What is a good 11 plus score?

The result of the West Midlands entrance test is a standardised age score. It is not a mark out of a total, and it is not a percentage. It is a position, adjusted for how old the child was on the day, so that a child born in August is not compared unfairly with a classmate born the previous September.

Because it is a position rather than a mark, “good” only means anything relative to a published threshold. A score that comfortably qualifies for one school may not be competitive at another in the same city. That is not a quirk; it is how the system is designed.

The publisher of the test says it plainly. In its own guide to standardised tests, read on 6 September 2026, GL Assessment writes: “A Standard Age Score converts a pupil's raw score to a standardised score which takes into account the pupil's age in years and months and gives an indication of how the pupil is performing relative to a national sample of pupils of the same age. The average score is 100. A higher score is above average and a lower score is below average.”

How far scores spread either side of that average is published separately. GL Assessment's support documentation on standardisation and norms, read on 6 September 2026, states: “Standard scores have a mean (average) of 100 and a standard deviation of 15.”

Those two published facts are the whole of what we can say about the scale. Our own arithmetic from them, rather than anything GL Assessment states, is that a score fifteen points above 100 sits one standard deviation above the average and a score fifteen points below it sits the same distance the other way. Beyond that we are not going to describe bands, because GL Assessment does not publish any and we could find no primary source that does: the ranges other sites give for what counts as above average or competitive are not sourced anywhere we can check. Pathway Eleven is an independent service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by GL Assessment.

One thing follows from all of this, and it is the thing families most often trip on. The West Midlands qualifying and priority scores below are a combined total across the weighted sections of the test, not a single Standard Age Score, so 205 cannot be set beside 100 and read as a comparison. They are two different kinds of number, and only the published thresholds tell you anything about the total.

This distinction is the single thing most worth understanding, and it is where most confusion on forums comes from.

A qualifying score is a gate. Reach it and your child is considered for a place. Miss it and they are not considered at all, whatever else is true about the application. The Birmingham qualifying score for 2027 entry is published as 205, and the Foundation states that a child who does not achieve the qualifying score or above will not be considered for a place and that you should not list the school on your preference form.

A ranking score is a queue. Once children have qualified, each school applies its own published admissions criteria to decide who is offered a place, and score is one of the things those criteria use. Because schools are oversubscribed, the score at which the last offer was made is usually well above the qualifying score, and it differs between schools and between admissions categories.

Birmingham adds a third number, a priority score, published as 224 for 2027 entry at the King Edward VI grammar schools. It sits above the qualifying score and moves an application into a higher admissions category at several of those schools, typically alongside living inside the catchment area. Qualifying makes a child eligible; the priority score changes which queue they stand in.

The weighting is the one part of the scoring a family can act on. Start a free week of Pathway Eleven: the Starting Assessment finds the weakest of the four areas, and the daily plan gives that area the most of your time.

The King Edward VI Foundation publishes, for each of the eight Birmingham grammar schools and each admissions category, the score at which the last offer was made on national offer day. Those figures move by several points from year to year, they collapse entirely when a school fills its places from a higher category before reaching the general one, and they are published after the event.

They are on this site in full: the four-year cut-off history, school by school is the Birmingham deep dive, and it is where those figures belong and where they are maintained. They are not repeated here, because two of our own pages carrying the same table is how one of them goes stale.

The admissions cycle those Birmingham numbers sit inside is a separate matter again: which eight schools share the paper, when a parent registers and what the sitting itself involves are covered on the eight Birmingham grammar schools and the test they share. And none of these numbers becomes real for a family until the result letter lands, which is where when the letter arrives and what the preference form asks for takes over.

Outside Birmingham the arrangements differ. Warwickshire, Walsall, Wolverhampton, Shropshire and Telford schools each publish their own admissions criteria, and several use the shared test result differently again. That is genuinely a case of it depending on where you apply, and the only reliable source is the school's own admissions page. Every partnership school has a page here linking to it: start from the West Midlands 11 plus entrance test page.

None of the numbers on this page can be produced at home, but the format can be rehearsed. We will send you the pack of practice papers in the regional format, with answer sheets and worked answers, plus the occasional preparation email. The free practice papers page sets out what the pack contains.

That address is used for the pack and for the occasional preparation email described above. There is no third use and no third party. One click unsubscribes you, and the Privacy Notice says exactly what is stored and how to get rid of it.

Because the score is only one of two things being weighed, and the other is which admissions category your family falls into. Schools prioritise applications differently: looked-after children, children eligible for the Pupil Premium, siblings, and in several cases children living inside a defined catchment area. Where a school fills most of its places from a higher category, the score needed in the general category can be far above the priority score, or no offers may be made from that category at all.

The practical consequence for a parent is that a target score, on its own, is not a plan. Two families with identical scores can get entirely different outcomes because they live in different places or fall into different categories. Read the admissions criteria of each school you intend to list, before test day rather than after, and treat the score as one input among several.

What a home practice paper produces is not any of these numbers. It is not standardised, it is not sat under real conditions, and no published information maps a raw mark onto the scale. Practice papers are useful for finding weak topics and building stamina, and they are not a prediction. Is my child on track sets out what to watch instead.

Not a number. Aim at the published weighting, because that is the only part of the scoring a family can act on. The consortium publishes it as 50% for English and verbal reasoning, 25% for non-verbal reasoning and 25% for mathematics.

That tells you where an hour is worth most. Half the result rests on reading, vocabulary and comprehension, and those move slowly, which makes them the thing to start earliest and protect longest. In our experience non-verbal reasoning improves quickly once a child has met the question types and then flattens, so meeting it early does most of the available work cheaply; that is an observation from our own teaching rather than a published finding, and we say it here rather than repeating it across the site as though it were one. Mathematics is different again. School covers the Year 3 to Year 5 ground thoroughly, so the gap is rarely missing knowledge in that ground: it is pace, it is multi-step problems, and it is the Year 6 content the test samples in September before Year 6 has taught it. That last point is why the checkpoints on our on-track page deliberately run ahead of the national curriculum.

A family that spends two years working in that proportion has done everything within its control. The number on the letter in October is then a fact to read against the published thresholds, not a verdict to be predicted in advance.

Pathway Eleven works in the proportion the published weighting sets out, rather than spreading time evenly out of habit. A Starting Assessment finds the level first; the daily plan of revision, guided teaching and timed practice then gives most attention to whichever area is weakest, with every question reviewed and approved by a qualified teacher. Full mock rehearsals are part of full membership rather than the trial, and they unlock from Year 4. It predicts no score, for all the reasons set out above. There is one price, £49 a month for all four areas, and the first seven days are free.

The published sources behind every figure above

Every number on this page is a transcription rather than a calculation, so each one is listed here with the page it was transcribed from and the day that page was read. Where the page reasons beyond its sources, it says so in the sentence itself.

• King Edward VI Foundation, Results and offers. The qualifying score of 205 and the priority score of 224 for 2027 entry, the statement that a child below the qualifying score will not be considered, and the published statement that raw scores and mark totals are not provided. Checked 5 September 2026.
• King Edward VI Foundation, Grammar Schools: Entrance Test Information. The two-paper format, the four areas tested, and the statement that section scores are standardised to take account of differences in age. Checked 5 September 2026.
• West Midlands Grammar Schools, The entrance test. The published weighting of 50% English and verbal reasoning, 25% non-verbal reasoning and 25% mathematics across the shared regional test. Checked 5 September 2026.
• GL Assessment, A guide to standardised tests. The definition of a Standard Age Score quoted above, including that the average score is 100 and that the pupil's age in years and months is taken into account. Checked 6 September 2026.
• GL Assessment support, Standardisation and norms. The quoted statement that standard scores have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Checked 6 September 2026.