Grammar schools in Coventry: none in the city, and what that changes

A list of schools is the wrong place to begin. The council says plainly what is not here: “Coventry City does not have any Grammar schools in its area. To apply for a Grammar school, you will need to include the school within your Coventry application in order for them to be considered. However, you must ensure that you have already registered to sit the [11 plus] test with the Local Authority in which the Grammar school is situated as the deadline date to register is usually at the end of June the year before your child starts secondary school. Coventry School Admissions do not administer the [11 plus] test.” Source: Coventry City Council, secondary school admissions. Read 19 September 2026.

That paragraph carries three separate instructions, and a family that reads it as one sentence usually misses one of them. The registration happens somewhere else, with another authority, and it happens first. The application still goes in on a Coventry form. And the test itself is nothing to do with the city, so nobody at Coventry School Admissions can tell you how your child did or whether the date has moved.

The rest of the city's secondary estate is described by the same council in its own count: “20 secondary academies serving children aged 11 to 18, a University Technical College for children aged 13 to 19 and an all-through academy for children aged 4 to 16”. Its co-ordinated scheme adds who decides on places at them: “All secondary schools in Coventry are academies or free schools and their Trust or Board of Directors is the admissions authority.” Source: Coventry City Council, secondary school admissions and its Secondary School Co-ordinated Admissions Scheme 2027/28, paragraph 3.1. Both read 19 September 2026.

A nearby name comes up often enough to be worth settling here. There is no grammar school in Nuneaton. King Edward VI College, Nuneaton is recorded on the GOV.UK register of schools and colleges as a sixth form college for ages 16 to 19, reference URN 130840, and it stands on the site of the former grammar school. Source: GOV.UK, Get Information about Schools. Read 19 September 2026. Warwickshire County Council's own list names six selective schools in the county, one of them a bilateral academy rather than a grammar school, and Nuneaton is not among them.

So the honest subject of this page is not Coventry's schools. It is the grammar schools near Coventry that a city address can genuinely reach, the one bilateral academy beside them, and the paperwork that decides whether the attempt counts. If you have arrived here without meeting the exam itself, what the 11 plus is and what a grammar school test decides are the two pages to read first, and the West Midlands 11 plus hub holds the shared paper and all nineteen schools.

Read the Birmingham sentence again, because the advice inside it is stronger for a Coventry family than for the people it was written for. The council is telling parents with six slots to hold their nerve until the score arrives. A Coventry parent holding three slots is spending a third of the application on any school named before the result is known, and the calendar allows the wait: Warwickshire published results by Friday 16 October 2026 for the round just finished, and Coventry's own application deadline for that year was 31 October 2026, which leaves the second half of October to decide with the score already in hand.

Another line from the city's own page settles a question that comes up every year. “If you are a Coventry resident but your child is attending a school outside of the city (or a private school), you will still need to complete a Coventry application.” Where the child goes to primary school changes nothing about which council receives the form. Source: Coventry City Council, secondary school admissions. Read 19 September 2026. Our page on secondary transfer across the West Midlands sets out what each council does with the form after it closes.

Living outside both areas turns out to be a decision rather than a problem, and the rule is written down. Rugby High School's admissions policy says that “Parents/Carers living in other authorities should register for the test in the region in which they would most like their child to attend a school, eg if you live in Northamptonshire and want your child to attend a grammar school in Warwickshire, you should register your child with Warwickshire to sit the test in Warwickshire.” Coventry is one of those other authorities, so the question to answer before anything else is which school you would most like, not which council is closest. The policy points at one region rather than both, and the sharing box further down is what carries a single score across to the other.

Whichever you choose, registering is not applying. Warwickshire County Council states that “Taking the [11 plus] test is not the same as making an application for a grammar school, nor does it guarantee an offer of a place at a grammar school.” The registration puts a child in a seat in September; the Coventry application in the autumn is what asks for the place.

The two registrations close on different days, and for a family weighing both areas the earlier one is the real deadline. Birmingham City Council published a closing time of “4:00pm on Friday 26 June 2026” for entry in September 2027, adding that “Late registrations are not allowed”. Warwickshire's round for the same entry year closed at 16.00 on Monday 30 June 2026. Four days apart, two separate forms, and neither one counts as the other.

Two smaller rules are easy to miss. The invitation pack “will include a 'Fit and Well' sheet which must be brought to the test session with a photograph of the child sitting the test”, and that photograph “must be signed and dated by the Headteacher of your child's school”. Turn up without it and the child cannot sit that day. And a child sits once: “students are not permitted to sit the test more than once. If it is discovered a child has sat the test more than once, the score from the earliest test will be used.” Source: Rugby High School Admissions Policy 2027-28, pages 7 to 8. Read 19 September 2026.

Dates for the year after this one are not published yet, so what follows is the pattern rather than a promise. Warwickshire states that registration “Opens: 7 May each year for those children currently in Year 5”, that the deadline is “30 June”, and that tests are “scheduled to take place in September, when they have just started in Year 6”. The round for September 2027 entry was sat on 12 and 13 September 2026. A child in Year 5 as this page is published therefore sits in September 2027 for 2028 entry, and the 2028 dates were not on the council's registration page when we checked it on 19 September 2026. Put a reminder in for early May 2027 and read the council page then, alongside our own dates and deadlines page and how registration works across the region.

Registration is a June job, and the reading, timing and stamina it is testing are a Year 3 to Year 5 job. A free Pathway Eleven account opens with the free Starting Assessment and turns it into a plan for the weeks in between, so no evening starts with a decision about what to practise. Every question in the bank is reviewed and approved by a qualified teacher before a child sees it, and full mock papers are part of the full plan rather than the free account.

If you are weighing schools in both areas, you will want the score to count in both. It can, and the mechanism is a box on the registration form rather than anything you can arrange later. Rugby High School's policy describes the Warwickshire direction: “Parents/Carers whose children sit the test in Warwickshire may request that their raw score is shared with the grammar schools in Birmingham/Shropshire/Wolverhampton/Walsall. This can be done as part of the registration process.” The same document offers the reverse, and adds that a sharing request made after the closing date “will be considered late for the region they wish their results to be shared with”.

A second box on the same Birmingham form does a different job. The council states that each of its grammar schools “prioritises applicants who are registered for Pupil Premium”, and that “You cannot apply under Pupil Premium if you forget to tick this box when completing your selective test application.” Same page, same check date. A Coventry family entitled to Pupil Premium and weighing the Birmingham route has two boxes to find on one form, not one.

There is one paper behind all of this, which is why a single score can travel at all. Warwickshire County Council describes the arrangement: “The [11 plus] test is currently operated as a shared test between the Warwickshire, Birmingham, Walsall, Wolverhampton and Shropshire Grammar Schools. The same test papers are used across all authorities.” Source: Warwickshire County Council, its 11 plus test page. Read 19 September 2026. The consortium names the publisher of that paper: West Midlands Grammar Schools states that “The test is provided by GL Assessment”. Source: West Midlands Grammar Schools, the entrance test. Read 19 September 2026. Pathway Eleven is an independent service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by GL Assessment. Rugby High School's policy counts the schools inside it: the six in Warwickshire, the eight in Birmingham and the five across Shropshire, Wolverhampton and Walsall. Nineteen schools, and a child sits the test once, whichever area sets the date.

What the paper contains, how long each part lasts and how the sections are weighted are set out on the West Midlands 11 plus page, and what a standardised score is and is not explains why the number on the letter is not a percentage. The four parts of it have pages of their own: English comprehension, verbal reasoning, maths and non-verbal reasoning. A word a policy uses that you do not recognise is probably in the 11 plus glossary.

This is the part that a county boundary hides. The priority areas that decide most Warwickshire offers are not county boundaries; two of them are plain distance circles drawn from a landmark, and a house falls inside or outside on distance alone. The three selective schools in Rugby share one: Rugby High School and Lawrence Sheriff School both define a Priority Circle “the centre of which is the Rugby Water Tower and has a radius of 10.004 miles”, and Ashlawn School, which is a bilateral academy in Rugby rather than a grammar school, uses “a circle with a radius of 10.004 miles from the Rugby Water Tower” for its selective places. Three more schools share a second circle, and none of them measures from its own front door: it is drawn from the Fountain in Rother Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, at 16.936 miles for Stratford Girls' Grammar School and for Alcester Grammar School under their 2027 policies, and, under the 2026/27 arrangements that were the most recent published for it when we checked, at an inner circle of 13 miles and an outer circle of 16.885 miles for King Edward VI School. Stratford Girls' attaches a date to its circle: “Evidence will be required to prove that the child is resident within the priority circle by the deadline of 11.59pm on 31st December 2026.”

There is a second Rugby priority area, and Coventry is never inside it. The Eastern Area of Warwickshire is a named list of Rugby plus some three dozen parishes, and no part of Coventry is on that list, so the Eastern Area criteria at Rugby High School, Lawrence Sheriff School and Ashlawn School are closed to a Coventry address. The Priority Circle criterion at the same three schools is not.

We measured it, and the method matters as much as the answer. What follows is Pathway Eleven's own calculation: the straight-line distance between the centre point of one postcode unit and the centre point of the postcode unit we use for each landmark, taken from Ordnance Survey eastings and northings published through postcodes.io and read on 19 September 2026. It is the centre of a postcode rather than the monument itself, and no school measures its circle this way, so a result within a few hundred metres of a boundary is not one to rely on.

Seven postcodes are seven postcodes, not seven districts, and this page will not tell you that a CV number is inside anything. Whole postcode districts straddle both lines, and a council's own measurement is the one that counts. Birmingham City Council makes the general point about every distance tool including ours: “Other websites that provide distance measuring facilities do not measure home to school distances as defined by us, so will produce different measurements.” Recorded from the council's page on calculating distances from schools, fetched 8 September 2026.

What to do with your own address is therefore simple. Put it through our postcode tool, which sorts all nineteen partnership schools by straight-line distance and prints each school's catchment or priority area in its own words, then check the result against Warwickshire's own priority area map, which asks you to click your area and zoom in to your street. If the two disagree, the council is right. The school pages for Rugby High School, Lawrence Sheriff School and Ashlawn School carry the Rugby circle in each school's own wording. The Rother Street one is on the pages for King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon, for Stratford Girls' Grammar School and for Alcester Grammar School.

Warwickshire publishes something after each offer day that is easy to miss: not just the qualifying score each school used, but how many offers were made under every single admissions criterion and the lowest score that succeeded in each. For a family deciding whether an application from outside a priority area is worth one of three slots, that leaflet is the whole answer, and it is a year of history rather than a rule for the next round.

First, the thresholds the schools set for 2026 entry. There is no fixed pass mark anywhere in this system: a headteacher “has an overriding discretion to set the Automatic Qualifying Score and the required minimum academic standard for admission”, after consulting a Committee of Reference, weighing the oversubscription criteria, the ability of the cohort and the number of places. Results letters carry the previous year's figures with the council's own warning that “there can be no guarantee that any child, including those scoring above the required score for previous years, will be offered a grammar school place”. Source: Rugby High School Admissions Policy 2027-28, pages 9 to 11. Read 19 September 2026.

Now the part that decides a Coventry application. Below are the criteria that decide where a Coventry application lands, with the offers made under each and the lowest score that succeeded. Seven further criteria in the same leaflet, each of them for children scoring below the automatic qualifying score or for unfilled premium places, made no offer at all. Two things stand out. In the category reserved for children living outside a school's priority area or catchment, five of the six made no offer at all. And where a Priority Circle did deliver, what it cost varied enormously: Rugby High School filled 80 places through its circle at its qualifying score of 213, while Lawrence Sheriff School offered three through its own at 241, against the same qualifying score of 213.

Scores for offers made under the looked-after, education health and care plan, Pupil Premium, Service Premium and staff criteria are withheld in the leaflet itself, marked “Not published (due to Data Protection)”, so the rows above are the criteria whose scores the council prints. Source: Warwickshire County Council, 2026 entry 11 plus test and grammar school offers information leaflet. Read 19 September 2026.

For a Coventry family the reading is specific rather than gloomy. The realistic route is the Priority Circle, because it is a distance criterion rather than a parish list, and all three Rugby schools have one. Which of them is open to your child depends on the child: Rugby High School takes girls, Lawrence Sheriff School takes boys, and Ashlawn School, the bilateral academy of the three, is co-educational. Ashlawn made 16 offers under its East Circle criterion, at 208. Further south, King Edward VI School takes boys, Stratford Girls' Grammar School takes girls and Alcester Grammar School is co-educational. Source: Warwickshire County Council, grammar schools in Warwickshire, which is where every intake in this paragraph comes from. Read 19 September 2026. On the leaflet figures above, those three southern schools offered nothing outside their areas at all that year, whatever the score.

Birmingham is the other half of the answer, and the Warwickshire rows above do not describe it. Each Birmingham school publishes a final category for applicants who fall into none of the earlier ones, and what that category took, school by school and year by year, is kept on the results tracker beside the year and the publisher each figure comes from. For a family whose address is outside every Warwickshire circle, that is a question to ask rather than a closed door, and the Birmingham 11 plus sets out the route.

Two cautions before anyone treats those rows as next year's rules. The wording moves between cycles: Rugby High School's 2026 criterion for children “living inside or outside of the priority areas” is not the same criterion as the 2027-28 policy's Criterion 9 for children living outside the catchment areas, and each year has to be read against its own document. Sizes move too: the 2027-28 policy gives Rugby High School a Published Admission Number of 150, while the council's 2026 leaflet records a Published Admission Number of 120 for 2026 entry with 150 offers made. Both numbers are published, by two bodies, for two different years. The results tracker keeps each year's leaflet beside the figures it produced.

Then there is the journey, which three policies address and no council here pays for. Warwickshire's travel assistance policy of July 2026 conditions help on the pupil being “resident in Warwickshire” and “attending their nearest qualifying school”, so a Coventry address fails the first condition before the second is reached. Coventry's own policy states that “If a parent/carer exercises their right to choose a school other than the nearest suitable school, the Council does not have a duty to provide travel assistance. In these circumstances parents/carers will be required to make their own travel arrangements”; note that the copy we could read is headed as a version for a Cabinet decision in March 2017 and the council's live download did not serve the document on the check date, so confirm the current version with the council or against the statutory position on GOV.UK. Birmingham publishes its own limit for the schools on its side: “Pupils who accept places at selective schools in Birmingham will not be entitled to free transport from the local authority if an appropriate place is available at a maintained school within three miles of their home address.” Alcester Grammar School puts the practical version in its own policy: it “is strongly recommended that parents/carers firmly establish the cost and availability of transport to the school if it is intended to use a bus service (public or otherwise), before application is made for admission”.

Rugby is the nearer of the two destinations, and two operators publish timetables for it: West Midlands Railway and Avanti West Coast. No journey time appears on this page because none was confirmed on an operator's own page when we checked on 19 September 2026, and the figures that circulate come from ticket resellers. We did not verify a rail route or a journey time to Stratford on an operator's page, and it is the journey to check first if a Stratford school is going on the form. Check the operator at the time of day a child would actually travel, rather than at the quietest hour of the timetable.

There are selective entrance exams inside Coventry; they are just not state ones. King Henry VIII School and Bablake School, both part of Coventry School Foundation, each publish their own assessment for September 2027 entry, and each publishes the same three dates on its own site: applications by Monday 5 October 2026, the entrance exam on Saturday 17 October, dated 2026 on the King Henry VIII page, and offers on Friday 4 December 2026. Those are two separate publications saying the same thing rather than one arrangement, and neither page states that the assessment is shared between the two schools, so this page does not say that it is.

What each school tests is published too. King Henry VIII School lists English Comprehension, English Composition and Mathematics, publishes sample papers for all three, and describes tests administered “in small groups, with a member of staff and our Sixth Form Prefects”. Bablake School lists English Comprehension 1, English Composition 1, English Comprehension 2, English Composition 2 and Mathematics. Source: King Henry VIII School, how to apply and Bablake School, senior application process. Both read 19 September 2026.

One difference is worth a sentence of its own for a family preparing for both routes. Neither Coventry assessment includes non-verbal reasoning, while the shared state paper does, and both Coventry schools ask a child to write at length, which the state paper does not: the familiarisation guide published jointly by the Grammar Schools in Birmingham and Warwickshire County Council describes two booklets that “are timed and consist of multiple-choice questions”, with answers marked on a separate sheet. A child preparing for both is preparing for two different things, not one thing twice. Fees, deposits and bursaries are set by each school and published on its own admissions pages, which is where to check them.

Every fact above, traced to the document that published it

Each source below was opened and read on 19 September 2026. Where a document carries its own version date, that date is given with it. One fact on this page is our own calculation rather than a publisher's, and it is labelled as ours in the section it appears in.

• Coventry City Council, secondary school admissions, the statement that the city has no grammar schools, the 2027 entry timetable, and the rule for a resident whose child is schooled outside the city.
• Coventry City Council, Secondary School Co-ordinated Admissions Scheme 2027/28, the three preferences at paragraph 4.2 and the admissions authority at paragraph 3.1.
• Coventry City Council, travel assistance policy for statutory school age, the duty where a parent chooses a school other than the nearest suitable one. The copy read is headed as a version for a Cabinet decision on 7 March 2017 and its currency is unconfirmed; the statutory position is on GOV.UK, free school transport.
• Warwickshire County Council, its 11 plus test page, the shared test across five authorities.
• West Midlands Grammar Schools, the entrance test, the consortium's own statement of who provides the shared paper.
• Warwickshire County Council, register for the 11 plus test, the 7 May opening, the 30 June deadline and the September sitting.
• Warwickshire County Council, applying to a Warwickshire grammar school, the statement that taking the test is not an application.
• Warwickshire County Council, grammar schools in Warwickshire, the list of six schools and the intake of each.
• Warwickshire County Council, 2026 entry 11 plus test and grammar school offers information leaflet, the qualifying scores on page 2 and the criterion-level offers on pages 3 to 9.
• Warwickshire County Council, priority area maps, the council's own map for checking an address.
• Warwickshire County Council, children and young people's travel assistance policy, July 2026, the residency and nearest-school conditions at section 4.1.1.
• Rugby High School admissions policy 2027-28, last reviewed September 2026: the Priority Circle radius, the Eastern Area parish list, the six-preference statement for Warwickshire residents, the registration rule for other authorities, the score-sharing request, the Fit and Well sheet, the one-sitting rule and the headteacher's discretion over the qualifying score.
• Lawrence Sheriff School admission arrangements 2027/28, the matching Priority Circle and Eastern Area definitions.
• King Edward VI School admission arrangements 2026/27, the 13-mile inner circle and the 16.885-mile outer circle. The 2027/28 arrangements were not published on the school's Warwickshire directory record on the check date.
• Stratford Girls' Grammar School admissions policy 2027, the 16.936-mile priority circle and the residency evidence deadline.
• Alcester Grammar School admission arrangements 2027/28, the priority area, the first-round rule for children outside it and the transport recommendation.
• The Lawrence Education Trust, admissions policy for Ashlawn School 2027-2028, the selective places and the 10.004-mile circle from the Rugby Water Tower.
• Birmingham City Council, apply for a grammar school entry test, page last updated 18 June 2026: the 26 June 2026 closing time, the consent box and its consequence, the Pupil Premium box, the free-transport limit for its own selective places, and the six preferences.
• Birmingham City Council, calculating distances from schools, on third-party distance tools. Recorded from the council's page, fetched 8 September 2026.
• Entrance test familiarisation guide, published by The Grammar Schools in Birmingham and Warwickshire County Council, on the two timed booklets and the separate answer sheet. The guide carries no version date, so it is cited as read on 19 September 2026.
• King Henry VIII School, how to apply, the 2027 entry dates and the papers sat.
• Bablake School, senior application process, the 2027 entry dates and the five papers.
• GOV.UK, Get Information about Schools, URN 130840, King Edward VI College, Nuneaton as a sixth form college for ages 16 to 19.
• postcodes.io, the Ordnance Survey coordinates behind our own distance calculation and the licence statements printed under the figure.