Getting into Tonbridge Grammar 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 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 Tonbridge 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, in one look
Tonbridge Grammar 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.
Tonbridge sets no test of its own, but it ranks on the Kent Test score rather than distance: inside both the Area list and the Trustee list, girls are placed in order of their combined score, so qualifying alone will not secure a place.
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: Not a postcode catchment. Up to 135 of the 180 places go to girls resident for Council Tax purposes in Tonbridge & Malling, Tunbridge Wells or Sevenoaks; 30 Trustee places go to girls living anywhere else, and 15 to Pupil Premium girls.
Before the oversubscription criteria: girls whose EHCP names the school and who have been awarded a selective assessment via the Kent Test are admitted, and the number of available Area places is reduced accordingly.
4 ranked criteria decide the order, across 2 lists.
▸The full criteria, in the school’s own words
- 1.Looked after and previously looked after children who name the school and who have been awarded a selective assessment via the Kent Test, given priority over all other applicants (Area places reduced accordingly).
- 2.Rank score, run as two separate lists.
- 1.Area places, up to 135 places, for girls with a selective assessment resident for Council Tax purposes in Tonbridge & Malling Borough, Tunbridge Wells Borough or Sevenoaks District, ranked by combined score in the age-eleven assessment, then distance to the school, then random allocation by lot supervised independently.
- 2.Trustee places, 30 places, for girls with a selective assessment resident outside those three council areas, ranked by combined score, then distance, then lot. If either list has too few candidates by the date the local authority sends offer letters, the surplus places transfer to the other list. 3. Pupil Premium places, 15 places, for girls eligible for Pupil Premium with a selective assessment, allocated only where the eligible girl's score is below the automatic qualifying score for Area places, ranked by distance then by lot; a Supplementary Information Form must reach the school by 31 October in the year of application, alongside the Secondary Common Application Form. Unfilled Pupil Premium places transfer to the Area list.
Waiting list held in criteria order, re-ranked on each addition, until 31 December 2027.
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.
The scores that actually won places
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.
The published qualifying score is 332. That is the mark a child has to reach to be considered at all. It is not the mark that gets a place.
- For 2025 entry, the last place on the priority area route went to a child scoring 368, 36 marks above the qualifying score. Source
- For 2025 entry, the last place on the out of area route went to a child scoring 395, 63 marks above the qualifying score. Source
One year, not a promise about the next. The bar moves with how many children apply and how they score.
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.