GL, CEM, CSSE, FSCE or Quest: which 11+ test is it?

Which 11+ test your child sits is decided by the school, not by your county. For most English grammar schools that test comes from GL Assessment. The other names parents meet are CSSE, FSCE, Quest, a shared consortium test, or the school’s own papers. One name on that list, CEM, no longer means what the search results imply.

That last point is why this article exists rather than a tidy comparison table. A parent typing “is my school CEM or GL” is usually holding a practice book bought on the strength of a format that has moved on. The rest of this is what each provider actually sets, how to check yours in writing, and what to do about the schools where nobody has published it.

Who decides which test your child sits?

Selection is a school-level decision, even where a council runs the paperwork and the whole county appears to sit one exam. What has happened in those places is that the schools opted into a common arrangement; the arrangement still belongs to each of them, and a school on the other side of a boundary can and does sit something else entirely.

Across the school records we have checked against each school’s own published admissions arrangements, the shape is lopsided: 119 of our 164 verified schools sit a GL Assessment test, and the remainder are spread thinly across four other answers. That is the useful thing to know before you buy anything. The odds favour GL, and the odds are not the answer.

What the school sets	Schools	What that means in practice
GL Assessment	119	Multiple-choice reasoning papers, answers on a separate sheet
Quest Assessments	10	Curriculum-based papers, answers marked on an OMR sheet
FSCE	10	Key Stage 2 English and maths, no past papers published
CSSE	10	English and maths papers set by the consortium, no reasoning paper
Sutton SET	5	Five of the six sharing schools; the papers’ author is not published
More than one provider	4	Papers from two sources, combined as the school describes
The school’s own papers	3	Format is whatever the school publishes, and only that
A named successor to CEM	1	The school says who took over from CEM; treat it as its own format
Not published	2	We have not found it stated in the school’s own material

Take the last row seriously. Where a school has not put its provider in writing, we leave the field empty rather than inferring it from the school down the road. An absence in that column is an absence of published information, not evidence that the school has no provider.

What does each provider actually set?

GL Assessment is the default, and its own description of the product is the clearest statement of what your child will meet: tests covering verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, spatial reasoning, English and maths, offered as both digital and paper versions, with results age-standardised before a school sees them. Which of those subjects appear, and in how many papers, is the school’s choice rather than GL’s, so “it is a GL test” tells you the question style and almost nothing about the timetable. If the standardising part is new to you, understand the scale before results day: we cover it in what a standardised age score of 121 actually means.

CSSE writes its own. The Consortium of Selective Schools in Essex covers ten Essex schools, including Colchester Royal Grammar School, and it is the odd one out on format: an English paper of sixty minutes with ten minutes of additional reading time, and a mathematics paper of sixty minutes, and no reasoning paper at all. The consortium publishes its own familiarisation material, and that material, not a generic multiple-choice pack, is what a child sitting CSSE should be practising with. How the CSSE test works across all ten Essex schools sets out the rest of what one sitting decides.

FSCE, Future Stories Community Enterprise, is the one built to resist drilling. The North Halifax Grammar School puts the design plainly on its own admissions page: children are assessed only on knowledge appropriate to the Key Stage 2 curriculum, and the school warns that the entrance test content changes each year, so its familiarisation guide is not definitive . There are no past papers to work through. Steady curriculum work is the whole strategy, which some parents find liberating and others find unnerving.

Quest Assessments sets the tests behind several council-run arrangements. Bexley is the clearest worked case: the council states that Quest is the provider and that a single test admits to all four of its grammar schools, Beths Grammar School among them, with the result built from half the verbal ability score and a quarter each of the numerical and non-verbal scores. Quest itself describes two booklets of about fifty minutes each, answered by drawing a line through a box rather than writing . That answer sheet is a skill in itself, and it is free to practise: Quest publishes familiarisation material on its own site.

A weighting like Bexley’s is also a reminder that the provider does not set the bar. What counts as a qualifying mark is the school’s decision, and it is a different question again, covered in how a qualifying score or cut-off is actually set.

Is my child’s school still CEM?

CEM is the most searched name in this whole subject and the least useful one to plan around.

The organisation itself has not disappeared, but it has changed twice. Its own history page records that CEM joined Cambridge in 2019 and became Cambridge Insight in 2025, and the selection assessment it now sells is a computer-based one aimed largely at independent schools. Meanwhile authorities that had used its paper 11+ went elsewhere. Warwickshire is the one we can show you in a council’s own words: it announced that its grammar school applicants would take the test from GL Assessment instead, from 2023 entry, after the previous contract with CEM came to an end.

Our own records say the same thing from the other direction: not one of our verified schools names CEM as the provider of a live paper test. What survives is the word rather than the thing. “CEM-style” has become a description of a question mix, verbal, numerical and non-verbal material blended into timed sections rather than split into one paper per subject. That mix is real and some schools still set it. What it no longer tells you is who wrote the paper, or that the school your child is applying to sets anything of the kind.

Could the provider change before your child sits?

The most expensive mistake in this area is not choosing the wrong provider. It is choosing the right provider for the wrong year.

Trafford is the case we watch most closely, because it is mid-transition and a mid-transition fact is exactly the kind that goes stale in print. The consortium of five Trafford grammar schools, including Altrincham Grammar School for Girls, announced that GL remains the provider for entry in 2027, with FSCE taking over from 2028 onwards. Two children in the same family, two years apart, will sit tests of a different shape. The school’s own page for the current cycle still points parents at a Trafford GL familiarisation guide , which is right for this year and will not be next.

Announcements like that appear on the school’s or consortium’s news page long before the admissions policy is rewritten, so read both. If your child is in Year 4 or younger, the provider you read today is a fact with an expiry date. That is one of several reasons the sensible starting point is a year later than most parents assume, which is the argument in when to start preparing for the 11+.

What if the school never names its provider?

Two of the best-known tests in London are anonymous in exactly this way, and pretending otherwise would be the easiest possible thing to get wrong.

The Sutton Selective Eligibility Test is shared by Sutton Grammar School and five other Sutton schools, five of the six being in our verified set. One sitting decides eligibility across all of them, and the council’s own page says only that qualifying makes a child eligible to sit the grammar schools’ second stage examinations . Nowhere in that material is a provider named, so our record for those schools carries the consortium and leaves the provider blank. How the Sutton SET works across six schools sets out what each stage actually contains.

St Olave’s Grammar School works the same way and adds a trap of its own. It publishes its format in detail, a first stage of one hour of multiple-choice English, logic and mathematics, followed by a written second stage, and names no external provider anywhere in it. It also calls that first stage the SET, which is not the Sutton SET and shares nothing with it but three letters. The logic section is verbal and non-verbal reasoning under another label, and the question types behind that label are the ordinary ones: we set them out in the verbal reasoning question types children meet. What the marker looks for in a creative writing task covers what that written second stage actually rewards.

What should you do next for your child?

Do these four things, in this order.

• Find the school’s determined admissions arrangements for your child’s entry year, on the school’s own site, and read what it says about the test. That document is the only one that binds anybody.
• Check the entry year, not the current one. A policy for this September’s sitting may already have been superseded for the year your child applies.
• Match the physical format before the content: multiple-choice on a separate answer sheet, an OMR line through a box, or full written answers in a booklet. Those are three different exam-day skills, and the last one cannot be rehearsed on a screen.
• Only then choose practice material, and choose it for the format rather than for the brand on the cover.

Our which 11+ test each school uses tool collects the answer for every school we have verified, grouped by provider, with each school’s own page linked for the detail. It is free and needs no sign-up. Where a region runs one arrangement for almost everybody, the regional guide is the faster read: how the Kent Test works is the worked example of a county-wide GL arrangement.

Common questions

Is my child’s school GL or CEM?

For a state grammar school the answer is almost never CEM any more, and it may not be GL either. Check the school’s own admissions arrangements for the current entry year, because that is the only document that binds it, and our which-test tool collects the answer for every school we have verified.

What happened to the CEM 11+?

CEM joined Cambridge in 2019 and was renamed Cambridge Insight in 2025, and its selection assessment is now a computer-based test . Meanwhile the authorities that used its paper 11+ moved to other providers. So a practice book sold as CEM preparation is not describing a test most grammar schools now set.

Does the provider change how we should prepare?

More than parents expect. A GL paper is multiple-choice reasoning answered on a separate sheet; a CSSE sets English and mathematics only, in its own format; an FSCE paper stays inside the Key Stage 2 curriculum and publishes no past papers at all. The underlying maths and English are the same, but the exam-day habits are not.

Can my child sit more than one provider’s test?

Often yes, and it is a normal thing to do where two schools you like sit on different days. The limits are practical rather than official: the sittings have to be on different dates, each one needs its own registration by its own deadline, and each format needs its own familiarisation.

Where does a school publish which test it uses?

In its determined admissions arrangements for the entry year, usually a PDF on the school’s own site, and often repeated on the council’s admissions pages. If neither says it in writing, treat the provider as not published rather than guessing from what the school down the road does.