Wirral Grammar Schools and the Wirral Selection Test

There are six grammar schools in Wirral. Four of them (Calday Grange, West Kirby, Wirral Grammar School for Boys and Wirral Grammar School for Girls) select through the council-run Wirral Admissions Test, sat on Tuesday 15 September 2026 and provided by Quest Assessments. The two Catholic grammars, St Anselm's College and Upton Hall FCJ, set their own separate entrance exams.

That first paragraph contains two things a lot of the advice available online currently gets wrong. The first is the provider. Wirral Council states plainly that its assessment is provided by Quest Assessments, and Wirral Grammar School for Girls, Wirral Grammar School for Boys and West Kirby Grammar School each confirm the same thing independently on their own admissions pages. Earlier cycles used GL Assessment. Pages that still describe this as a GL paper, or that quote a combined score out of roughly 200, are describing a test your child will not sit. The second is the split: registering for the council assessment does not enter your child for St Anselm's or Upton Hall, and every year some families discover that too late.

This guide walks the admissions year in order, from the spring of Year 5 through to the appeal deadline in the April after offer day. Where a fact comes from the council or from a school, it is linked. Where no official figure exists, we say so rather than inventing one, because the single most common piece of misinformation about the 11 plus in Wirral is a confidently stated pass mark that nobody publishes.

Wirral grammar schools at a glance

Six schools, two routes. Here is each one with the exam it uses.

• Calday Grange Grammar School, West Kirby. Route: Wirral Admissions Test, provided by Quest Assessments. Test date: Tuesday 15 September 2026.
• West Kirby Grammar School, West Kirby. Route: Wirral Admissions Test, provided by Quest Assessments and administered by Wirral Local Authority. Test date: Tuesday 15 September 2026.
• Wirral Grammar School for Boys, Bebington. Boys at 11+. Route: Wirral Admissions Test. Test date: Tuesday 15 September 2026.
• Wirral Grammar School for Girls, Bebington. Girls at 11+. Route: Wirral Admissions Test. Test date: Tuesday 15 September 2026.
• St Anselm's College, Birkenhead. Catholic grammar, boys at 11+. Route: its own entrance examination, on its own date, arranged directly with the school.
• Upton Hall School FCJ, Upton. Catholic grammar, girls at 11+. Route: its own entrance examination, on its own date, arranged directly with the school.

One honest caveat on the first two entries. Calday Grange and West Kirby both operate mixed sixth forms, and automated school data sources disagree about how each is classified at the point of Year 7 entry. Rather than repeat a figure we cannot stand behind, check the current position in each school's own published admissions policy, or on the Department for Education's Get Information about Schools register, before you build a shortlist around it. Everything else in that list comes from the council or from the schools themselves.

Milestone one: spring of Year 5, decide which exams you are entering

The decision that shapes everything else is made months before any paper is opened. Wirral Council is explicit that its assessment arrangements apply only to children seeking a place at a non-Catholic grammar school in Wirral. The Catholic grammars are outside the council process entirely.

In practice this gives you three possible plans. You can enter the council assessment only, which puts Calday Grange, West Kirby, Wirral Boys and Wirral Girls in play. You can approach one of the Catholic grammars only. Or you can do both, which means two registrations, two sets of dates, and a child sitting two different exams in the autumn term. None of these is wrong, but the third needs planning from spring rather than from September.

Worth remembering too that Wirral runs a partially selective system rather than a fully selective one. The council describes all-ability schools as catering for the whole ability range and admitting children without assessing their ability, while grammar schools assess ability and admit those who reach the required standard. Sitting the assessment is optional. Not sitting it does not disadvantage your child at any all-ability school.

Milestone two: 1 May to 1 June, registering for the assessment

The Assessment Request Form is the gateway. West Kirby Grammar School notes that it is available from 1 May and due by 31 May of Year 5. Wirral Grammar School for Boys quotes the same 31 May deadline. The council's own cut-off for the current cycle was 12 noon on 1 June 2026.

Two details matter more than the exact date. First, late applications are not accepted, with a single narrow exception for children who move into Wirral after the deadline. There is no discretionary window and no appeal against a missed registration. Second, registration is a separate act from the secondary preference form you complete a year later. Doing one does not do the other.

Requests for special or access arrangements had a separate, slightly later deadline of 7 June 2026. If your child has a diagnosed need, extra time, a modified paper or any other adjustment must be requested through that route, with evidence, before the deadline. It cannot be arranged on the day.

The lookup below shows the Wirral dates we have checked, with the registration link.

Milestone three: June, familiarisation before the summer

Quest Assessments publishes free familiarisation material for parents, including downloadable booklets for English, maths, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning, a guidance document written for children, a vocabulary list and a recommended reading list. It is worth downloading all of it. Note Quest's own qualification: every school uses different papers and follows different structures, so the booklets show question style rather than the exact shape of the Wirral paper.

The schools add to this. Wirral Grammar School for Girls ran a free in-house familiarisation session on Saturday 13 June 2026, in two one-hour slots at 9:30am and 11:00am, taught by senior leaders, and points parents to a downloadable Wirral 11+ Quest Candidate Information Pack. Sessions like that are the closest thing to a first-party description of the test, and they cost nothing.

Inside the two papers: verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning and maths

The assessment covers three subject areas across two papers taken on the same day. Wirral Grammar School for Girls describes them as two separate booklets covering verbal and non-verbal reasoning and mathematics, both timed and both entirely multiple choice.

Multiple choice changes how you prepare. Answers go on a separate grid, so a child who loses their place by one row loses every mark after it. Working under a strict clock, transferring answers accurately and knowing when to leave a question and move on are skills in their own right, and they are trainable well before any content revision matters.

On the three subject areas, prepare like this:

• Verbal reasoning. Vocabulary breadth, word relationships, codes and letter sequences, and short logic puzzles. Use our verbal reasoning practice alongside Quest's vocabulary list and wide independent reading, which does more for verbal scores over a year than any worksheet.
• Non-verbal reasoning. Rotations, reflections, sequences, analogies and odd-one-out. This is the area where children improve fastest from a standing start because it depends on a small set of transferable rules. Start with our non-verbal reasoning practice.
• Maths. Key Stage 2 curriculum content applied under time pressure, with speed on number work mattering as much as topic coverage. Work through our maths papers with a timer running from the beginning.

A note on materials sold elsewhere. Because the provider changed, packs marketed as matching the previous Wirral paper may not match the current one. Practising general reasoning skills transfers perfectly well. Practising a specific, outdated question layout does not.

Milestone four: Tuesday 15 September 2026, assessment day

Children sit the assessment at the start of Year 6, usually in their own primary school or at a designated centre, with both booklets completed in one session. Wirral Grammar School for Boys describes assessments taking place in the third week of September.

There is nothing useful to cram in the final fortnight. The most valuable preparation in early September is a full timed run under realistic conditions so that the format holds no surprises, followed by a genuine wind-down. Our mock tests exist for exactly this: one sitting, correct timings, answer sheet, no interruptions.

Milestone five: mid-October, results and the pass mark question

Results are issued in mid-October, with Wirral Grammar School for Boys quoting a return date of around 21 October. This is the point at which most online guidance becomes unreliable, so it is worth being precise about the mechanism.

Three things happen in order. Raw marks are totalled across the two booklets. Those marks are then standardised according to age, so that a child born in August is not penalised for being up to eleven months younger than a child born the previous September. Finally, a qualifying standard is applied that reflects the strength of that year's cohort.

That last step is why no fixed pass mark exists to publish. The standard is set after the papers are marked, not before, so any number quoted in advance is a guess. You will find tutoring sites asserting an indicative qualifying score of around 110, and others describing an average combined score near 200 with an aim of 240 or above. Those two claims cannot both describe the same age-standardised scale, and neither is sourced to the council. Wirral Grammar School for Girls simply states that scores are standardised according to age and does not publish a pass mark. If you want to understand what a standardised score actually represents, our guide to standardised scores and age weighting explains the arithmetic properly.

Milestone six: 31 October, the secondary preference form

Qualifying is not the same as applying. The secondary preference deadline is 31 October of Year 6, and it is a separate national process run through your home local authority. Both Wirral Grammar School for Boys and West Kirby Grammar School flag this date specifically, because children do lose places by assuming a good assessment result carries an automatic application with it.

List your preferences honestly and in genuine order. Ranking a school lower to seem strategic does not improve your odds; the equal preference system considers each school's own criteria independently. Note also that West Kirby Grammar School has no defined catchment area and draws pupils from Wirral, Chester, North Wales, Liverpool and Warrington, so a Wirral postcode is not a prerequisite for every school on the peninsula.

The Catholic grammars: St Anselm's College and Upton Hall FCJ

Both schools run their own entrance arrangements, on their own dates, with their own registration forms. Because the council process explicitly excludes them, nothing you do through Wirral Council touches either application.

We are deliberately not publishing paper structures, admission numbers or qualifying thresholds for these two schools. Every figure circulating for them on tuition sites is third-party, and we could not verify any of it against the schools' own published material. The correct action is to contact each school's admissions office directly in the spring of Year 5, ask for the current registration deadline, the exam date and the format, and prepare against what they tell you. If either confirms a GL-style paper, that is the only context in Wirral where GL-format practice material is the right choice.

Milestone seven: 2 March, offer day

National offer day for secondary places falls on 1 March, or the next working day where that date falls on a weekend. Wirral Grammar School for Girls quotes 2 March for the current cycle. Offers arrive by email or letter depending on how you applied.

If you are holding an offer you do not want, release it promptly. If you are on a waiting list, confirm in writing that you wish to remain on it, and keep confirming, because lists move well into the summer term as families decline places.

Milestone eight: 13 April, the appeal deadline

This is the part almost every competing page names and then declines to explain. Wirral's appeals process is set out clearly by the council, and the details are worth knowing before you need them.

• Appeals are heard by an Independent Appeal Panel of three members, including at least one Lay Member and at least one member with education experience, constituted under the School Standards and Framework Act 1998.
• Secondary appeals for the current cycle must be submitted by 13 April 2026. Appeals lodged after that may not be heard until September or October, by which point the school year has started.
• Where the appeal concerns a grammar place and the assessment standard was not met, you must supply your child's Year 5 end-of-year report and achievement data through the HT1 Headteacher Information form.
• Character references from teachers are not accepted. A warm letter about how hard your child works will not be considered, so put your effort into the academic evidence the panel can actually weigh.
• Decisions are issued within five working days of the hearing and are binding and final for that school year.

Appeals against a grammar refusal are demanding because the panel must first be satisfied that the child is of the required academic standard despite the assessment result. Concrete, dated academic evidence is the whole case. The council can be reached on 0151 666 4600 or at [email protected].

Grammar schools in Liverpool and wider Merseyside

Parents searching for grammar schools in Liverpool often end up on Wirral pages, and the two are not interchangeable. Liverpool itself is largely comprehensive, and selective options in the city run their own entrance examinations to their own timetables rather than joining the Wirral assessment. If you are looking across the Mersey as well as within it, contact each school directly and expect a different format, a different date and a different registration deadline.

The wider pattern holds nationally: 11 plus formats, providers and deadlines vary considerably by area, and a technique that suits one region's paper may not suit another's. Our pillar guide to grammar schools near me sets out which test each selective area uses, which is the fastest way to check whether a neighbouring authority is even open to you.

How to prepare for the Wirral Admissions Test

A realistic plan spans about a year and front-loads skills rather than papers. From the spring of Year 5, build vocabulary through reading and secure the Key Stage 2 maths curriculum, because a shaky grasp of fractions or place value cannot be repaired in August. Over the summer, introduce non-verbal reasoning properly, teaching the transformation rules one at a time rather than throwing mixed papers at a child who has not yet learned the vocabulary of rotation and reflection.

From late August, shift to timed practice with a separate answer sheet, because multiple-choice technique is a distinct skill from subject knowledge. Two or three full timed sittings across September are worth more than a dozen untimed worksheets. Track which question types are costing time rather than marks, and prioritise those.

Above all, prepare against the test your child is actually sitting. The provider change is recent enough that a great deal of Wirral-specific advice online still describes the old arrangement. When something you read conflicts with the council's assessment page or a school's own admissions page, the official source wins.