What is the 11 Plus exam?

Who sits it, and why

Two kinds of school select by exam. Grammar schools are state schools, so they are free, and they choose their intake by academic ability rather than by distance alone. Independent schools charge fees and usually set their own entrance papers, which may or may not resemble the local grammar school exam.

Grammar schools only exist in some parts of England. If there are none near you, the 11 Plus may never come up at all. Scotland and Wales do not have them. Northern Ireland runs its own separate transfer tests, which are not the same exam and have their own timetable.

What is on the paper

It varies by area, which is the single most important thing to understand early. Across the country you will meet four subjects:

• Maths, at roughly upper Key Stage 2 level but faster and with harder multi-step problems than school tests.
• English, usually comprehension and vocabulary, sometimes with spelling, punctuation and grammar, sometimes with a piece of writing.
• Verbal reasoning, which is logic expressed in words: codes, letter sequences, word relationships.
• Non-verbal reasoning, the same thing in shapes: rotation, reflection, sequences and matrices.

Maths and English are close to universal. The two reasoning papers appear in most regions and not all. Your area's combination is decided for you, by where you live and by which schools you apply to, so it is worth confirming before buying a single practice book.

When it happens

In most areas the exam is sat near the start of Year 6, in September, before secondary school applications close. Registration closes long before that, commonly in the spring or summer of Year 5, and it is the deadline that catches families out rather than the exam itself. Miss it and there is usually no second chance that year.

Results normally arrive in October, in time to inform your application. The national closing date for secondary applications is 31 October, and offers go out on 1 March. The timeline page sets all of that out in order.

What the result decides

Passing does not hand you a place. In most areas it makes your child eligible, and places are then allocated against the school's own oversubscription rules, which usually involve distance, siblings or a defined catchment. A handful of highly selective schools rank purely by score, so eligibility and a place are much closer to the same thing there.

There is also no single pass mark, for reasons worth understanding rather than guessing at. Pass marks explained covers standardised scores and why the qualifying number moves each year.

Is it worth doing?

That is a family decision and it depends on the alternatives near you, on how your child handles pressure, and on whether the nearest grammar school is somewhere you would actually want them to go. Preparation done well is a year of steady short sessions. Done badly it is an arms race, and children can tell the difference.