Getting into The Judd School
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 Wednesday 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 Judd 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
Judd 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.
The score, honestly
Reaching 332 makes a child eligible across the county. It has not been enough here: the cut-off score was 371 to 389 over the last 2 years, and the mean score of a pupil who got in ran 389.5 to 410.1.
| Entry | Inner area | Outer area |
|---|---|---|
| Sept 2026 | 389 | 403 |
| Sept 2025 | 371 | 398 |
Outer area sat higher than inner area in every one of the 2 years, so the address does real work here even after the score. Figures are the age-standardised Kent Test total.
2 years is a guide to where the bar has sat, not a promise about 2027. Where this comes from
Enter your postcode and we’ll tell you whether you’re in the priority area, and what that means for the score.
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: 157 of the 180 places go to the Inner Area and 23 to the rest of England, so where you live changes the mark that wins a place, not whether you can apply.
Places are split by area before any oversubscription criteria are applied: 157 places to the Inner Area and 23 places to the Outer Area.
If one area has too few qualifying applications, the other area's allocation is increased.
Up to 4 further places, outside the PAN, go to the school's Specialist Resource Provision for students with an EHCP and a diagnosis of ASD, and are allocated by the local authority, not by the school.
Children with an EHCP naming the school are admitted before the criteria are applied, reducing the 180 accordingly.
- 152 placesINNER AREA, MAIN ALLOCATION
- up to 5 placesINNER AREA, PUPIL PREMIUM
- 23 placesOUTER AREA
12 ranked criteria decide the order, across 3 lists.
▸The full criteria, in the school’s own words
- 1.Looked After or Previously Looked After Children who receive a ‘Grammar Assessment’ in the Kent Test, including children who appear to have been in state care outside England and ceased to be so as a result of being adopted.
- 2.Academic ability, measured by ranked aggregate score on the Kent PESE tests, the highest score given the highest rank.
- 3.Distance from home to school where scores are equal, nearest ranked highest.
- 4.Random selection by drawing lots, supervised by an independent person, where score and distance are both equal.
- 1.Up to 5 places to students registered in the current academic year for Free School Meals, ranked by aggregate Kent PESE score; a Supplementary Information Form is required.
- 2.Any of those 5 places left unallocated go to students eligible for Pupil Premium, again ranked by aggregate PESE score; a Supplementary Information Form is required.
- 3.Distance where scores are equal.
- 4.Random selection by drawing lots. Any unused places in this subcategory are added back to the Inner Area main allocation.
- 1.Looked After or Previously Looked After Children with a ‘Grammar Assessment’.
- 2.Academic ability by ranked aggregate Kent PESE score.
- 3.Distance where scores are equal.
- 4.Random selection by drawing lots.
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 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 he stands against that 332 well before September.