Getting into Queen Elizabeth Grammar School
The Queen Elizabeth Grammar 11+, set by FSCE: what it involves and what to do next, for entry in September 2027.
The paper mixes multiple choice with written answers and can draw on any Year 5 subject, science, history, geography and music included. You are told only whether your child reached the required standard, never the score.
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 midnight on Sunday 12 July 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 Queen Elizabeth 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
Queen Elizabeth Grammar sits the FSCE 11+.
FSCE (Future Stories Community Enterprise) is a not-for-profit test provider set up by Reading School, and a growing number of grammar schools now use it. Its papers stay close to the Key Stage 2 curriculum: English and Maths, not abstract reasoning puzzles. That makes it a fairer test, because what counts is what children have actually learned at school. FSCE publishes no past papers, so there is nothing to drill from, but you can still prepare properly. Steady work on KS2 English and Maths is what pays off, and that is exactly the ground PlusProgress practice covers.
FSCE publishes no past papers, which unsettles parents used to drilling them, but it also means there is nothing to drill and steady curriculum work is the whole strategy. The papers stay close to Key Stage 2 English and Maths, which is exactly the ground PlusProgress practice covers, adapting difficulty as your child improves rather than repeating what they can already do.
How places are decided
160 places for September 2027. Reaching the required standard puts a child in the running; this order decides the rest.
Catchment: Yes, a designated catchment area, but it is published only as a map, with no postcodes or place names in the policy. It ranks above all other addresses. Separately, 32 of the 160 places go on test score alone, wherever your child lives.
Two things happen before the oversubscription list is reached.
First, applicants with an EHCP who have reached the required standard and have named the school are admitted, and those admissions count inside the PAN.
Second, 32 places (20% of all places) are awarded purely on ranked aggregate entrance-test score, highest score first, with no reference to where the child lives.
5 ranked criteria decide the order.
▸The full criteria, in the school’s own words
- 1.children in local authority care or previously in local authority care, including children previously in state care outside England;
- 2.current family association, meaning a sister or brother attending the school at the time the child starts, with multiple-birth siblings admitted together even if that takes the school over its PAN;
- 3.pupil premium, capped at 10 students in receipt of pupil premium including service premium, described as 2 places per Year 7 form group based on a PAN of 160 across 5 forms of entry, and pupil-premium children already placed under a higher criterion do not count towards those 10;
- 4.children of permanent members of QEGS staff employed two or more years at the time of registration, or recruited to fill a demonstrable skill shortage, excluding contract and peripatetic staff;
- 5.a two-part geographic criterion taking category (a) the designated catchment area first, then category (b) all other areas, and within each giving priority to those living closest to the school. Distance is straight-line from a point within the home to OS reference NY 51206 29679, measured on the local authority's computerised GIS. Ties are broken by a randomly drawn number, independently verified. Unfilled pupil-premium places pass to the next priority in the list on National Offer Day.
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.
271 children sat for Queen Elizabeth Grammar for 2025 entry, for 160 places, about 1.7:1. 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.
Test week: one calm timed run-through, then rest.