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Kendrick School
Affordable, reliable exam papers for the Kendrick School entrance exams
Entrance exam papers designed specifically for Kendrick School, Reading
Instant download, unlimited use and all answers and explanations included
Complete exam papers covering Comprehension, Verbal Reasoning, Non-Verbal Reasoning, Spatial Reasoning and Maths
Audited by UK examiners and written exclusively for the Kendrick School exams
Did you know?
Over 1,400 girls sit the exam every year, competing for 128 places, an acceptance rate of just over 9%
About the exam
Kendrick School is a single selective state grammar school for girls in Reading, Berkshire. It is one of the most competitive grammar schools in the country: around 1,400 candidates sit the exam in a typical year for 128 Year 7 places, and most of those places end up filled from a much smaller pool of qualifying candidates who also live inside the school's designated catchment area.
Kendrick uses the GL Assessment 11+ exam, having previously used the CEM format. A short-lived score-sharing arrangement with the Slough Consortium has ended, and Kendrick now runs entirely on its own. There is no consortium and no shared test, so parents must complete the Local Authority's Common Application Form and submit a separate registration directly to Kendrick to sit the exam.
How places are decided
The exam takes place on a Friday in mid-September of Year 6 at the school itself. Each child sits two multiple-choice papers on the same day with a short break in between. Both papers are produced by GL Assessment, both are multiple-choice throughout, and answers are recorded on a separate Optical Mark Reading sheet that is machine-marked.
Raw scores are age-standardised and added together to produce a single aggregate score. The qualifying mark sits in the high 90s to low 100s on the standardised scale (typically 99 or 100 in recent cycles), with a lower threshold of around 94 to 95 for candidates in the Pupil Premium, Service Premium and looked-after-children categories. Children scoring below the qualifying mark are not eligible to be ranked for a place.
The numbers tell the real story of admission to Kendrick. Of the 1,400 candidates who sit the exam in a typical year, around 300 to 400 clear the qualifying score. Of those, 128 are offered places. Allocation is by oversubscription criteria that heavily prioritise the designated area, split into Priority Area 1 and Priority Area 2. Roughly three quarters of places go to candidates from these two priority areas; the remaining quarter is nominally open to candidates from wider areas, but in practice no candidate living outside the designated area has been offered a place in over a decade. The school explicitly advises parents living outside the designated area not to register.
Test results go to parents in mid-October. Final Year 7 allocations are published on National Offer Day in early March.
What's in the two papers?
Each paper runs to around 60 minutes per session. No calculator, ruler, protractor or scrap paper is permitted; pupils work in HB pencil only, with rough working done in the question booklet itself.
Paper 1: Verbal Skills
A paper of English and Verbal Reasoning, presented on the cover as two named parts.
The English part opens with a reading comprehension on a single passage of around 450 to 500 words, followed by spelling and punctuation exercises. Both SPaG blocks present continuous prose split into lettered groups; the child marks the group containing the error, or marks N if the line is error-free.
The Verbal Reasoning part follows in several short, separately timed blocks of typically six questions each, drawn from the GL canonical "21 Types". Two blocks recur in every paper (Closest in Meaning, and Opposite Meanings in the dual-answer A-to-E plus X-to-Z format); the remaining blocks rotate through the wider GL repertoire, including Letter Codes, Letter and Number Series, Move a Letter, Hidden Word, Compound Word, Word Link, Analogies, Odd One Out, Two Meanings, Missing Letter and Logic Riddle.
Paper 2: Mathematical and Non-Verbal Skills
Internally divided into a non-verbal part and a mathematics part.
The non-verbal part runs across four short, separately timed sections and explicitly includes spatial reasoning. Analogies and Codes appear as a fixed core in every paper; the remaining two sections rotate across the GL non-verbal repertoire, with at least one spatial type (Cube Nets, 3D Folding, Hidden Shapes, or 2D Rotation and Reflection) in every paper.
The Mathematics part closes the paper. It covers the Key Stage 2 curriculum to the start of Year 6: number and place value, the four operations, fractions, decimals and percentages, measurement, money and time, 2D and 3D shape, angles, coordinates, statistics, sequences, simple algebra and ratio. Mental methods only.
Where to focus preparation
The catchment rule is doing the real filtering. Kendrick's designated area, split into Priority Area 1 and Priority Area 2, has effectively determined every offer for over a decade. The qualifying score, the ranking, and the headline 10:1 application ratio are all real, but families living outside the designated area face an effectively zero offer rate regardless of how well their child scores. Before preparing for the exam, check the designated area boundaries on the school's own admissions pages.
The qualifying bar is higher than at most GL grammars, and the offer rate among qualifiers is roughly one in three. The qualifying score alone is significantly higher than at consortium grammars like Slough or Trafford. The realistic target for a confident application is a score well above the qualifying mark, not at it. Kendrick sits in the same super-selective tier as QE Boys (Barnet), Henrietta Barnett and the top Sutton schools.
Spatial reasoning is the part where most generic 11+ practice falls short. Paper 2 dedicates a full section to spatial reasoning (cube nets, 3D folding, hidden shapes, rotation and reflection), and the papers are otherwise split by subject, so a child who is weak on spatial cannot make it up elsewhere. Most off-the-shelf 11+ material gives spatial limited coverage; targeted spatial drilling matters more for Kendrick than for almost any other GL grammar.
Our Kendrick papers are written against this exact format: Paper 1 with comprehension, spelling, punctuation and a varied Verbal Reasoning block sweep, and the two-part Paper 2 with the four-section non-verbal and spatial structure plus mixed KS2 mathematics, all under genuine GL pacing.