Getting into Queen Mary's Grammar 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 26 June 2026 at 4pm. 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 Mary's 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 Mary's Grammar 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 minimum qualifying score has sat at 200, but the mark that actually took the last place on offer day was higher: 225 for 2026 entry, 224 for 2025 and 223 for 2024. Governors do not set the 2027 score until November 2026.
How places are decided
180 places for September 2027. Reaching the required standard puts a child in the running; this order decides the rest.
Catchment: No catchment area. The school says parents living inside and beyond the Borough of Walsall may apply, and the arrangements carry no distance criterion at all. Within each priority group, places go in order of test score.
Candidates must first achieve the minimum qualifying score in the Test; anyone below it is not offered a place regardless of preference.
3 ranked criteria decide the order. Ties are broken by adding together the candidate's positions in the three skill areas of the Test, highest score winning; if that still cannot separate applicants, an independently verified random allocation is used.
▸The full criteria, in the school’s own words
- 1.a looked after child, or a child previously looked after who immediately afterwards became subject to an adoption, child arrangements or special guardianship order (including children who appear to have been in state care outside England and ceased to be so as a result of being adopted), who achieve the minimum qualifying score, ranked by standardised score;
- 2.children in receipt of Pupil Premium at the time of the Test who achieve the minimum qualifying score, ranked by standardised score, but limited to no more than 30% of students in this category (currently 54 places), within this category, priority goes first to B1, students attending a State-funded Primary School in Walsall at the time of the Test (a list is appended to the arrangements), then B2, students not at a Walsall state-funded primary who achieve the minimum qualifying score, ranked by standardised score;
- 3.other children who have achieved the minimum qualifying score, ranked by standardised score, until the Published Admission Number is reached.
Taken from the school’s own determined admission arrangements. The full document is linked under sources.
What the official 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.
From 2020 entry up to 30 per cent of places, about 54, are reserved for pupil premium applicants. That is the most generous allocation of any school we hold figures for.
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.