Grammar schools near Solihull and the 11 plus

There are none inside the borough, and the council says so itself rather than leaving a parent to work it out. Solihull's own booklet for families transferring to secondary school puts it this way: “There are no grammar schools within Solihull, the nearest are located within Birmingham and Warwickshire. You must read the admission arrangements for the grammar school you apply for. Some grammar schools have catchment areas. To submit a grammar school preference, you must have sat the test and include it as a preference on the local authority application as one of your preferred schools.”

If you have been searching for Solihull grammar schools and finding only Solihull School, this is why: the selective schools a Solihull child can name sit in Birmingham and in Warwickshire, and the council is the one saying so.

Read it twice, because four separate things are packed into those four sentences. Nothing in them says a Solihull child is shut out. They say the schools are somewhere else, that each one writes its own rules, that some of them use catchment, and that a family has to do two jobs rather than one: sit the test, and name the school on the council form.

The borough line matters less than parents expect, because catchment does not decide who may sit the test and it does not decide who may apply. What an address changes is where an application ranks when a school has more qualified applicants than places. That is the whole of it, and the rest of this page is about how each school does that ranking, school by school, in the school's own published words.

Before anything else, fix the cohort. Solihull Council states that “Children born between 1 September 2015 and 31 August 2016 transfer to a secondary school in September 2027”, which is the cycle every deadline on this page belongs to. Source: Solihull Council, starting primary or secondary school. Checked 19 September 2026.

Four of them, and it is worth being exact about, because the opposite is often stated. The 2027 admissions policy for King Edward VI Aston School lists the electoral wards that make up its catchment area, and the list does not stop at the Birmingham boundary. After the Birmingham wards it continues: “Solihull Castle Bromwich, Chelmsley Wood, Kingshurst & Fordbridge, Smith's Wood”. The 2027 policy for King Edward VI Handsworth School for Girls ends its own ward list with exactly the same four.

All four are Solihull wards. The borough's seventeen wards, as the council itself lists them, are Bickenhill, Blythe, Castle Bromwich, Chelmsley Wood, Dorridge and Hockley Heath, Elmdon, Kingshurst and Fordbridge, Knowle, Lyndon, Meriden, Olton, Shirley East, Shirley South, Shirley West, Silhill, Smith's Wood and St Alphege. A family living in one of those four is therefore inside the published catchment of two of the eight Birmingham schools.

If you have read that Solihull is outside the catchment of every Birmingham grammar school, that is the claim these two policies contradict. We are not going to tell you which ward your own address sits in, and neither will the schools: both policies say “A map of the catchment area is available to view on the school website. To check which ward a home address falls within, visit your Local Authority website.” Solihull publishes its catchment and distance checker at solihull.gov.uk/onlinemaps, and that is the answer for a Solihull postcode.

Being in catchment is not the same as being admitted. Catchment decides the queue, not the entry: a child still has to reach the published qualifying score, and the school still ranks qualified applicants inside each of its categories. Warwickshire describes the same principle for its own schools, saying that higher priority is usually “given to those children who achieve the highest scores” and “who live within the priority area (i.e., the catchment area) for the school”.

The other six Birmingham schools set out rules of their own, and they are not all the same shape: one measures in miles, one names no catchment in the criteria we could read, and the rest set catchment areas of their own. Rather than restate ward lists we did not re-read on the date above, our postcode tool holds each school's rules in the school's own words, sorted by distance from an address you type in.

Source: King Edward VI Aston School, 2027 admissions policy, King Edward VI Handsworth School for Girls, 2027 admissions policy, Solihull Council, ward profiles and Warwickshire County Council, grammar schools in Warwickshire. All checked 19 September 2026.

Four of the schools within reach of Solihull do not use wards at all, and they do not all measure the same thing.

Bishop Vesey's Grammar School draws rings. Its September 2027 policy gives priority “to pupils meeting the qualifying score living within Zone 1, which is a 12-mile radius surrounding Bishop Vesey's Grammar School, the centre being defined as the foot of the steps leading to the main school entrance”. Zone 2 is “an area of between a 12-mile and 20-mile radius”, Zone 3 is “anywhere beyond a 20 mile radius”, and the measurement is a straight line calculated in metres by Birmingham's own system. Evidence of residence was required “by the deadline of October 31st 2026”.

Alcester Grammar School and Stratford Girls' Grammar School share one circle, and it is not centred on either school. Both 2027 policies define the priority area as “a circle with a radius of 16.936 miles drawn from the Fountain in Rother Street, Stratford-upon-Avon to the County boundary south of Long Compton”, with evidence of residence required by 11:59pm on 31 December 2026. An applicant outside that circle who reaches the automatic qualifying score is still ranked, one category below an applicant inside it and one category above the waiting list.

The published criteria we could read for Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls name no catchment and no zone. The Foundation's published cut-off table gives it three categories and none of them is a catchment: looked-after applicants, Pupil Premium applicants and “All other applicants not falling into one of the above categories”. The school's own admissions page gives the tie-break order: looked-after children first, then Pupil Premium, and “Lastly to those who live closest to the School”. Distance breaks ties there rather than setting the queue.

Here is the line this page will not cross. Whether a particular Solihull address falls inside Bishop Vesey's Zone 1 or Zone 2, or inside or outside that Stratford circle, is a measured distance that changes between Castle Bromwich and Dorridge. No page can answer it for the whole borough, and a page that tries is guessing with somebody's application. Solihull Council is blunt about third-party measuring: “Distances are measured by our admissions system. This is the only measurement we will use (measurements taken from other websites, such as Google Maps, will not be valid.)”

So use the right tool for the right job. Our postcode tool for West Midlands grammar schools will sort all nineteen partnership schools, the five beyond Birmingham and Warwickshire included, by straight-line distance from your address and show each school's rules in its own words, which is orientation and nothing more. For the number that counts, ask the people who will calculate it: Warwickshire Admissions on elevenplus@warwickshire.gov.uk or 01926 414143, and the King Edward VI Foundation Office on 0121 472 1147.

Source: Bishop Vesey's Grammar School, admissions, Alcester Grammar School, admissions arrangements, Stratford Girls' Grammar School, admissions, Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls, Year 7 admissions and Solihull Council, secondary school admissions 2027 booklet. All checked 19 September 2026.

Two numbers are published in advance and one is not. For entry in September 2027 the King Edward VI Foundation states that “The Qualifying Score for all of the Birmingham grammar schools for 2027 entry is 205” and that “The Priority Score for all of the King Edward VI Grammar Schools for 2027 entry is 224”. It is equally plain about the first of those, which works as a door: “If your child does not achieve the qualifying score or above they will not be considered for a place and you should not list the school on your child's preference form.” The Priority Score is the second number, and it is not a door. It is the higher figure the Foundation publishes for its own six schools, and the Foundation's one worked example of it, printed under the table below, shows it deciding order inside a school's category rather than deciding who is considered at all. The Birmingham 11 plus takes both thresholds apart.

The number nobody publishes in advance is the one that actually decides an offer, because it falls out of the applications each school happens to receive. What the Foundation does publish, after the event, is the score the last child to be offered a place in each category achieved. For a family living outside a school's catchment, the row to read is the school's own general category, and those rows have not been gentle.

Set out year by year, the same rows look like this. Figures in brackets are the Foundation's own note of “the final score offered by September after waiting list offers had been made”, so the first number in each cell is the March position and the bracketed one is where it ended up.

If you live in one of the four Solihull wards named in the Aston or Handsworth Girls catchment, the row above is not yours. Those schools publish separate figures for in-catchment categories, and the Foundation's results and offers page carries them.

Some cells pair a score with a distance, and the pairing is not decoration. Where a category is ranked on distance once the score is met, the Foundation publishes both: for 2023 entry it explained that the last child offered a place in one such category “achieved the Priority Score (224) and lived a distance of 5856 metres from the school: applicants in this category are ranked according to their distance from the school”.

Read that table with three things in mind. It is history rather than a forecast, and Camp Hill Boys moving from no March offers in 2025 to 254 in 2026 is the reason why. Nothing in it is a pass rate, because no row says what proportion of children reached any figure. And there is no raw mark behind any of it to aim at: the Foundation states that “We do not provide raw scores and we do not provide information that details how many available marks there are in each section or in the test as a whole.” If the number on the letter needs unpacking, Birmingham 11 plus standardised scores and what is a good 11 plus score do that job, and the results tracker carries the full published history with its sources.

Every school in that table reads the same paper, so there is one thing to get good at rather than eight. Create a free account, and the week opens with a Starting Assessment and then runs a daily plan built from it, weighted the way the published result is weighted. Every question in the bank is reviewed and approved by a qualified teacher before it reaches a child. Full mock rehearsals are part of the full plan rather than the free account, and they unlock from Year 4.

Source: King Edward VI Foundation, results and offers. Checked 19 September 2026.

Solihull sits between two grammar school areas and applies through a third council, its own, which is why a Solihull family has more moving parts than a Birmingham one. Here is the September 2027 cycle as it was published, which is also the shape of every year.

Registration is the parent's job and it happens the school year before the offer. For the 2027 cycle the Foundation published 5 May 2026 as the day the consortium portal opened and 4pm on 26 June 2026 as the moment it shut, adding that “It is not possible to register for the test after this time”. Sutton Coldfield Girls describes what the form asks for, including a photograph of the child taken within the month before registering, used to “verify your child's identity at the test venue”. How to register for the West Midlands 11 plus walks that half slowly.

One deadline closes a fortnight before the one everybody talks about. The Foundation's timetable gives 4pm on 12 June 2026 as the point by which a request for reasonable adjustments had to be in, against 4pm on 26 June 2026 for registration itself. In practice that means things like extra time, an enlarged or otherwise modified paper, a coloured overlay, rest breaks, or a room away from the main hall, and the Foundation's own guidance adds that an adjustment a child uses at school may not be granted if it is irrelevant to a multiple-choice paper. The child's primary school also has to provide information, including the arrangements already in place there, so this starts as a conversation with the class teacher or the SENCo in the spring term of Year 5 rather than as a form filled in at home. For Warwickshire schools the request goes elsewhere: the county asks families to “complete the specific testing arrangements form and return it to elevenplus@warwickshire.gov.uk”.

Pupil Premium is a second box, and forgetting it costs the same as forgetting the first. The Foundation is clear that “extra marks are not awarded in the entrance test to applicants registered as pupil premium”, and that the claim is made by uploading a form completed by the child's primary school at the point of registration. Birmingham City Council states the mechanical consequence: “You cannot apply under Pupil Premium if you forget to tick this box when completing your selective test application.” It is worth the trouble: Birmingham City Council records that each of the eight schools prioritises applicants who are registered for Pupil Premium.

The county runs a second registration on its own Parent Portal, and it is not the same form or the same day. Registration, Warwickshire says, “opens on 7 May each year for those children currently in Year 5”, and “Candidates must register by the deadline of 30 June”. Four days later than the consortium, on a different website, for schools a Solihull family might reasonably put on the same list.

Now the tick box, which decides whether a Birmingham test result can be used by a Warwickshire school at all. Birmingham City Council states: “If your child is taking the selective test for grammar schools in Shropshire, Walsall, Warwickshire, or Wolverhampton local councils, you must tick the box(es) on the selective test registration form to consent to your data being shared with the relevant local council. If you do not do this, your child will not be offered a place at the non-Birmingham grammar school on 1 March 2027, even if they scored enough to be offered a place and you included the school as a preference on your secondary school application for September 2027.” Late requests, it adds, “will not be considered until after offers are made on 1 March 2027”.

Warwickshire states the mirror image from its own end: “If you did not register your child for the test by the deadline of 30 June, you will not be able to have your results shared between all authorities.” Two authorities, two sentences, four days between the deadlines. Nothing we read on either website says that one registration covers both, so a family naming schools on both sides should confirm it with both admissions teams rather than assume it.

The council form is the second job and it is nothing like the first. Solihull's booklet is direct: “Apply online at www.solihull.gov.uk/admissions if you live in Solihull”, “You must apply by 31 October 2026”, “You can apply for up to six schools that you would like your child to go to”, and “You can apply for any school. It may be in Solihull, a church school, an academy, or a school in another council area such as a grammar school. You cannot apply for independent fee-paying schools on this application.” If you live outside the borough, the booklet says, you apply to your home council instead.

Taking the test and applying are two acts, not one, and Warwickshire says so plainly: taking the test “is not the same as making an application for a grammar school, nor does it guarantee an offer of a place”. Results land by 16 October and the form closes on 31 October, which is deliberate. Birmingham advises waiting for the score before naming a grammar school, because a school your child cannot be considered for is a preference slot spent. The Foundation removes the other half of that worry: every council operates equal preference, so “if you put a grammar school first on your preference form but your child is not offered a place, you will not put at risk the chance of them being offered a place at any other school you have listed”. Secondary transfer in the West Midlands takes the council year in full, and the West Midlands 11 plus dates keeps every published date in one sourced table.

Nothing has been published yet for September 2028 entry. On 19 September 2026 the Foundation timetable, the consortium site, Birmingham City Council and Warwickshire all showed the 2027 cycle only. What can be said is the pattern, in Warwickshire's own words, that registration “opens on 7 May each year for those children currently in Year 5”, and the Foundation's, that applications are made “via your Local Authority by 31 October, when your child is in Year 6”. If your child is in Year 5 now, expect to register in the May and June of this school year, sit the paper in the September of Year 6, read the score in October and file the council form by the end of that month. Check the consortium and Warwickshire portals again in the first week of May 2027, when the exact dates should appear.

This is where Solihull differs most from Birmingham or Warwickshire, and where the council's own booklet is the document to read. The fallback for a Solihull family is not another selective school. It is a comprehensive, and places at the popular ones are tight.

The booklet says it without softening: “There is no guarantee of a place at any secondary school. In 2026, some children were not offered places at their catchment school.” It follows with the practical instruction that costs families most when it is ignored: “If you live in Solihull, we strongly recommend that you include your catchment-area school among your preferences, even if it is your lowest preference. If you don't and you do not qualify for any of your preferred schools, you will be offered a place at the nearest school with a vacancy after all the offers are made.” And then the consequence, measured: “For 2026 admissions, those applicants that did not include their catchment school and did not qualify for a place at their preference schools were offered a place over 7 miles from their home.”

The allocation figures in the same booklet show why. Tudor Grange Academy Solihull had 280 places and 1,597 applications, and the last place offered on distance went to a family 0.98 miles away. Alderbrook School had 280 places and 1,560 applications, with the last offer at 1.685 miles. Arden had 300 places and 918 applications, with the last offer at 3.28 miles. Heart of England School, Lode Heath School, Smith's Wood Academy and Tudor Grange Academy Kingshurst each offered a place to everyone that applied.

Six preferences, and a grammar school takes one of them. The council's advice is to spend one of the others on your catchment-area school, even as the lowest preference, which is the difference between a nearby fallback and the nearest school with a vacancy. Appeals are not the safety net people hope for either: the booklet records that “The threshold for granting an appeal is high. At the point of publication only 2 appeals were upheld for secondary schools for September 2026.”

Source: Solihull Council, secondary school admissions 2027 booklet. Checked 19 September 2026.

Search for grammar schools in Solihull and Solihull School comes up quickly, which is where a good deal of confusion starts. It is independent and fee paying, it is not part of the consortium, and it does not use the shared test, so nothing on the rest of this page applies to it. The grammar schools above are the other kind: funded by the state and free to attend, selecting at eleven on one shared paper. The grammar school test sets out that difference in full.

Its own site describes a Year 7 entrance assessment in three parts. The English paper is “Task 1: Comprehension of prose passage. Task 2: Creative/descriptive/original writing”. The maths paper is “Section A: Basic arithmetic. Section B: Arithmetic and thinking skills. Section C: Problem solving”. The third is verbal and non-verbal reasoning. One difference jumps out of that list. There is a writing task, and the shared consortium test has “no sections of writing within the test” in the consortium's own words. Does the 11 plus include creative writing takes that difference properly.

The route differs as much as the paper. An application to Solihull School goes to the school, while a state grammar school preference goes on the Solihull Council form, and the council's booklet is explicit that independent fee-paying schools cannot be named on that application. Dates and deadlines for the school's own exam are not printed here, because they were not published on the page we read. Ask the school.

Source: Solihull School, entrance exams and West Midlands Grammar Schools, the entrance test. Both checked 19 September 2026.

Count the terms rather than the years, because the terms are what a family actually spends. A child sitting the paper in the September of Year 6 has the whole of Year 5 and everything before it, and the test itself falls in the first fortnight of Year 6, before a single lesson of that year has done any good.

Year 3 is for the ground floor: reading that stretches, number facts that stop being effortful, and vocabulary picked up by habit rather than by list. Year 4 is where the paper's own shapes start to matter, because verbal and non-verbal reasoning are question types rather than timetabled subjects. The maths and English a child is taught feed both, but no lesson is called either, so the question formats have to be met somewhere. Year 5 is the year of the two deadlines, and it is also the year timed practice earns its place. Our Year 3, Year 4 and Year 5 guides take each of those term by term.

Free material exists and it is worth using before anything is paid for. The consortium publishes a familiarisation guide as a free download, and it is unusually direct about intensity: “Intensive coaching or tuition is not in the long term best interests of your child”, “None of the schools keep past papers”, and “Many children are anxious about sitting tests. You can help by not putting pressure on your child.” That is the consortium's position, and we agree with it. If you are weighing what to spend, 11 plus tutors in Birmingham, 11 plus tuition cost and mock exams in Birmingham lay out the options a Solihull family usually looks at, and preparing without a tutor argues the other side.

A word, finally, for a parent in the north of the borough who has just discovered that their ward is named in two catchment lists. Being named in a catchment list changes where an application ranks, and the published cut-offs above are history rather than a forecast. West Midlands 11 plus results covers what results day involves, including what to say at home if the letter is not what you hoped.

Which authority published each figure, and when we read it

Every date, score, quotation and ward name on this page was read on the publishing body's own page or policy document on 19 September 2026. Where a document is a PDF, the link goes to the document itself or to the page that carries it.

• Solihull Council, secondary school admissions 2027, the no-grammar-schools statement, the 31 October deadline, six preferences, the catchment-school advice, the 2026 allocation figures and the appeal outcomes.
• Solihull Council, starting primary or secondary school, the transfer cohort and offer day.
• Solihull Council, ward profiles, the borough's seventeen electoral wards.
• Birmingham City Council, grammar schools in Birmingham, the eight schools, the data sharing tick box and the advice on waiting for results.
• King Edward VI Foundation, results and offers, the qualifying and priority scores, the year-by-year offer scores, equal preference and the no-raw-scores statement.
• King Edward VI Foundation, admissions timetable, the registration window, the reasonable adjustments deadline, the test date and the results date.
• King Edward VI Foundation, the test, the two papers, their content, the weighting and the publisher.
• King Edward VI Foundation, pupil premium, how the claim is made and what it does and does not change about the marking.
• King Edward VI Foundation, special arrangements, who decides a request for reasonable adjustments and what a child's primary school has to provide.
• King Edward VI Aston School, 2027 admissions policy, the catchment ward list including four Solihull wards.
• King Edward VI Handsworth School for Girls, 2027 admissions policy, the same four Solihull wards in its own catchment list.
• Bishop Vesey's Grammar School, admissions, the September 2027 policy with its three zones, the measuring point and the residence deadline.
• Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls, Year 7 admissions, the tie-break order and the registration mechanics including the photograph.
• Warwickshire County Council, the 11 plus test, the shared arrangement, the Key Stage 2 sentence and the results-sharing consequence.
• Warwickshire County Council, register for the 11 plus test, the Parent Portal, the annual opening date and the 30 June deadline.
• Warwickshire County Council, the 11 plus, the county's own published dates for the 2027 cycle, including the two days it gave for the test.
• Warwickshire County Council, grammar schools in Warwickshire, the six schools and the priority principle.
• Alcester Grammar School, admissions arrangements, the priority circle, the categories and the evidence deadline.
• Stratford Girls' Grammar School, admissions, the same priority circle in its own 2027 policy.
• West Midlands Grammar Schools, the schools, the partnership's own grouping of the nineteen schools that share the test.
• West Midlands Grammar Schools, the entrance test, the consortium's own statement that the paper contains no writing section.
• West Midlands Grammar Schools, preparing for the test, the free familiarisation guide and the consortium's position on coaching.
• Solihull School, entrance exams, the independent school's own assessment and its writing task.