West Midlands 11 plus results: what the score means

Before the council form closes, and deliberately so. Every body in the region publishes a results date that sits ahead of the 31 October preference deadline, because a family cannot sensibly build a preference list without knowing the number. These are the dates published for the cycle that ends in entry in September 2027.

Bishop Vesey's Grammar School and Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls are not run by the Foundation and publish the same date on their own admissions pages; Sutton Coldfield's row above is its own. The Foundation's results page does, separately, publish cut-off scores for all eight Birmingham grammar schools.

The letter or email carries a score. It does not carry an offer, and the schools say so themselves: Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls states plainly that the result it sends is not an offer of a place. What it gives you is the one piece of information the preference form needs.

Both, and which one matters depends on where you are applying. The distinction is the single most useful thing to understand on results day.

In Birmingham the Foundation publishes two numbers for entry in September 2027: a qualifying score of 205 and a priority score of 224. Qualifying is a threshold, and reaching it makes a child eligible to be considered. The priority score is used to rank among the children who qualified. Bishop Vesey's Grammar School publishes the same qualifying score of 205 on its own Year 7 page. For a family reading this a year early, the Birmingham cycle from registration through to test day sets out how a child reaches that October letter in the first place.

In Walsall the number is not fixed in advance at all. Queen Mary's Grammar School states that the qualifying score “is determined by the School's Governors after the Test results are available”, and describes any figure shown before that as approximate and subject to confirmation in November. In Warwickshire the county publishes no figure whatsoever: it says only that a child joins the waiting list for schools where the score meets the minimum academic standard.

None of these thresholds is in a family's hands. The year in front of them is. Start your free week and the Starting Assessment, then the daily plan it produces, begin straight away. Every question in the bank is reviewed and approved by a qualified teacher before it reaches a child.

The preference form. It goes to the council you pay council tax to, not to the schools, and it is what actually applies for a place. Every council in the region published 31 October 2026 as the deadline for entry in September 2027, and 1 March 2027 as the day offers are made.

Three details are worth checking on your own council's page rather than assuming. Walsall Council publishes a closing time of 10pm on 31 October 2026, not midnight. City of Wolverhampton Council opened its applications on 10 September 2026 and Shropshire Council on 1 September 2026, so the form is available for weeks before the score arrives. And Walsall lists both Queen Mary's schools among those needing a supplementary form as well as the online application.

Order the list honestly. A preference list is a ranking of what you want, not a bet on what you think you can get, and naming a school you would not accept in order to seem realistic is how families end up with an offer they did not want. The councils publish their own guidance on how preferences are processed, and it is worth reading once.

Waiting lists then work quietly in the background. The Foundation states that a child “will automatically be placed on the waiting list for any schools listed higher than the school offered on your preference form providing they have achieved the qualifying score or above”. That is automatic, so there is nothing to join, but it is worth knowing that movement in the spring and summer is normal.

Full dates for every council in the region, each linked to the page that published it, are on the West Midlands 11 plus dates page, and the area pages for Birmingham, Walsall, Wolverhampton, Warwickshire and Shropshire and Telford take each one in turn.

Take the first hour before you take anything else. Nothing is decided by lunchtime, no form has to be sent that day, and there is nothing useful a family can do straight away except be steady about it. What a child needs then is a short, calm account of what the number is and what happens now, not a plan.

The preference form still has to be completed, and completed honestly. A list built to look realistic rather than to say what you actually want is how families end up holding an offer they did not want, and a score below one school's threshold says nothing about the others on your list. Order it the way you would have ordered it in September.

A non-selective school is also not a lesser school. If the news is not what you hoped for, the honest thing to say is that whether a school selects has very little to do with how good it is, or with how well your child will do there, and that the child has just done a hard thing that most of their year group did not attempt.

If a child is very distressed, or if the distress does not settle over the following days, speak to their class teacher, who sees them somewhere you do not, and to a GP if it starts to affect sleeping or eating. Our page on 11 plus exam stress covers the weeks around the test and what to say about a result before it arrives, and our safeguarding page sets out where else to go and how to reach us.

There is a formal route, and it is worth knowing in outline before you need it. GOV.UK states that “if your child is refused a place, you can appeal against the decision”, and that “you can only appeal once against each rejection”. Each refusal is appealed separately.

The process is governed rather than informal. The admission authority sets a deadline for submitting information and evidence, and “must give you at least 10 school days' notice of the hearing”. Appeals “must be heard within 40 school days of the deadline for making an appeal”. There is “a panel of 3 or more people at the appeal hearing”, and that panel “must be independent”. A decision is usually sent within five school days.

What a panel is deciding is narrower than most families expect, and it is decided in stages rather than in one judgement. The first stage is whether the admission arrangements were properly followed and whether they comply with the School Admissions Code. GOV.UK states that if they “were not properly followed or do not comply with the school admissions code your appeal must be upheld”. Read the whole sentence rather than its last three words: it is conditional, not an assurance, and everything in it turns on the panel finding one of those two failures. Where the arrangements were properly applied, the panel goes on to weigh your reasons for wanting the place against the school's reasons for refusing it. It is not a second chance to argue that a child is able. Our 11 plus glossary explains the admissions terms an appeal letter will use.

Source: GOV.UK, appealing a school's decision. Checked 5 September 2026.

Decide what you are going to say before the email arrives, because the first thing you say is the part a child remembers. Say it plainly, say it calmly, and say it in a sentence that does not need a follow-up: the score came, here is what it means, here is what happens now.

Two things are worth avoiding. The first is treating the number as a verdict on the child. It is a position in a cohort on one morning, and every school in the region says as much in its own careful wording about qualifying and ranking. The second is making a promise nobody can keep. Nobody knows on results day which school will offer a place, and a child told the outcome is certain will experience March as a second result.

Then stop. Reading and mental arithmetic keep mattering into Year 7 wherever a child goes, and the routine built for this can quietly become a study habit instead of a countdown. That is a better outcome than any single number.

What we read about results, and when

Each address below was opened and read in full on 5 September 2026, and the figure beside it is transcribed from that page rather than from any summary of it.

• King Edward VI Foundation, results and offers, the results date, age standardisation, the qualifying and priority scores, and waiting lists.
• Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls, Year 7 admissions, the results email and the statement that it is not an offer.
• Queen Mary's Grammar School, September 2027 entry, the results date and how its qualifying score is set.
• Newport Girls' High School, entrance test and Haberdashers' Adams, joining in Year 7, the Shropshire results dates.
• Warwickshire County Council, grammar schools and the 11 plus test, the county results date and application deadline.
• Walsall Council, City of Wolverhampton Council and Shropshire Council, the preference form windows and offer day.
• GOV.UK, appealing a school's decision, the statutory appeal route.

Birmingham City Council's grammar schools page refused an automated request on 5 September 2026. Nothing here is attributed to it. Its published dates, read on 31 August 2026, are on our dates page.