The Slough Consortium of Grammar Schools is the body responsible for the shared 11+ entrance test used by the four selective state grammars in Slough. Around 4,150 children sit the test in a typical year for somewhere between 600 and 700 Year 7 places across the consortium, but those headline numbers flatter the picture, because most of those places end up filled from a much smaller pool of children who both clear the qualifying score and sit inside each school's catchment.

​

The four schools are Herschel Grammar School, Langley Grammar School, St Bernard's Catholic Grammar School and Upton Court Grammar School. All four are co-educational. A child sitting the Slough test once is eligible to be considered at all four consortium schools; they cannot use that result to apply to grammars in neighbouring authorities. Reading School and Kendrick School previously shared their test with Slough but the arrangement ended in 2024, so the Reading grammars and the Buckinghamshire grammars now run their own separate tests.

How candidates are ranked

​

The admissions process runs from a single 11+ result, taken on a Saturday in mid-September of Year 6. 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 answer sheet that is machine-marked. The test is held at four centres in Slough, one at each of the four consortium schools.

​

Raw scores are age-standardised and combined into a single overall result, averaged across both papers. The standardised qualifying score has held steady at 111 for several cycles, which represents roughly the top 35% of the cohort. Of the ~4,150 children who sit the test in a typical year, around 1,500 clear it. Children scoring below 111 are not eligible to be ranked for a place at any of the four schools, regardless of which appear on the Common Application Form.

​

The qualifying bar is a much wider gate than the country's most selective GL grammars use — Trafford sits around the top 25%, QE Boys around the top 6%,  but clearing it is still only the first step at Slough. With around 1,500 children qualifying and roughly 650 places between the four schools, each school then applies its own oversubscription criteria, and most of these are heavily catchment-driven. The same standardised score does not produce the same outcome at every school: a strong score with the wrong postcode can still finish below the offer line, and a borderline score with a strong catchment can still get one. Families ranking schools on the Common Application Form should weigh both the score and the catchment for each preference.

​

Test results are sent to parents in mid-October. Final Year 7 allocations are published on National Offer Day in early March.

The two papers
 

The two Slough papers are split by subject rather than rotated through the same subjects in each booklet. Each paper runs to around 60 minutes, including audio-administered instructions, a worked example for each section, and unmarked practice questions before the section proper begins.

​

Paper 1: Verbal Skills

A paper of English and Verbal Reasoning, divided on the cover into two named parts.

 

English is a reading comprehension of usually 14 multiple-choice questions on a literary passage, then a spelling exercise where each line of continuous prose either contains exactly one spelling error or is error-free (the child marks A–D for the segment containing the error, or N for no error), and finally a sentence completion section in cloze format.

 

Next is Verbal Reasoning across a sequence of shorter blocks: Insert a Letter, two Logic Problem slots, Opposites, Letter Series, Hidden Word and Word Link. The Opposites block uses an unusual dual-answer format, two letters per question, one from A–E and one from X–Z; this catches out children who have only practised standard single-letter A–E formats.

​

Paper 2: Non-Verbal Reasoning Spatial Reasoning and Mathematics

This is internally split into sections, each separately timed. The Non-Verbal Reasoning section runs for around 24 minutes and cycles through Analogies, Letter Codes, Series, Odd One Out, Matrix and Hidden Shapes. The Spatial Reasoning section follows: a short block on Cube Nets and Folded Paper.

 

The Mathematics section closes the paper drawing from the whole KS2 curriculum, including number and place value, the four operations, fractions, decimals and percentages, measurement, money and time, 2D and 3D shape, angles, coordinates, statistics, sequences, algebra and ratio.

What this means in practice

​

Three things are worth knowing before you start preparing:

​

1. The qualifying bar is relatively low, but catchment does the filtering.

 

The standardised pass mark of 111 sits much lower than at Trafford, HBS or QE Boys — Slough is not a super-selective test. But the consortium typically has more than twice as many qualifying children as available places, so each school's catchment-driven ranking ends up doing the real work. Clearing 111 is necessary but rarely sufficient; postcode matters as much as score.

​

​

2. The papers are split by subject, which limits compensation across sections.

Because Paper 1 is entirely English and Verbal Reasoning and Paper 2 is entirely Maths and Non-Verbal/Spatial Reasoning, a child who is weak across a whole subject — Maths, or Spatial — cannot make up for it elsewhere in the same way they could on a paper where every subject appears in every booklet. Preparation has to be broad rather than deep in any one area.

​

​

3. Spatial and the dual-answer Opposites format are the unfamiliar parts.

 

Most generic GL practice does not cover Slough's specific Opposites format (two letters per question, A–E plus X–Z) or build the Cube Net and Folded Paper drilling that the Spatial block demands. These are small sections in mark terms, Spatial sits at around 8 questions of 65, Opposites at 6 of 58; but they are the parts of the paper that most often catch a well-prepared child unaware.

​

Our Slough papers are written against this exact format: the full ten-section Paper 1, the three-section Paper 2 with internally-timed Non-Verbal, Spatial and Mathematics blocks, the unusual dual-answer Opposites format built in rather than skipped, and full Cube Net and Folded Paper drilling rather than the token coverage most generic 11+ material offers.