West Midlands Grammar Schools
Complete, accurate entrance exams for the West Midlands Grammar Schools
Entrance exam papers suitable for all 19 grammar schools across the Grammar Schools in Birmingham, the Warwickshire Consortium and the Shropshire/Wolverhampton/Walsall Consortium.
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 West Midlands Grammar Schools exams
Did you know?
Although the subjects in Paper 1 and Paper 2 are the same, the content varies dramatically
About the exam
The West Midlands Grammar Schools Entrance Test is one of the largest shared 11+ exams in the country: a single GL Assessment paper used by 19 selective state grammar schools spread across five local authority areas. Around 5,000 candidates sit it in Birmingham alone in a typical year, with several thousand more across Warwickshire, Walsall, Wolverhampton and Shropshire, competing for roughly 2,800 Year 7 places. One registration covers all 19 schools, and one sitting produces one standardised score that the partnership shares with whichever schools the family lists on their preferences.
The 19 schools sit under three sub-consortia, each with its own qualifying-score cut-off and its own oversubscription rules.
The schools
The Grammar Schools in Birmingham (eight schools):
Bishop Vesey's Grammar School, King Edward VI Aston School, King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys, King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Girls, King Edward VI Five Ways School, King Edward VI Handsworth Grammar School for Boys, King Edward VI Handsworth School for Girls, Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls.
The Warwickshire Consortium (six schools):
Alcester Grammar School, Ashlawn School (bilateral entry, a small number of selective places alongside non-selective intake), King Edward VI School (Stratford-upon-Avon), Lawrence Sheriff School (Rugby), Rugby High School, Stratford Girls' Grammar School.
The Shropshire, Wolverhampton and Walsall Consortium (five schools):
Haberdashers' Adams, Newport Girls' High School, Queen Mary's Grammar School (Walsall), Queen Mary's High School (Walsall), Wolverhampton Girls' High School.
How the test is built
Two papers, both sat on the same morning with a short comfort break in between. Each paper runs to around an hour of administered time, including audio instructions, worked examples and unmarked practice questions before each section starts. All questions are multiple choice, answered on a separate OMR answer sheet, and pupils work in HB pencil only.
Both papers cover all four subjects: English Comprehension, Verbal Reasoning, Mathematics, and Non-Verbal Reasoning including Spatial Reasoning. Each paper is built from four internally timed sections, one per subject. The four sections run back-to-back inside the paper, each with its own clock, so a pupil cannot bank time on the easier sections and spend it on the harder ones.
Two design features make this test distinctive among GL grammar exams. First, no Verbal Reasoning type, no Non-Verbal type and no Mathematics strand appears in both papers. Paper 1's VR covers Vocabulary Opposites, Word Production, Word Relationships and Letter Codes; Paper 2's covers Synonyms, Words in Sentences, Insert Letter and Letter Series. Paper 1's maths covers number and place value, the four operations, measurement and statistics; Paper 2's covers fractions and percentages, geometry, ratio and algebra. The full Verbal Reasoning canon, the full Non-Verbal canon and the full KS2 maths curriculum are split cleanly across the two booklets. Second, English Comprehension uses a fiction passage in Paper 1 and a non-fiction passage in Paper 2, with question styles deliberately overlapping so that comprehension skill is tested twice across two genres.
How scoring works
Raw scores are weighted at 50% English plus Verbal Reasoning, 25% Mathematics and 25% Non-Verbal plus Spatial Reasoning. The weighted total is then age-standardised. Unusually for a GL grammar test, the West Midlands partnership standardises around a median of 200 rather than the more common 100, so the entire score scale runs about twice as high as it does for other GL consortia.
Each sub-consortium publishes its own qualifying score, and within Birmingham each King Edward VI school also publishes its own oversubscription criteria. Recent qualifying scores have sat around 205 for the King Edward VI Foundation schools and as high as 232 for King Edward VI School in Stratford-upon-Avon. Hitting a sub-consortium's qualifying score makes a candidate eligible to be ranked; it does not guarantee a place. After eligibility is established, each school applies its own oversubscription criteria, which typically combine catchment, Pupil Premium priority, sibling links and rank by standardised score.
Results go to parents in mid-October. Year 7 allocations are released on National Offer Day in early March.
What's worth knowing
The partnership is wide, but the schools are not interchangeable. King Edward VI Stratford's qualifying bar is materially higher than the King Edward VI Foundation cut-off. Stratford Girls' has more than seven applicants per place. Ashlawn admits only 31 of its 256 Year 7 students through the selective route, with a further 25 places via a separate modern languages aptitude test. Pick preferences with the actual offer dynamics of each school in mind, not just the partnership headline.
Both papers test the full curriculum. A pupil who is weak in any one of the four subjects bleeds marks twice across the day rather than once, because every paper carries every subject. Preparation has to be broad rather than deep in any one area.
The question-type and topic split between the two papers is deliberate and tightly designed. A pupil who has practised only one paper's worth of GL types will meet at least four unfamiliar question types in the other paper. Mock material built against the live test's actual two-paper split, rather than a generic GL practice mix, gives a much truer sense of the experience.
Our West Midlands papers are written against this exact format, with the locked four-section structure per paper, the no-overlap question-type and strand rotation across the two booklets, and the partnership's distinctive Choose TWO comprehension item and dual-letter VR mark style built in rather than skipped.