11 Plus Past Papers: Where to Find Genuine School and Board Papers

You searched for 11 plus past papers. What came back was a page of downloads, packs and bundles, almost all of them labelled with the phrase you typed. It looks like a solved problem. Somewhere in those results, you assume, is the actual paper your child's target school actually set, and all you have to do is find the free one.

That assumption is wrong for most of England, and nobody on the first page of results tells you so. GL Assessment does not release its live 11+ papers. The CEM route that once covered large parts of the country no longer exists in its old form at all, and the assessment that replaced it is sat at a computer, so it cannot produce a downloadable paper even in principle. Almost everything marketed as an 11 plus past paper is a practice paper written by a publisher or a tutoring company, modelled on a real format rather than taken from one. Several of those companies say exactly this in their own words, just never on the page that ranks for this search.

The picture is not uniformly bleak, though, and that is the useful half. Individual schools and one large consortium genuinely do publish their own papers, complete with mark schemes, and county councils publish official familiarisation booklets for free. Nobody has assembled that list in one place. This article does three things: it gives you a taxonomy so you can tell what you are actually downloading, a directory of who publishes what, and the guidance that follows from both, which is how to use a paper whose format has since changed.

What are you actually downloading when a site says past paper?

Four different objects circulate under the same label. They are not interchangeable, and the differences matter for how you use them.

1. A genuine past paper. A paper that was actually sat by real candidates in a real sitting, released afterwards by the body that set it. It carries the true question count, the true timing, the true mark distribution and, if you are lucky, the official mark scheme. This is the rarest category by a long way.
2. A school specimen or sample paper. Written by the school itself to show the format and standard of its own exam, but never sat competitively. Usually shorter than the real thing. Authoritative on style and content, less reliable on length and pacing.
3. An official familiarisation booklet. Published free by an exam board or a county council so that children know what the answer sheet looks like and how the instructions are worded. Deliberately short and deliberately easier than the real test. Its job is to remove surprise, not to measure ability.
4. A commercial practice paper. Written by a publisher, tutoring company or education platform in the style of a real test. Quality varies enormously. The good ones are genuinely useful. None of them are past papers, however the download button is labelled.

A parent who knows which of the four they have in front of them will draw sensible conclusions from the score. A parent who thinks a publisher's practice paper is the real Kent Test will read far too much into a bad afternoon.

Why does GL Assessment never release its real 11+ papers?

Because the papers are still in service. GL Assessment supplies tests to grammar schools and consortia across many English counties, and it reuses calibrated question banks across regions and years. Publishing a live paper would destroy the comparability that standardised scoring depends on, and would hand an advantage to whoever downloaded it first.

You can see the policy stated by omission on GL's own free materials page. It offers exactly two things. Familiarisation papers, which are free PDFs for home printing, and practice papers, which are printed booklets you buy. The page explains that "familiarisation papers aim for general familiarity with test styles, while practice papers offer comprehensive preparation". What it never mentions, anywhere, is past papers. There is no quiet archive, no request form, no exception for tutors. The category simply does not exist in GL's catalogue.

This is the single most important thing to understand about the search you just ran. If your child sits a GL test in Kent, Buckinghamshire, Birmingham, Lincolnshire, Essex outside the CSSE consortium, Trafford, Wirral, Bexley, Sutton or anywhere else on the GL route, there is no genuine past paper of that test in the world that you can legally download. Every result promising one is offering you category four.

What happened to CEM papers, and why can Cambridge Select Insight never have one?

CEM, the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring, was for years the other half of the 11+ landscape and was widely described as the harder route to prepare for because it published so little. That route has now changed identity. CEM has been rebranded as Cambridge Insight, and its selective schools test is Cambridge Select Insight, a computer-based entrance assessment used by selective independent, partially selective state and grammar schools, covering numerical, verbal and non-verbal ability.

The format change matters more than the name change. Each student works independently at a computer, guided by on-screen instructions. Results are downloadable by the school from a secure website within 72 hours, and 25% extra time versions are available for candidates with identified special educational needs. There is no paper to photocopy, no booklet to leave the exam hall in a bag. A screen-delivered adaptive-style assessment cannot produce a downloadable past paper the way a printed exam can, because the artefact you are asking for was never printed in the first place.

So if you find a PDF advertised as a CEM past paper, one of two things is true. Either it is a commercial practice paper written in the old CEM style, or it is a genuinely old document that describes a test format that is being retired. Neither is what you were looking for. If you are unsure which board your child's school uses, our comparison of GL, CEM and ISEB routes sets out how to check.

The same logic applies to the ISEB Common Pre-Test used by many independent senior schools. It covers mathematics, English reading comprehension and grammar, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning, and the four assessments can be taken together on one day or split across several. ISEB publishes no past papers of the pre-test at all, offering an admissions toolkit and a knowledge base of support articles and videos instead.

Which state grammar schools and consortia publish genuine past papers?

This is the short list, and it is worth knowing precisely because it is short.

CSSE, Essex. The Consortium of Selective Schools in Essex is the outstanding case in England. It publishes genuine past papers on its practice material page for 2021, 2022 and 2023 entry. Each year set includes an English Paper, an English Continuous Writing Paper, an English Mark Scheme, a Maths Paper and a Maths Mark Scheme. These are category one: real papers from live sittings, with the official marking. The consortium notes that all CSSE examination papers are protected by copyright, so use them at home rather than redistributing them.

Kent County Council. Kent publishes an official Kent Test Familiarisation Booklet as a free PDF, alongside a "Prepare for the Kent Test" page. The booklet contains timed multiple-choice sections and is designed to show the kinds of challenge the test presents. It is category three, not category one, and it is deliberately gentler than the real thing.

Buckinghamshire Council. Buckinghamshire publishes a free official Familiarisation Booklet for the Secondary Transfer Test, and states plainly on its transfer test page that the test measures verbal, non-verbal and mathematical skills, that pupils sit two papers of about 60 minutes each with a break between, and that the test is produced by GL Assessment. It also notes that there is a shorter practice test, usually taken two days before the main test, to help children learn what to expect. Again, category three.

Everywhere else on the GL route. Bexley, Sutton, Birmingham, Lincolnshire, Trafford, Wirral, Warwickshire and the rest publish admissions arrangements and, in some cases, a link to GL's own familiarisation PDFs. None publish genuine past papers. If you are still working out which tests apply where you live, our regional guide to grammar schools and their entrance tests is the faster way in.

Which independent schools publish past or specimen papers?

Independent schools set their own written exams, which means they can publish without breaking a shared standardisation scheme. Many of them do, and these are specimen papers rather than past papers in most cases, but they come straight from the people who write the real exam.

St Paul's Girls' School publishes sample papers for three subjects on its 11+ entry page: English, with a sample paper and a reading passage; Mathematics, with two sample papers of which candidates sit only one; and General Comprehension, with a sample paper and a resource booklet. Written assessments for the current cycle fall on Saturday 5 December 2026, with no alternative dates offered.

Emanuel School publishes specimen papers for Year 7 English, Year 7 Maths paper 1 and paper 2, and a Maths topic list. Usefully, it is explicit about the gap in its own materials, stating that there are no specimen verbal reasoning papers available and that the school devised its own verbal reasoning exams based on GL assessment papers, which parents can buy online or in bookshops. Its exams run to Maths 45 minutes, English 1 hour and Verbal reasoning 30 minutes.

City of London School for Girls publishes an English specimen paper and a maths specimen paper. Its process is a useful illustration of the hybrid model now spreading: a first assessment that is a one-hour computer-based Cambridge Select Insight test covering numerical, verbal and non-verbal skills, then a second assessment of a 45-minute English paper on creative writing and analytical skills plus a 45-minute maths paper on problem solving, with interviews for the current cycle running from 11 to 21 January 2027.

A pattern worth noticing: the computer-based component of these processes is exactly the part with no downloadable material, while the school-written written papers are the part you can see. Prepare for the visible half using the school's own documents, and for the invisible half using format familiarity rather than paper hunting.

Which schools say plainly that they release nothing?

Some schools answer the question directly, and their honesty is genuinely helpful because it stops you searching.

St Paul's School states that it is not able to send out past papers in Mathematics and English. In their place it publishes an 11+ examination syllabus as a downloadable PDF, and its selection process runs as an ISEB online pre-test in Year 6, written English and Mathematics exams at the school in December, and an in-person interview.

The Henrietta Barnett School is blunter still: "We do not release any past papers or offer any resources for Round Two." It directs candidates to GL Assessment familiarisation booklets for its first round entrance test. Entry to Year 7 runs as a first-round assessment in verbal and non-verbal reasoning and English, followed by a second-round English and Mathematics test.

What should you do when a school publishes nothing? Two things. First, take the syllabus or subject list seriously, because a school that will not give you questions will often tell you exactly which topics it examines, and that is arguably more actionable. Second, build your preparation from format familiarity plus topic coverage rather than from paper collection. A child who is fluent in the underlying skills and comfortable with the answer format does not need the specific paper.

How do you use an old paper when the format has since changed?

This is the question the genuine papers force on you, and nobody addresses it. A CSSE paper for 2021 entry is a real paper, but it is several admissions cycles old. A specimen paper written before a school moved to Cambridge Select Insight describes a process that has partly moved to a screen. Both are still valuable. They are just not valuable in every dimension at once.

Split the paper into what has aged well and what has not.

• Trust the question style. How a question is worded, how many steps it hides, whether the reading passage is fiction or non-fiction, whether maths is presented as bare calculation or embedded in a scenario. These change slowly.
• Trust the difficulty calibration. An older genuine paper is the best available answer to "how hard is this really?", which is exactly the thing commercial packs get wrong most often, in both directions.
• Trust the topic coverage. If long multiplication, fractions of amounts and perimeter appeared then, they are almost certainly examinable now.
• Do not trust the timing. Section lengths and total durations get revised, and a screen-based component changes pacing completely.
• Do not trust the structure. Question counts, section order and the balance between subjects are the first things a board or school adjusts.
• Do not trust the mark boundaries. Standardised scores are recalculated each year against that year's cohort. An old raw total tells you nothing about this year's threshold.

A practical way to run it: give your child the old paper with generous time on the first attempt and treat it purely as a diagnostic of skill and stamina. Then re-run a section under the current published timing from the school's own admissions page. You get honest information about ability from the paper, and honest information about pace from the current arrangements, without pretending the old paper supplies both.

How do you choose and mark a practice paper honestly?

For most families, most of the time, commercial practice papers are what you will actually use, because for GL and Cambridge regions nothing else exists. That is fine, as long as you buy them with clear eyes.

Ask three questions of any pack. Who wrote it, and do they say so? The better providers are upfront: Owl Tutors states its free 11+ papers were written by its tutors, all of whom are qualified teachers, and designed around real formats, and Atom describes its papers as written by its own teachers and admissions specialists. Those are honest descriptions of reconstructions. Does it include a mark scheme? A paper without one teaches nothing, because the learning happens in the review. And is it matched to your child's actual route, rather than to a generic 11+ that no single child ever sits?

Then mark it honestly. Two scores are worth recording, not one: the raw mark, and the count of questions left unattempted. A child scoring 60% having attempted everything has a knowledge gap. A child scoring 60% having attempted two thirds has a pacing gap, and those need entirely different responses. Our guide to free 11 plus practice papers with answers goes further into sourcing and marking, and our year-by-year preparation plan covers when in the cycle full papers start earning their place.

If you would rather not manage the marking yourself, Trace Learn's paper-style tests run the same format with automatic marking and a per-topic breakdown, so you can see whether a weak score came from fractions, from inference, or from running out of time.

How is this directory maintained?

School admissions pages move, and PDFs get pulled between cycles. This directory is reviewed each admissions cycle, and the categories above (genuine past paper, school specimen paper, official familiarisation booklet, commercial practice paper) are re-checked against each school's own live page rather than against what we published last year. Where a school has changed what it publishes, the entry changes with it, including the entries that say a school publishes nothing.

If a link here has broken or a school has started publishing material we have not listed, tell us through the contact route on this site and we will check the source page and update the entry. Corrections that remove a claim are as welcome as ones that add a school.

One closing point worth saying plainly. The reason no page ranking for this search explains any of this is that most of them are selling the thing the explanation would call into question. You searched for a past paper. In most of England, for most of the tests, that object does not exist. What does exist is a small number of genuine papers, a decent number of school specimens, free official familiarisation material in every region that runs a test, and a large market of practice papers that are useful when you know what they are. Knowing the difference is worth more than another download. If you want a structured way to work through that material, you can start with a free account and build the plan around your child's actual route.