The 11+ in Birmingham

One test, nineteen schools

The West Midlands Grammar Schools entrance test covers eight grammar schools in Birmingham and a further group across Shropshire, Walsall, Wolverhampton and Warwickshire — nineteen schools in total.

The Birmingham schools include Bishop Vesey's Grammar School for Boys, King Edward VI Aston School, the King Edward VI Camp Hill schools, King Edward VI Five Ways School, the King Edward VI Handsworth schools and Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls.

Your child sits the test once. The result is then available to every school in the group that you go on to name on your application form.

Who can sit it

Date of birth

Between 1 September 2015 and 31 August 2016, for entry in September 2027.

Year group

Year 5 at the point of registration, Year 6 when the test is sat.

Registration

Online, through the West Midlands Grammar Schools site, with a photograph of the child uploaded as part of the form. It closed at 4pm on Friday 26 June 2026.

What is in the papers

The test is provided by GL Assessment. There are two papers, each about 60 minutes long, and each is made up of individually timed sections rather than running as one continuous hour.

Between them the sections cover English comprehension, verbal reasoning, mathematics, and non-verbal and spatial reasoning. The questions are multiple choice and answers go on a separate answer sheet.

• Individually timed sections change how a child has to work. There is no borrowing time from an easy section to finish a hard one, and running out of time in one section does not affect the next.
• A separate answer sheet is its own skill. Losing your place on it is the commonest avoidable way to lose marks, and it is worth practising under timed conditions rather than reading about.

How it is weighted — and why that matters

The Foundation publishes the weighting, which most systems do not, and it is not an even split.

English and verbal reasoning

50% of the total

Non-verbal reasoning

25%

Mathematics

25%

• Half the marks sit in English and verbal reasoning. A family dividing preparation evenly across four subjects is spending half its effort on a quarter of the paper.
• Scores are standardised to take account of differences in age, so a summer-born child is not measured against an autumn-born child as though they were the same age.

What the published pages do not give

The Foundation's test page does not publish a results date, and it does not publish a fixed qualifying or pass mark. Each school sets its own admissions arrangements, and those are published by the individual schools and by the local authority.

There are widely circulated figures for both. They are not on the Foundation's pages, so they are not here. Ask the schools you intend to name, or read their determined admissions arrangements.

Birmingham City Council publishes its own grammar schools pages. We could not read them when this guide was checked, so nothing here is drawn from them and they are not listed below as a source.

• Sitting the test is not applying. A school can only consider your child if you have named it on your home local authority's common application form by 31 October 2026.
• Because the group spans five areas, your home authority may not be the one where the school sits. You still apply through your home authority, and you still list every preference on that one form.