Getting into Newport Girls' High School
The West Midlands Grammar Schools: Shropshire, Walsall and Wolverhampton (SWW) 11+, set by GL Assessment: 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 4pm, Friday 26 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 Newport Girls' High 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
Newport Girls' High sits the West Midlands Grammar Schools: Shropshire, Walsall and Wolverhampton (SWW), 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.
The qualifying score is not set in advance: a panel meets after the marking to decide it, so it shifts a little each year. For September 2026 entry it was 192, or 183 for looked after girls and those on Pupil Premium.
How places are decided
120 places for September 2027. Reaching the required standard puts a child in the running; this order decides the rest.
Catchment: Yes, the Newport boundary area, published as a map rather than a postcode list. Girls inside it who reach the qualifying score come ahead of everyone else, and any places left go to girls from anywhere, in score order.
Admission runs in four stages and stops as soon as the 120th girl is admitted.
4 ranked criteria decide the order.
▸The full criteria, in the school’s own words
- 1.Stage one: looked after and previously looked after girls, including internationally adopted previously looked after children, provided they have scored no less than 95% of the qualifying score.
- 2.Stage two: up to 15 girls whose primary school receives pupil premium support for them at the time of the entrance test, who attend a Telford and Wrekin primary school named in Appendix 1 of the policy at the time of the test, and who scored no less than 95% of the qualifying score; evidence of pupil premium entitlement must reach the school no later than five working days before the test; if more than 15 qualify the highest 15 scores are taken, and a tie for 15th place admits all tied girls; unfilled places in this group roll into stages three and four.
- 3.Stage three: all girls resident in the publicised Newport boundary area who achieved the qualifying score, ranked by test score if there are more than the remaining places.
- 4.Stage four: everyone else, anywhere in the UK or abroad, on decreasing rank order of standardised test score, with a tie for the 120th place (to two decimal places) settled in favour of the girl living closest to the school. There is no sibling criterion, although twins or triplets tied on the same standardised score are admitted above PAN rather than split.
Taken from the school’s own determined admission arrangements. The full document is linked under sources.
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, 5 schools
The same test also covers these schools: We have pages for these so far:
Test week: one calm timed run-through, then rest.