8
SUMMER SALE!
30% OFF ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING!
Use coupon: SUMMER30 at checkout
The Lincolnshire Consortium of Grammar Schools
Complete, accurate entrance exams for the Lincolnshire Consortium of Grammar Schools
Entrance exam papers suitable for all 15 grammar schools in the LCGS
Instant download, unlimited use and all answers and explanations included
Complete exam papers covering Paper 1 and Paper 2
Audited by UK examiners and written exclusively for the LCGS exam
Did you know?
LCGS exams are 100% Reasoning, with no Maths or English
About the exam
The Lincolnshire Consortium of Grammar Schools runs one of the most distinctive 11+ tests in the country. Fifteen state grammar schools spread across the county share a single exam, and unlike almost every other GL consortium the test contains no maths, no English comprehension and no writing task. It is a reasoning-only exam, sat across two consecutive Saturdays in mid-September of Year 6 rather than on a single day, and it is the only mainstream 11+ in England that tests verbal, non-verbal and spatial reasoning without touching any other subject.
Around 2,200 Year 7 grammar places are available across Lincolnshire each year, which makes Lincolnshire one of the largest fully selective grammar school systems in England. The consortium is deliberately geographically spread, so families in most parts of the county live within reach of at least one member school.
The schools
The consortium spans ten towns across Lincolnshire:
-
Boston: Boston Grammar School (boys), Boston High School (girls)
-
Grantham: The King's School (boys), Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School
-
Sleaford: Carre's Grammar School (boys), Kesteven and Sleaford High School (girls)
-
Spalding: Spalding Grammar School (boys), Spalding High School (girls)
-
Bourne: Bourne Grammar School (co-educational, and the largest of the 15 by intake)
-
Louth: King Edward VI Grammar School (co-educational)
-
Gainsborough: Queen Elizabeth's High School (co-educational)
-
Horncastle: Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School (co-educational)
-
Skegness: Skegness Grammar School (co-educational)
-
Alford: Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School (co-educational, the smallest of the 15 by intake)
-
Spilsby: King Edward VI Academy (bilateral: grammar and secondary modern under the same roof)
One further Lincolnshire grammar school, Caistor Grammar School, is not a member of the consortium and runs its own separate 11+ test. Families applying to both Caistor and any consortium school need to sit both exams.
How the test is built
The exam is provided by GL Assessment and consists of two multiple-choice papers, taken one week apart on consecutive Saturdays. Every question is answered on a separate optical mark reading sheet that is machine-marked.
Paper 1: Verbal Reasoning. 80 questions in 50 minutes. That works out at around 37 seconds per question, one of the tightest verbal reasoning paces of any GL consortium in the country. The content sweeps through the full GL verbal canon: vocabulary (synonyms, antonyms and odd-one-out), letter series, number series, letter codes, word relationships and short logic problems.
Paper 2: Non-Verbal and Spatial Reasoning. 70 questions in around 50 minutes, split into five internally-timed sections. Three sections are standard GL Non-Verbal Reasoning; two are dedicated Spatial Reasoning. That is a much heavier spatial weighting than most GL grammar exams, where spatial reasoning is usually a small bolt-on. In Lincolnshire it is a subject in its own right, worth roughly 28 of the 70 marks on Paper 2.
How places are allocated
Scores from both papers are age-standardised and combined into a single total. Children need a combined standardised score of 220 or above to qualify for a grammar school place. That threshold identifies approximately the top 25% of the national cohort by ability.
Qualifying is necessary but not always sufficient. Each of the 15 schools then applies its own oversubscription criteria, and for most schools these are heavily distance-driven. King Edward VI Grammar School in Louth, for example, reserves around 80% of its places for children living within a 12.5-mile priority area; other consortium schools use a similar priority-then-distance system. Bourne Grammar draws pupils from parts of Cambridgeshire, Rutland and Northamptonshire as well as Lincolnshire, which makes it particularly competitive despite having the largest intake of any school in the consortium.
Test results are emailed to parents in mid-October. Final Year 7 allocations are confirmed on National Offer Day in early March.
What this means in practice
Three points are worth flagging before you start preparing.
First, the syllabus is much narrower than any other mainstream 11+ in England. That is good news and bad news. Good news because there is no need to work up KS2 maths or English comprehension for the exam itself. Bad news because the reasoning that is tested is tested at high pace and high volume: 150 questions of pure reasoning across the two papers is a lot to sit through for a Year 6 child, and children who have only ever practised mixed-subject 11+ papers can find the pure-reasoning format unexpectedly draining.
Second, spatial reasoning matters more here than almost anywhere else. Paper 2 dedicates two of its five sections to spatial work, and generic 11+ practice books rarely give spatial the same weight. Targeted preparation on cube nets, shape-combining and folded-paper questions pays off more for Lincolnshire than for any comparable consortium.
Third, the papers are a week apart, not on the same day. That is unusual and it changes the rhythm of test day. It also means that if the first paper goes badly, a child has a week to reset before the second, which is different from the same-day two-paper consortia where the second paper can be sat under the weight of the first.
Our Lincolnshire papers are written against this exact format: Paper 1 as a full 80-question Verbal Reasoning test in 50 minutes, Paper 2 as a five-section Non-Verbal and Spatial Reasoning test in the same time, with the dedicated spatial content built in rather than skipped.