Getting into Calday Grange Grammar School
The Wirral 11+ Assessment, set and marked by Quest Assessments and administered by Wirral Council for the consortium: 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 Sunday 31 May 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 Calday Grange 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
Calday Grange Grammar sits the Wirral Admissions Test, set by Quest Assessments.
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.
How places are decided
210 places for September 2027. Reaching the required standard puts a child in the running; this order decides the rest.
Catchment: No catchment area. Geography enters only at the end, as the shortest walking distance to the school, and the school says it welcomes applications from across the Wirral, Chester, North Wales, Liverpool and Warrington.
The policy states: “If the school is oversubscribed - priority will be determined in the following order:”
5 ranked criteria decide the order.
▸The full criteria, in the school’s own words
- 1.Looked After Children, and previously Looked After Children who immediately moved on from that status through an adoption, child arrangement or special guardianship order.
- 2.Children with a valid medical or social reason supported in writing by a doctor, social worker or appropriate professional person.
- 3.Up to 15 places for children on Free School Meals at the time of application who achieve the qualifying score, in rank order of the shortest walking distance from the school (details must be provided to Wirral’s Children and Young People’s Department and will be verified).
- 4.Children who will have a sibling at the school at the time of admission (sibling means a brother or sister by the same parents, a half brother or sister, a step-brother or sister, or an adopted child living in the same household).
- 5.Geographical factors: preference to children with the shortest walking distance from the school as measured by the Local Authority computer mapping system. If priority still cannot be distinguished, random allocation is used under School Admissions Code 1.35. Note that all of this only applies to children who have already reached the qualifying score in the Wirral selective assessment.
Taken from the school’s own determined admission arrangements. The full document is linked under sources.
What the appeal figures show
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.
Over 2 years we have figures for, 91 families appealed and 36 won, about 40%.
- 2023 entry: 44 heard, 20 upheld
- 2022 entry: 47 heard, 16 upheld
An appeal is a hearing where you explain to an independent panel why your child should have a place. How appeals work, and the figures for every school
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 council-run assessment also covers these Wirral grammars: We have pages for these so far:
Common questions
Paper one assesses Verbal Reasoning. Paper two assesses Mathematics and Non-Verbal Reasoning. Both are sat in the same session with a short break between them, and each lasts about 50 minutes. There is no separate English paper and no writing task.
Quest Assessments sets and marks the papers, and Wirral Council administers the process for the consortium. That means you register for the assessment with the council rather than with an individual school, and one sitting covers the consortium’s grammar schools.
No. The council’s assessment covers the non-Catholic grammar schools. St Anselm’s College sets and marks its own entrance examination and is outside it, so a child applying to both sits two separate tests on different days.
Yes. Quest publishes familiarisation booklets for Maths, Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning, and they show your child how to fill in an OMR answer sheet, which is worth doing at least once. The consortium also offers free access to Atom Home for pupil premium eligible candidates, with eligibility confirmed by your child’s primary school.
The Quest guide asks for pencils and a good eraser. Because every answer is a line drawn through a box on a computer marked sheet rather than a written answer, a pencil that rubs out cleanly matters more here than it usually would.
Test week: one calm timed run-through, then rest.