Grammar Schools in the UK: Find Your Area and Its Entrance Test

Most parents who search for grammar schools near them are not doing geography homework. They usually have a child in Year 4 or Year 5, they have heard that the local grammar is worth a look, and they are quietly working through three questions in order: is there a grammar school we could realistically get to, what exam does it actually use, and have we already missed something?

Almost every guide answers only the first question. You get a long list of school names by county, sometimes a clickable map, and almost never the two facts that decide whether your child can sit the test at all: which test the area uses, and when you have to register for it. That gap matters more than it sounds. In several regions the deadline to register for the entrance test falls in early summer, months before the secondary school application form is even open. A parent who starts researching in September can find the schools, love the schools, apply to the schools, and still discover that the test window closed in June.

So this guide is built as a decision sequence rather than a list. Four filters, in the order that actually saves you time: is it a state grammar or a private school with a confusing name, does your part of the UK have grammar schools at all, which test does your area use and what does it cover, and what are the dates you cannot miss. Every date below is cycle-specific, so treat it as a prompt to check the official source we link to, not as a substitute for it.

Filter one: a grammar school is free, but the word is not protected

GOV.UK is unambiguous about what a grammar school is: they are state schools that "select their pupils based on academic ability and there is a test to get in", and they "can be run by the local authority, a foundation body or an academy trust" (GOV.UK types of school). State grammar schools charge no tuition fees. That is the whole answer to the very common question of what it costs to send a child to one: nothing in fees, though you will pay for uniform, trips and often a longer commute.

The confusion comes from the name. Several well known independent, fee-paying schools also carry "Grammar School" in their title, for historical reasons, and search engines cheerfully mix them into local results alongside free state schools. If you see a school advertising an entrance examination in January, an open morning aimed at Year 5, and a fee schedule, you are looking at an independent school, and its admissions process has nothing to do with your council's 11+ arrangements.

A quick test that works almost every time: state grammar schools are admitted through your local authority's common application form, and their entrance test is organised by the council or by a consortium of schools. Independent schools handle their own registrations, their own exams and their own offers, and they invoice you. If the school's admissions page asks you for a registration fee to sit the test, that is a strong signal you are outside the state system, with the exception of Northern Ireland, where the state entrance assessment does carry a modest fee.

Filter two: does your region have grammar schools at all

This is where a lot of searches quietly fail, and no one on the results page says it out loud.

• Scotland has no grammar schools in the selective sense. A handful of Scottish schools use "Grammar" in their name for historical reasons, but they are non-selective comprehensives. There is no 11+ to prepare for.
• Wales abolished academic selection at eleven and has no state grammar schools.
• North East England (Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, County Durham) has no state grammar schools either. Families there sometimes travel into North Yorkshire, or look at independent options.
• Northern Ireland does have academic selection, but it works completely differently from England. See the SEAG section below.
• England has selective schools concentrated in a fairly small number of areas: Kent and Medway, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, several outer London boroughs, Essex and Southend, Lincolnshire, parts of the West Midlands, pockets of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria, and a scattering in Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Devon.

If your county is not on that list, the honest answer is that there is nothing local to find, and your effort is better spent on catchment and comprehensive admissions than on 11+ preparation.

One more caveat before you go county-hunting: school counts published on aggregator sites drift. If you need an authoritative list of selective schools in a given local authority, use the Department for Education's Get Information About Schools service rather than a blog list, ours included.

Filter three: find your area, its test provider and its subjects

This is the part every directory skips. Below, each area is grouped with the test it uses, what that test covers, roughly when registration runs, and which year group sits it. Everywhere in England, the test is sat at the start of Year 6 for entry the following September, which means the registration window falls during Year 5. Northern Ireland is the exception.

Kent and Medway

Kent. The county runs the Kent Test, formally the Age 11 Procedure for Entrance to Secondary Education. Kent County Council states that the tests aim to identify children in the top 25% of the ability range. For 2027 entry, registration opened on 1 June 2026 and closed on 1 July 2026. Children at Kent primary schools sat the test on 10 September 2026; children at non-Kent primaries were tested on 12 or 13 September 2026. Note that several Kent grammar schools also run their own additional assessments, so check each school's admissions page as well as the county process.

Medway. Medway runs its own separate test, and being registered for Kent does not register you for Medway. The Medway Test is three papers: English (30 minutes, covering comprehension, punctuation and grammar), Mathematics (50 minutes) and Reasoning (45 minutes in timed sections, including spatial, non-verbal and verbal reasoning). The 2026 test took place on 15 and 16 September, with alternative dates for special arrangements and for children outside Medway schools, and invitations issued by the end of August. Medway Council is explicit that you must register on time for your child to be considered (Medway Test information).

Buckinghamshire and Berkshire

Buckinghamshire. The Secondary Transfer Test is produced by GL Assessment and, in the council's own words, measures verbal, non-verbal and mathematical skills. Children sit two papers of roughly 60 minutes each with a break in between, and normally take a shorter familiarisation practice test a couple of days beforehand. For entry in September 2027, registration opened on 1 May 2026 and closed at 3pm on 2 June 2026, with the tests on 8 and 10 September 2026. Formal invitations went out by 7 August. That June cut-off is the single earliest major deadline in England, and it is the one families most often miss.

Berkshire. Selective schools in Slough and Reading run consortium and school-level tests with their own registration portals and their own windows, typically opening in spring and closing in the early summer. Because arrangements sit with the schools rather than the county, check each school directly.

London's selective boroughs

London is not one system. It is a set of borough and consortium arrangements that happen to sit near each other.

Sutton. The Selective Eligibility Test (SET) is common to Greenshaw High School (selective band), Nonsuch High School for Girls, Sutton Grammar School, Wallington County Grammar School, Wallington High School for Girls and Wilson's School. It is two multiple-choice papers, maths and English, each taking between 40 and 50 minutes with a break between them, and answers are marked on a separate sheet by filling in a lozenge. Critically, the SET contains no verbal reasoning and no non-verbal reasoning. For 2027 entry, registration ran from 1 May to 31 July 2026, the SET was sat on 15 September 2026, and the Stage 2 test followed on 3 October 2026.

Other boroughs. Kingston, Barnet, Bexley, Redbridge and Newham each run their own arrangements, some through consortia and some school by school. Several use a two-stage model similar to Sutton's: a broad eligibility test, then a second, harder paper for those who clear it.

Essex, Southend and the East

The Consortium of Selective Schools in Essex (CSSE) runs a common exam for most Essex and Southend grammar schools. Two papers are sat: English lasting 60 minutes with 10 minutes of additional reading time, and Mathematics lasting 60 minutes. One change matters a great deal for anyone using older practice material: with effect from September 2024 (2025 entry), the English paper no longer contains Applied Reasoning questions. The 2026 exam date was Saturday 19 September, with registration for 2027 entry already closed (CSSE).

The Midlands, the North and the South West

Birmingham and the West Midlands. The King Edward VI consortium in Birmingham runs its own entrance assessment, while Walsall, Wolverhampton and Warwickshire schools operate separately. Registration generally opens in spring and closes in June, with testing in September.

Lincolnshire. Lincolnshire is the model case for checking the school and not just the county. The council devolves 11+ arrangements to the individual grammar schools, so testing dates, formats and registration routes vary within one authority (Lincolnshire school admissions guide). Do not assume that registering with one Lincolnshire grammar registers you with another.

Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria. Selective schools here are sparse and mostly individual rather than consortium-based, which means individual registration forms and individual dates. Yorkshire in particular has only a small number of state grammar schools, despite how often the question comes up.

Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Devon. Gloucestershire runs a county-level test for its grammar schools; the schools in Wiltshire and Devon are few and largely self-administering.

Northern Ireland: the SEAG entrance assessment

Northern Ireland runs on a different calendar and a different year group. The SEAG Entrance Assessment is taken by Primary 7 pupils transferring to post-primary school. For the current cycle, registration opened on 18 May 2026 and closed at 11:59pm on 18 September 2026. Paper 1 was sat on 14 November 2026 and Paper 2 on 21 November 2026, with Statements of Outcomes released online on 23 January 2027 and re-mark requests accepted between 25 January and 3 February 2027. A non-refundable registration fee applies, with payment waivers for families eligible for free school meals.

Filter four: registering for the test is not applying to the school

If you take one thing from this page, take this.

There are two entirely separate deadlines, and in most areas they are months apart:

1. Test registration. You tell the council or consortium that your child will sit the entrance test. This is usually a short online form during Year 5, and in several regions it closes in June or July.
2. The secondary school application. You list your preferred schools on your local authority's common application form. This is the one due on 31 October, the date everyone knows.

Kent's test registration for the 2026 cycle closed on 1 July, nearly four months before the application form was due. Buckinghamshire's closed at 3pm on 2 June. Medway Council states plainly that registering for the test is not a school application, and that results arrive before the application closing date precisely so that you can decide which schools to list. Miss step one and step two cannot rescue you: there is no test score to submit, and the grammar school has nothing to consider.

The practical implication is that grammar school planning is a Year 5 activity, not a Year 6 one. Our guide on when to start 11+ preparation sets out a realistic timeline, and the broader parent guide to the 11+ covers how the pieces fit together.

Same name, very different exam

"The 11+" is a category, not a paper. GL Assessment, one of the main providers, explains that the 11+ can cover English, maths, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning, but that "local authorities or individual schools decide which subjects to test, as well as the balance of question types within the tests" (GL Assessment FAQs). Schools can also add their own questions to a provider's test.

Compare three areas and the problem is obvious. Sutton's SET is multiple-choice maths and English with no reasoning at all. Buckinghamshire's GL-produced test measures verbal, non-verbal and mathematical skills, with no English comprehension paper. Medway includes a dedicated reasoning paper with spatial, non-verbal and verbal questions. A family in Sutton drilling non-verbal reasoning is preparing for a paper their child will never see. A family in Buckinghamshire working through comprehension passages is doing the same in reverse.

So the order of operations is: confirm your region's test first, then buy or build practice material to match it. If your area does test reasoning, our non-verbal reasoning guide covers the question families and a method for working through them. If it does not, skip it entirely and put the time into maths fluency and reading. GL also notes that English and maths content is based mainly on curriculum work reached in the early part of Year 6, which is why the papers can feel like they arrive a term too early.

How competitive is it, and why nobody can promise you a mark

Grammar schools are selective by design, and the entry bar is genuinely high. Kent states that its tests aim to identify children in the top 25% of the ability range. Individual schools admit fixed numbers each year, and popular schools in dense areas receive several applications for every place.

Be wary of anyone quoting you a target score. Sutton Grammar School puts it about as clearly as an admissions authority can: "It is not possible to state a pass mark in advance of the test. The pass mark will be decided by the participating schools after the test has been marked. Each School may determine its own pass mark." That is standard practice, not an outlier. Thresholds are set after marking, they move with the strength of the cohort, and in many areas standardised scores are age-adjusted, so two children with identical raw marks can receive different results.

Which means the honest answer to "can any child go to a grammar school?" is: any child may sit the test where their area runs one, and every child can improve their score with sensible preparation, but no tutor, app or publisher can guarantee a place. What preparation reliably does is remove the avoidable losses: unfamiliar question formats, poor time management, and the shock of a paper that looks nothing like school work.

Your next step

Work through it in this order. Confirm your region has selective schools. Confirm the test your area uses and the subjects it covers. Put both deadlines in your calendar now, the test registration and the 31 October application. Then, and only then, choose practice material that matches the actual paper.

If you want that sequenced for you, build an exam plan around your region's test date and subjects, so that practice is aimed at the paper your child will actually sit. When you are ready to move from theory to timed practice, our free 11+ practice papers are a reasonable place to start.

Last reviewed: 26 August 2026. Registration windows, test dates and consortium arrangements change every admissions cycle. We review this page twice a year, in April (as spring registration windows open) and in September (as test dates land), and we link every region to its official council or consortium source so you can verify before you commit. If a date here disagrees with the official source, the official source is right: tell us and we will fix it.