Getting into Skipton Girls' High School
The Skipton Girls' High 11+, set by FSCE: 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 Midnight on Wednesday 19 August 2026. 3 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 Skipton 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
Skipton Girls' High 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.
Two papers, Maths and English, sat at the school from 9.30am to about 12.15pm. She has to reach the required standard in each paper separately, not on a combined total, and she may sit the test only once in the year.
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: There is a Priority Area, published as a map rather than a postcode list, covering the Craven area of North Yorkshire. Girls inside it are ranked ahead of girls outside, but living outside is not a bar and the school expects some places to go to girls beyond it.
Girls with a current EHCP naming the school who are deemed suitable in the testing are offered a place first, and the number of available places is reduced accordingly.
4 ranked criteria decide the order.
▸The full criteria, in the school’s own words
- 1.looked-after and previously looked-after girls who have been deemed suitable;
- 2.those who at the time of application are registered as Pupil Premium and/or whose families are in receipt of Universal Credit;
- 3.girls living within the school’s Priority Area who have been deemed suitable;
- 4.girls living outside the school’s Priority Area who have been deemed suitable. Within any one of these groups that cannot be met in full, places go to those living nearest the school, measured in a straight line by electronic mapping from the front door of the home to the main school entrance on Gargrave Road, with a random draw as the final tie-break. No place counts or quotas are attached to any criterion.
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.
247 children sat for Skipton Girls' High in 2024, for 120 places, about 2.1:1. Source
347 girls registered for the 2024 test and 247 actually sat it. Roughly one in four who register do not turn up, so a registration count overstates the field you are competing against.
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.
Three weeks out is exactly when a timed mock helps.