Getting into The Folkestone School for Girls
The Kent Test, the one 11+ Kent County Council runs for every Kent grammar school: 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 1 July 2026. Kent asks parents who missed it to email kent.admissions@kent.gov.uk rather than assume the door is shut. Otherwise: 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 Folkestone School for Girls 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
Folkestone School for Girls sits the Kent Test, 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.
Folkestone runs its own entrance test, the Shepway Test, as an alternative to the Kent Test, and she needs only one of the two. It is half an hour of creative writing plus a computer-based section covering comprehension, vocabulary, Maths and Non-Verbal Reasoning, sat at the school.
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 boundary you have to be inside. Girls living in the Folkestone and Hythe district (formerly Shepway) get priority, and girls outside it are still eligible, ranked by distance from the school.
Girls with an SSEN or EHCP who meet the entry requirements are admitted first and the PAN is reduced accordingly.
Only girls who have first shown selective ability (see testNotes) are eligible for consideration at all.
4 ranked criteria decide the order.
▸The full criteria, in the school’s own words
- 1.Children in Local Authority Care, meaning a looked after child or a child who was previously looked after but immediately afterwards became subject to an adoption, child arrangement or special guardianship order, including children who were in state care outside England and ceased to be so through adoption.
- 2.Girls in receipt of Pupil Premium who reside in the District of Folkestone and Hythe (formerly Shepway), per the map at Appendix 2. Pupil Premium means registered for targeted free school meals at any point in the last 6 years; it excludes expanded FSM and excludes those eligible only for Universal Infant Free School Meals. Applicants under this criterion must return the Supplementary Form for Pupil Premium Information (Appendix 1) to the school by 31st October in the year of application and must also name the school on the Secondary Common Application Form.
- 3.Girls who reside in the District of Folkestone and Hythe (formerly Shepway), per the Appendix 2 map. If successful applicants in Folkestone and Hythe exceed the places available, nearness of home to school decides, measured as a straight line between the child's permanent home address and the school using National Land and Property Gazetteer address points.
- 4.Other girls who satisfy the selection requirements, with those living nearest to the school given higher priority. If two or more children have equal eligibility for the last available place, names are numbered and drawn randomly under independent supervision. No place count or quota is attached to any individual 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.
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.
372 children sat for Folkestone School for Girls in 2024, for 180 places, about 2.1:1. Source
Over 2 years we have figures for, 60 families appealed and 22 won, about 37%.
- 2023 entry: 29 heard, 11 upheld
- 2022 entry: 31 heard, 11 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, 33 schools
The same test also covers these schools:
Common questions
Kent publishes a real number, which is rarer than you would think. For the 2025 test, a grammar school assessment needed a total of 332 or more with no single score below 108. The council sets it again each year and publishes the new figure with results in October, so treat 332 as the shape of the target rather than a guarantee. Papers are standardised from 69 to 141, so the highest possible total is 423.
Two papers of about an hour. The first is English and Maths, each section a 5 minute practice run then a 25 minute test, with a comprehension exercise in the English part. The second is reasoning, and the council’s own familiarisation booklet gives it three sections: Verbal Reasoning, one 20 minute test after a practice run; then Spatial Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning, both in short blocks of 4 or 5 minutes each, in an order the council does not fix. Spatial means picturing a shape and moving it in your head, folding it or turning it or finding it hidden inside another. It counts towards the reasoning score rather than getting a score of its own. There is also a 40 minute writing exercise which is not marked: it exists so a headteacher panel can look at it if your child’s scores fall just short.
That is what the headteacher assessment is for. A child who does not meet the standard on scores alone can be referred by their primary head, and a local panel looks at classwork and the unmarked writing exercise before deciding. It is a real route, not a formality, and it is worth asking the primary school about early.
No, and Kent says so plainly: it means grammar school is judged suitable, not that a place is held. Each school then applies its own admissions criteria, and in the most oversubscribed schools that means distance or the highest scores. The pages here carry each school’s own rules.
Children at Kent primary schools sit it in their own school on Thursday 10 September 2026 for 2027 entry. Everyone else is invited to a Kent testing centre on the weekend of 12 and 13 September 2026. Results are emailed on Thursday 15 October 2026, before the 31 October council deadline.
No. The council is explicit that the test is only valid for Kent grammar schools. Medway runs its own Medway Test and Bexley its own selection test, each with separate registration, so a family on a boundary may be looking at two registrations and two test days.
Test week: one calm timed run-through, then rest.
PlusProgress mocks return a standardised score for each paper, the same currency Kent reports back, so you can see where she stands against that 332 well before September.