St Michael's Catholic Grammar School

ST. MICHAEL'S CATHOLIC GRAMMAR SCHOOL

Accurate, reliable entrance papers for the St. Michael's Catholics Grammar School in Finchley, London

Dedicated papers built especially for St Michael's covering the full exam structure and content

Instant download, unlimited use and all answers and explanations included

Complete exam covering all 4 sections: English, Verbal Reasoning, Mathematics and Non-Verbal Reasoning

Audited by UK examiners and written exclusively for the Slough Consortium exams

Did you know?
Many guides and preparation exams report that the English section of the St. Michael's exam is multiple choice (like the rest of the exam). This is incorrect. The St. Michael's English section of the exam is standard answer format and can include both comprehension AND writing tasks. Ensure you have the correct preparation material.

About the exam

St Michael's Catholic Grammar School is a long-established selective girls' grammar in North Finchley, in the London Borough of Barnet. It holds an Outstanding Ofsted rating and consistently sits in the top tier of London grammars on Attainment 8 and Progress 8. The Year 7 Published Admissions Number is 128. The school does not publish the total number of girls sitting its test each year, but the industry consensus puts it between roughly 1,300 and 2,000, giving a headline ratio of around 10 to 15 applicants per place.

The headline ratio is misleading, though, because almost all 128 places end up going to girls from practising Catholic families who also rank in the top 200 of test takers. If your daughter is not in that group, the practical chance of an offer is very low. More on that below.

The four papers

The St Michael's test is four separate papers sat on a single day, not the two combined booklets used by GL consortia like Slough or Sutton. Each paper covers one subject, and the four are taken in a single morning by invitation only.

Verbal Reasoning, Non-Verbal Reasoning and Mathematics are provided by GL Assessment, are entirely multiple-choice, and answers are recorded on separate OMR answer sheets. The English paper is the exception, and this is the area where a striking number of tutoring and mock sites get it wrong. The St Michael's English paper is not multiple-choice, and is not provided by GL Assessment. It is a written paper. Pupils write their answers by hand, in continuous prose, in the test booklet. The school itself confirms this on its admissions page in plain terms. Several well-known tutoring sites still describe the St Michael's test as "all multiple-choice" or as "four GL papers". Those descriptions are wrong, and a girl who walks into the exam hall expecting to tick boxes for English will have a difficult experience.

Each paper is between 50 and 60m long. The English paper is a 20-minute written comprehension on a literary passage followed by 20 minutes of open writing on a stimulus.

How the top 200 becomes 128 places

The entrance test takes place on a single Friday in mid-September of Year 6. Admission to the test itself is by invitation, conditional on a completed Supplementary Information Form, and where the Practising Catholic criterion is being relied on, a Certificate of Catholic Practice from the parish priest and evidence of First Holy Communion. The deadline for those documents is the first week of July, and the school does not accept anything submitted after that date.

There is no published pass mark. Each girl's raw scores from the four papers are age-standardised, summed and ranked, and the top 200 candidates are considered for places. Beyond that ranking, the school applies its faith-based oversubscription criteria in strict order:

Practising Catholic Looked After or previously Looked After girls
Practising Catholic girls with a Certificate of Catholic Practice and evidence of First Holy Communion
Other Baptised Catholic girls
Girls of other Christian denominations
Other Looked After girls
Pupil Premium girls (up to 32 places)
Any other girls

The school states explicitly in its admissions policy that within living memory all 128 places have been filled inside categories 1 and 2 alone. In practice, the working competition for a place at St Michael's is between practising Catholic girls who score in the top 200 of all test takers, and within that pool places go in straight rank order.

If two girls finish on the same standardised aggregate, the tie is broken by subject scores in a fixed order: Verbal Reasoning first, then Non-Verbal Reasoning, then English, then Maths. That order matters, and the implications are not obvious. We'll come to it.

Three things worth knowing

1. The Catholic criterion isn't a soft preference, it's almost the entire competition.

The 10-or-so applicants per place that you'll see quoted by tutoring sites is the all-applicants ratio. In practice, places almost always run out inside the practising Catholic category. If your daughter is not from a practising Catholic family with a Certificate of Catholic Practice and evidence of First Holy Communion delivered to the school office by the July deadline, the historical pattern is that she will not be offered a place even if she scores in the top 200. Parents in that position should treat St Michael's as a stretch rather than a target, and have a realistic Plan A elsewhere.

2. The English paper is the one that catches well-prepared families out.

Most off-the-shelf 11+ practice material assumes a multiple-choice English paper. St Michael's English is written, and the marker grades the actual writing rather than counting ticks. A girl who has been heavily drilled on GL multiple-choice comprehension but who has done little extended writing practice can score brilliantly on three out of four papers and badly on the fourth. The fourth paper then becomes the third tie-break, which leads us to the next point.

3. The tie-break order quietly rewards verbal strength.

Verbal Reasoning first, Non-Verbal Reasoning second, English third, Maths last. If two girls finish on the same standardised aggregate, the one with the higher Verbal Reasoning score wins regardless of how strong her Maths is. This is unusual. Most grammars either don't publish a tie-break order or weight Maths and English equally with reasoning. At St Michael's, the order makes clear that the school sees Verbal Reasoning as the most predictive paper. Preparation should reflect that. A girl who is strong at Maths but weaker at VR is at a quiet disadvantage on tie-breaks even before the written English paper is opened.

Our St Michael's papers are written against this exact format. Four separate papers per mock (VR, NVR, Maths, English), GL-style multiple choice on the first three with full answer sheets and answer keys, and a properly graded written English paper with both a comprehension passage and an open writing stimulus, including planning pages and a marking guide.

Across the five-paper series the writing stimuli rotate through eight different writing types, and the comprehension passages draw from different forms and registers, so a pupil working through the full set practises distinct skills rather than the same paper five times.