Getting into Alcester Grammar School
The West Midlands Grammar Schools Entrance Test, shared across five areas: what it involves and what to do next, for entry in September 2027.
Every fact on this page is checked against the school’s published admissions information, and nothing is guessed. · View sources · Report an error
Registration for the September 2026 test closed on Tuesday 30 June 2026. 1 weeks to test day.
What to do and when
Sitting the year after (2028 entry)? These are 2027-entry dates, and yours are not published yet: there is nothing you need to do this far out. Sign up for reminders and tick the 2028-entry box, and we’ll email only when your cycle’s dates are out and it is actually time to act.
5 dates as a calendar file, for Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook. Share the link with anyone who needs them.
Life’s busy, so we’ll email you a nudge before each Alcester Grammar deadline above. Nothing else: no newsletter, no marketing, and the reminders stop for good after National Offer Day (1 Mar 2027) unless you sign up again for another school.
The test, in one look
Alcester Grammar sits the Warwickshire 11+ Test (West Midlands Grammar Schools Entrance Test), set by GL Assessment.
GL Assessment sets the 11+ for most grammar schools in England, including this one. Papers are multiple-choice, and scores are age-standardised: children born at different points in the school year are marked against slightly different scales, so a summer-born child isn’t disadvantaged. Because GL is the most widely used format, familiarisation materials and practice papers in the same style are easy to come by.
Because GL is multiple-choice and age-standardised, the two things that move a score are accuracy under time pressure and covering every question type rather than the comfortable ones. PlusProgress practice is adaptive across English, Maths, Verbal and Non-Verbal Reasoning, so it keeps finding the types your child is weakest on instead of rewarding what they already do well, and mock papers follow the format this school sets. Progress is reported as a standardised age score, the same scale the school will use.
How places are decided
150 places for September 2027. Reaching the required standard puts a child in the running; this order decides the rest.
Catchment: A priority circle rather than a postcode list: a radius of 16.936 miles for 2027 entry, drawn from the Fountain in Rother Street, Stratford-upon-Avon. Living inside it ranks a child ahead of everyone outside.
Children with an EHCP naming the school are admitted first, subject to achieving the required Minimum Academic Standard or above; this reduces the places remaining.
Categories 1 to 5 then apply to children whose 11+ registration and secondary application were both on time.
5 ranked criteria decide the order. Within every category the highest scores get the highest priority; ties are broken by shortest straight-line home-to-school distance, and if distances are also equal by a computerised random number generator run by Warwickshire Admissions in front of an independent Legal Services witness.
▸The full criteria, in the school’s own words
- 1.Looked-After or Previously Looked-After children who achieve the Automatic Qualifying Score (AQS) or above, or who score up to 20 marks below the AQS (if the gap between the AQS and the Required Minimum Academic Standard is more than 20 marks, any such child reaching the Minimum Academic Standard is admitted).
- 2.Children living within the priority circle who attract the Pupil Premium through Free School Meals eligibility, who achieve the AQS or above or who score up to 20 marks below it. A cap applies across categories 1 and 2: up to twenty places only are offered in those two categories to students not meeting the AQS, including re-offers from the waiting list after 1 March 2027.
- 3.Children living in the priority area who achieve the AQS or above.
- 4.Children living outside the priority area who achieve the AQS or above.
- 5.Children who score below the AQS but above the required Minimum Academic Standard for the waiting list.
The same order governs the waiting list after 1 March 2027.
What an EHCP is: an Education, Health and Care Plan, a legal document from your council for a child with special educational needs. Where a plan names a school, that school has to offer a place, so those places are taken out of the number above before anyone else is ranked. It is not a route most families can apply through.
Taken from the school’s own determined admission arrangements. The full document is linked under sources.
How many children actually sit
Schools and councils publish some of this and not all of it. The numbers below came from Freedom of Information requests, which anyone can make, and each one links to the reply it came from.
Across the whole area, 2,926 children sat the Warwickshire 11+ in 2024. They were not all applying here: that number covers every school that shares the test. Source
How pupils here do at GCSE
This is based on how pupils at this school go on to perform in their GCSEs, five years after the 11+. Attainment 8 is their average result across eight subjects. Read it as a description of outcomes rather than of teaching: a selective school admits children who were already scoring well at ten, so a high position here reflects who the school takes in as much as what it does with them.
Scores from Compare school and college performance data in England, Department for Education, 2024/25, under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The Department publishes the scores and does not publish a ranking: the position above is ours, calculated over state-funded schools with a published score. See the full table.
One sitting, 6 schools
The same test also covers these schools: We have pages for these so far:
Common questions
No, and the two deadlines are four months apart. Registration closed at the end of June; the school application is not due until 31 October. Missing the June one cannot be fixed in October, and it is the commonest way a family loses a place.
There is no pass mark to aim at, and there never is one before the test. Each school sets its Automatic Qualifying Score after the papers are marked, against that year's cohort. Any number circulating beforehand belongs to a previous year.
Yes: proof of address, due by 31 December. Failing to supply it makes an otherwise on-time application late, which is a costly way to lose a place you had won.
Two papers of about an hour each, covering English, Verbal Reasoning, Non-Verbal Reasoning and Maths across the four sections. Of each hour, roughly a quarter is spoken instructions and practice questions, so the testing time is shorter than the sitting time.
The same test is operated across the Warwickshire, Birmingham, Walsall, Wolverhampton and Shropshire grammar schools, so a family near a boundary may be able to use one sitting for schools in more than one area. Check each school's own arrangements before relying on it.
Test week: one calm timed run-through, then rest.