Where would my child rank? The Kent Test 2025 score curve

If your child has cleared the Kent threshold, the next question is where the total sits. In 2025, half of the children who cleared it scored between 349 and 384 . The middle of that group sat at 365. Every one of those children had already met the county’s threshold, so this is not a curve of who passed and who did not. It is the range inside which a total that has already cleared the bar can sit, which is the question parents actually ask once a result letter is open.

The report behind it is published once a year, in response to freedom of information requests, and in the council’s description it shows the number of children who scored each total score . This article turns it into the two things a parent can use: a picture of the whole range, and a way of finding where one total sits inside it. For the separate and more surprising question of why a total on its own does not settle the outcome, the children who reached Kent’s total and were assessed for high school anyway covers that ground and this article stays off it.

What is the report, and what is it not?

Kent County Council publishes the report annually, and it has two tabs: one for children assessed suitable for grammar, one for children assessed suitable for high school. The 2025 edition covers the test sat in September 2025, for entry in September 2026 .

A total is the sum of three separate standardised scores. The council puts it plainly: “Your child will get 3 standardised scores, one for English, one for maths and one for reasoning, and a total (aggregate) score”, with each paper adjusted for age so that the youngest are not at a disadvantage. If that scale is the unfamiliar part, how standardised age scores work is the explainer and the standardised age score calculator will convert a raw mark for you. For the format and the dates of the test itself, the Kent Test, from registration to results is the place to start.

One more thing before the tables. This is a report about candidates, not about entrants. Kent County Council says so in as many words on its own registration page: “Being grammar assessed in the Kent Test does not guarantee your child a place in a Kent grammar school”. Nothing on this page is a chance of an offer. It is a description of where scores fell.

What does the range look like?

Total score	Assessed for grammar, disclosed	Suppressed cells	Assessed for high school, disclosed	Suppressed cells
207 to 295	none listed	none	2,582	12
296 to 309	none disclosed	4	1,546	none
310 to 331	334	7	2,754	none
332 to 349	1,915	none	1,047	none
350 to 371	2,824	none	287	2
372 to 393	2,261	none	6	13
394 to 423	1,196	2	none listed	none
All totals	8,530	13	8,222	27

“None listed” and “none disclosed” are not the same thing, and the difference is the discipline of reading this report. The grammar sheet carries no row at all below 296, so the report says nothing there. Between 296 and 309 it does carry rows, and every one of them is suppressed, so those children are in the report and their count is not .

Two features deserve a second look. The first is how far the grammar range runs at the top: 1,196 disclosed children scored 394 or more, and at least 30 of them scored the maximum possible 423, which is three papers at 141 each . The second is that the two blocks overlap heavily in the middle, which matters more than either extreme.

Where does one total sit on the curve?

To place a total, count the children below it. Because the report works score by score rather than in bands, that can be done exactly rather than estimated.

Total	Disclosed children scoring lower	Disclosed children at or above	Share at or above
332	334	8,196	96.1%
340	1,065	7,465	87.5%
350	2,249	6,281	73.6%
360	3,611	4,919	57.7%
365	4,223	4,307	50.5%
372	5,073	3,457	40.5%
384	6,388	2,142	25.1%
398	7,666	864	10.1%
410	8,298	232	2.7%

Read every row as a floor in both directions. The count on the left is of disclosed children only, so the real count of children below any total is a little higher; the denominator is a floor as well, so the share on the right is approximate to within a handful of children. The softest part of this particular sheet is its bottom: eleven of its thirteen suppressed cells sit below 332.

A child is assessed suitable for grammar with 121 in English, 118 in maths and 121 in reasoning. Where does that total sit among the children the 2025 report discloses as assessed suitable for grammar?

The usual wrong route

Most parents measure the total against the threshold instead of against the range. 360 is 28 clear of 332, which sounds like a comfortable margin, and out of a maximum of 423 it looks like a high percentage. Both readings flatter it: the group this child is being compared with is not everybody who sat the test, it is everybody who already cleared the same bar.

The method

1. Add the three papers: 121 + 118 + 121 = 360.
2. Find 360 in the table above. The disclosed count of grammar-assessed children scoring lower is 3,611.
3. The disclosed count at or above 360 is 4,919. That figure includes the 136 children who scored exactly 360, so the number scoring strictly higher is 4,919 less 136, which is 4,783.
4. Check the arithmetic against the row total: 3,611 + 136 + 4,783 = 8,530, which is the disclosed size of the sheet.
5. As a share, 3,611 out of 8,530 is 42.3%, so this total is above a little under half of the group and below a little over half of it. The middle of the group is 365.
6. Both counts are floors, because suppressed cells sit on either side of 360 and are not in either total.

Answer: 360, which is just above the middle of the grammar-assessed range: above at least 3,611 of the 8,530 disclosed children and below at least 4,783 of them.

The pattern the table draws out is that clearing the threshold and doing well are further apart than the threshold sentence suggests. A total of 340, ten points clear of the threshold, still sits above only 1,065 of the 8,530 disclosed children on that sheet. Ten points clear reads as safe and sits near the bottom of the range.

Do the two groups overlap?

A total on its own does not tell you which sheet a child ended up on, and the report shows that plainly. The two sheets overlap across a band of ninety scores, from 296 to 385, and at 78 of those totals a cell appears on both. Inside that band the two groups are genuinely mixed rather than merely adjacent: between 332 and 349 the report discloses 1,915 children assessed for grammar and 1,047 assessed for high school, so more than a third of the children it lists in that band came out on the high school sheet.

That last figure is a share of what the report discloses in one band, and deliberately not a share of the Kent cohort: the report does not state whether its two sheets together are every child who sat, and a percentage with an unconfirmed denominator is worse than none.

Why the overlap exists is a question about Kent’s condition rather than its distribution, and the sourced answer belongs elsewhere: why a total on its own does not decide a Kent assessment sets out the second half of the council’s rule, in the council’s own words. What this article can say is narrower. In the band where most Kent results land, a total is not enough to predict the outcome.

Do Kent primary children score differently from everyone else?

Since the suppression rule came in, the report splits children exactly one way. In the council’s words, “result reports will show the differences between children in a Kent County Council mainstream school and all other children”. The second group is everybody else who sat: children at independent schools, and children who do not attend a Kent mainstream school at all.

Group	Disclosed children	Suppressed cells	Lower quartile	Middle	Upper quartile
Assessed for grammar, Kent mainstream	4,531	21	343	356	374
Assessed for grammar, all other children	3,940	13	358	374	390
Assessed for high school, Kent mainstream	5,936	32	284	304	320
Assessed for high school, all other children	2,178	43	307	324	338

The gap between the two grammar-assessed middles is eighteen points, and it would be easy to read that as a statement about schools. It is not one, and the council’s own registration page suggests why. It tells families outside Kent to register only if they intend to apply for a Kent grammar place, and it says that some of Kent’s grammar schools, particularly those most likely to offer places to children from outside Kent, “give priority to those with the highest scores”. A group that has already selected itself on intent, aiming at schools that reward the highest scores, is not a like-for-like comparison with every child in a Kent primary. The gap is consistent with that self-selection. It is not evidence of anything about the schools those children came from, and the report offers none.

One caution about this table in particular. Splitting a cohort creates more small cells, and more small cells mean more suppression: the two grammar-assessed groups disclose 4,531 and 3,940, which comes to 8,471 against the combined row’s 8,530. The split rows are weaker floors than the combined ones, so read their quartiles as indicative rather than exact.

What can a position on this curve not tell you?

Three limits, and each matters more than the ranking does.

It is not a chance of an offer. A place is settled by a school’s own oversubscription criteria, which can weigh distance, siblings, a named priority area or a score, and a county-wide range says nothing about any of them. Our pages for Tonbridge Grammar School and Maidstone Grammar School each carry what the school itself publishes, with the date we last checked it against the school’s own site, and where a school publishes no figure we say so rather than filling the gap. Why a qualifying score and a cut-off are different numbers is the piece that untangles those two.

It is last year’s curve. This report describes children who sat in September 2025. Kent County Council says the grammar school threshold for 2026 will be available in October 2026, and the report for that cohort follows it . A distribution from one year is a guide to shape, not a target for the next one, and the threshold itself moves.

And it says nothing at all about the three papers underneath a total, which is where a large number of Kent results are actually decided. That is the subject of the children who reached Kent’s total and were assessed for high school anyway.

What should you do next for your child?

There are two honest uses for this curve and one misuse.

The first use is calibration. Two grammar assessments can be a long way apart: a total of 350 sits above about a quarter of that group and a total of 390 above about four in five of it. Treating them as the same result is how a family ends up naming a school that ranks on score with a total near the bottom of the range.

The second use is timing. If your child is in Year 4 or early Year 5, the useful thing this range shows is how much room sits above the threshold, and therefore how little is gained by aiming at the bar itself. When to start preparing works through what that means for a schedule.

The misuse is treating the curve as a forecast. We have sat with parents in October holding a result letter and last year’s figures, working a margin out to the decimal place, and the margin was never the thing that mattered. What mattered was whether the school they had named ranked on score at all, and what their second and third preferences were. If you are at that point, what results day itself looks like sets out the sequence; if you are not yet sure which test your county sets, which 11+ test your child will sit settles that first.

A score is only comparable with this curve if it comes from three papers of the same kind, sat in one go and standardised for age, which is not what a chapter of a workbook produces.

Common questions

What is a good score in the Kent Test?

Kent County Council publishes a threshold rather than a rank, so there is no official good score. What its own 2025 scores report shows is the shape of the range: among the children it discloses as assessed suitable for grammar, the middle half scored between 349 and 384, and the middle of that group sat at 365 .

What was the median Kent Test total in 2025?

Among the 8,530 children Kent County Council’s 2025 scores report discloses as assessed suitable for grammar, half scored 365 or more. Among the 8,222 it discloses as assessed suitable for high school, the middle figure was 309. Both are computed on the disclosed counts alone .

Is 360 a good Kent Test total?

It is above the middle of the grammar-assessed range, and not by much. A total of 360 sits above at least 3,611 of the 8,530 children the 2025 report discloses as assessed suitable for grammar, which is a little under half of them, and the middle of that group is 365 .

Why is every number here a lower bound?

Because Kent County Council replaces any count of five or fewer children with the words 5 or less, on advice from the Information Commissioner’s Office. Every count in this article is the sum of the disclosed cells only, so the true figure is higher by between one and five children for each suppressed cell. A suppressed cell is never zero .

Does a higher total mean a better chance of a place?

It depends on the school. Kent County Council says a grammar assessment does not guarantee a place, and separately that some Kent grammar schools, particularly those most likely to offer places to children from outside Kent, give priority to those with the highest scores. Which applies to your child is a question about the school’s own admissions criteria, not about the county curve .