and the schools it does not apply to.
- Free 11 plus non-verbal reasoning papers, the drawn questions worked through family by family.
A Starting Assessment, then a daily plan built around the skills it finds weakest.