Getting into Beths Grammar School
The Bexley Selection Test, the one 11+ the council runs for its four grammar schools: 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
The test was sat on 2 to 10 September 2026. Results are due early October 2026.
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 Beths 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
Beths Grammar sits the Bexley Selection Test, set by Quest.
Quest Assessments writes 11+ papers for a number of schools and councils, and each one picks its own mix of subjects, so the papers differ from place to place. What stays the same is the approach. Questions are built on the Key Stage 2 curriculum, answers are recorded on an OMR sheet by drawing a line through the chosen box, and marks are standardised according to age in years and months. That last point has a consequence worth knowing: there is no fixed number of correct answers that qualifies, because the mark needed shifts with how old a child is on the day. Quest publishes free familiarisation booklets, and working through one is worth doing if only so the answer sheet itself is not a surprise.
Quest papers are built on the Key Stage 2 curriculum and marked from an answer sheet, with scores standardised by age in years and months, so there is no fixed number of correct answers that qualifies. Two things follow. Work the underlying curriculum rather than chasing a target mark, and make sure the answer sheet itself is not a surprise on the day: download Quest’s own free familiarisation booklet. PlusProgress practice covers the curriculum ground adaptively and reports progress as a standardised age score, so the number at home means the same thing as the number the school sends.
Beths also accepts the Kent test: a boy deemed selective in the Kent (Dartford) test is eligible here, not only through the Bexley Selection Test.
How places are decided
192 places for September 2027. Reaching the required standard puts a child in the running; this order decides the rest.
Catchment: No catchment area. Any boy deemed selective may apply, and once the ranked categories are filled places go by shortest straight-line distance to the school.
Deemed selective in the Bexley Selection Test first. Then: looked-after and previously looked-after boys; boys identified by Bexley as achieving one of the highest 180 scores; siblings at the school at enrolment; children of staff; up to 12 Pupil Premium places in rank order of distance; then proximity to the school. Boys deemed selective in the Kent (Dartford) test are also eligible. Supplementary forms are due by 30 October 2026.
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, 5,855 children sat the Bexley selection test for 2025 entry. 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, 4 schools
The same test also covers these schools:
Common questions
There is no fixed pass mark, and Bexley says so plainly. The council and the four headteachers agree the selective standard each year after seeing how that cohort did, and about 30% of candidates are deemed selective. For scale, the council publishes that the average total weighted age-standardised score is 200 and about two thirds of children score between 170 and 230.
All four schools give priority to children the council identifies as achieving one of the 180 highest scores in the test, and Bexley Grammar’s policy says those children are guaranteed a place. So being deemed selective gets your child considered, and the top 180 is what usually decides the offer. Below that, distance from the school does a lot of the work.
In the first full week of September, at the start of Year 6. For 2027 entry, children whose own primary acts as a test centre sat between 2 and 10 September 2026, and everyone else at one of the grammar schools between 7 and 10 September 2026.
No. Registration only books the test with the council. You still name the schools you want on the common application form, which closes on 31 October in the year of the test.
For 2027 entry, registration closed at midnight on 31 March 2026, and the council is blunt about it: late registrations will not be accepted and there is no appeal process. The next opportunity is the following year’s round.
Early October, before the council application deadline at the end of that month, so you can name preferences knowing whether your child was deemed selective.
A format-matched mock shows where he genuinely stands.