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THE LATYMER SCHOOL
Bespoke papers unique to The Latymer School Round 1 and Round 2 entrance exams
Instant download, unlimited use and all answers and explanations included
Complete exam papers including both Round 1 and Round 2 with full content
Audited by UK examiners and designed to feel like the real thing
Did you know?
Although Round 1 is produced by GL, like many other top performing grammar schools the difficulty is higher than standard GL material. Round 2 is produced by the school itself and includes written responses and extended writing.
About the exam
The Latymer School in Edmonton has been selecting on academic ability since 1624, when Edward Latymer left a bequest in his will to educate eight "poor boys" of the parish. Four centuries on, it is one of the highest-performing co-educational state grammars in the country, with 192 Year 7 places to fill each cycle and around 10 applications for every place, an offer rate of roughly 1 in 10.
What sets Latymer apart from most other London grammars is that it admits only from a defined inner-area postcode list. Applicants from outside the catchment cannot be considered, no matter how strong their score. Within the catchment, the only thing that matters is rank.
How candidates are ranked
Latymer does not have a pass mark. The whole process is built around rank, and it works in two rounds. Crucially, both rounds are taken on the same day.
Round 1 is the GL Assessment papers: Mathematics and Verbal Reasoning, marked by optical scanner. Both scores are age-standardised and combined into a single ranking.
Round 2 is the English paper and is marked directly by the school. The English score is then re-standardised back into the combined ranking to produce a final list. Places are allocated from there against the school's oversubscription criteria (Looked After children, Pupil Premium pupils, music applicants, and inner-area applicants by rank).
The practical effect is that the GL papers function as a gate. A pupil whose combined Maths and VR score falls outside the top 700 will not have their English paper marked at all, no matter how well they wrote it.
The Mathematics and Verbal Reasoning paper
Both subjects sit inside a single combined GL Assessment booklet, multiple-choice throughout, with answers marked on a separate machine-readable answer sheet. The total duration is 60 minutes, 30 minutes for each subject, and the school sees no advance content.
Mathematics draws from the whole KS2 curriculum: number and place value, the four operations, fractions, decimals and percentages, measurement, money and time, 2D and 3D shape, angles, coordinates and transformations, statistics, sequences, algebra, ratio and multi-step word problems. The pace is brisk, 30 questions in 30 minutes, and pupils who pause too long on any one question lose ground quickly.
Verbal Reasoning rotates through the full GL bank of question types: synonyms, opposites, analogies, hidden words, compound words, missing letters, codes, number and letter sequences, and several others. The school does not publish which types will appear in any given year, so children who have only practised three or four formats are easily surprised. Pupils who can recognise a question type within a few seconds, and move on cleanly when stuck, are the ones who finish the paper. Many do not.
The English paper
The English paper is set by the school and marked by school staff, and it bears no resemblance to the multiple-choice formats produced by GL. It runs for 60 minutes, split into two equal halves, and pupils write their answers by hand on the booklet provided.
The first half is reading comprehension based on a literary extract, typically prose fiction, often from a 19th or early 20th-century novel. Pupils answer a series of written questions, normally in full sentences, with marks weighted towards textual evidence and inference. Some questions ask for a quoted word; others ask for a small paragraph.
The second half is a continuation writing task. Pupils are usually asked to continue the extract in the tone and style of the original writer. Marks are split between content and style on one side and SPaG on the other, so legibility, grammatical control and authorial voice all count.
A child who has only ever practised multiple-choice English will be unprepared for the demands of this paper. Stamina, handwriting and pacing matter as much as ideas.
What this means in practice
Three things are worth knowing before you start preparing:
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The bar is high. Latymer's intake performs in the top tier of state grammars nationally, and pupils who score comfortably on standard GL practice books often find Latymer-pitched papers a step harder.
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The catchment is non-negotiable. If your home postcode is not on the inner-area list, your child cannot be admitted regardless of score. Check eligibility before registering for the test.
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The English paper is its own discipline. Multiple-choice GL English will not prepare a pupil for an open-response, hand-written paper that asks for paragraphs of fiction in someone else's style.
Our Latymer papers are written against this exact format, with Maths and VR pitched at the top of the GL difficulty range, and an English paper that follows the school's own reading-and-continuation structure.