Which 11 plus does my area use? Who sets the test, area by area

Who actually decides your child’s 11 plus

Most families start by trying to work out which 11 plus their child will sit: a GL Assessment paper, Quest, FSCE, CSSE, or something a school writes itself. It is a fair question, and it is the second one rather than the first.

The body that decides what your child sits is the admissions authority. That is the local authority, or the consortium of schools, that runs admissions where the school is. It decides which subjects are tested, how many papers there are, when the test is sat, when registration opens and closes, how the subjects are weighted, and how a score turns into an offer of a place. The provider writes and prints the paper the admissions authority asked for.

This distinction does real work. Two areas buying from the same provider can run noticeably different tests: different subjects, different combinations, different rules about who may apply. So the question that gets a usable answer is not “which board am I”, it is “what has my admissions authority published for the year my child applies”.

The table below is what we have been able to verify from published sources. Where a provider is not published, we say so rather than guess. Confirm the current arrangements with the admissions authority in every case, because these are tendered contracts and they move.

Who sets the test, area by area

Larger areas first. “No change announced” means the area is using the provider shown and has not published a change, not that a change is impossible.

Every row is a starting point for a look at an admissions page, not a substitute for one. Confirm the current arrangements with the admissions authority, including the subjects and the format, before planning around any of it.

What is changing, and when

This is the part where advice written two or three years ago is now wrong, and it is worth reading even if your area is not listed.

Already moved. Bexley and the Wirral have moved from GL Assessment to Quest, in force for 2027 entry. If you are working from material bought for either area before that change, it is describing a paper your child will not sit.

Moving for 2028 entry. Trafford and the seven Gloucestershire grammar schools move to FSCE. The Slough consortium, the Dorset and BCP consortium, The Latymer School and Bishop Wordsworth’s move to Quest.

Two of those also move the test date, which matters more than the provider’s name. The Gloucestershire FSCE test is sat at the end of the summer term of Year 5, not September of Year 6, from 2028 entry, so the first sitting under the new arrangement falls in summer 2027. Trafford keeps a September sitting for 2028 entry and then moves to the latter part of the summer term of Year 5 from 2029 entry. That is close to a year less preparation time, so a parent of a Year 4 child in either area should work back from the new date. Confirm the current arrangements with the admissions authority, because dates are exactly the sort of detail that gets amended.

The content moves too. Both FSCE areas move towards a test drawn from the Key Stage 2 curriculum rather than a reasoning test. In Gloucestershire that means English, Maths and nine other school subjects, up to the end of Year 5. The Latymer School’s new arrangements drop Verbal Reasoning altogether. If that is your area, the reasoning practice that dominates most 11+ advice carries less weight and the curriculum work carries more. Our post on the Gloucestershire move to FSCE goes through one of those changes in detail, and the GL Assessment 11 plus explained has the wider picture of who supplies what.

One more piece of history that still confuses people. CEM stopped supplying paper 11+ tests after the 2023 round, so an area described online as a “CEM area” is now something else. What happened to the CEM 11 plus covers where those areas went.

How to find your area’s 11 plus arrangements

Four steps, in this order.

1. Find the admissions authority, not the school’s prospectus. For a county-run test it is the local authority’s admissions pages; for a consortium, a shared site covering the member schools; for a standalone school, its own admissions page.
2. Check the entry year the page applies to. An eleven plus page published in the autumn normally describes the round being sat now, for entry the following September. If your child is younger, you want the arrangements for their year, and those may not be published yet. That is normal, and a reason to check again later rather than assume.
3. Note the registration deadline as well as the test date. Missing registration is the one failure that no amount of preparation fixes, and the deadline is often in the summer term, months before the test.
4. Then check the subjects and the format. Which of English, Maths, Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning are tested, how many papers, whether answers go on a separate multiple-choice sheet, and whether any subject is weighted. Confirm all of it with the admissions authority.

Be careful with second-hand sources. Forum threads, tutor pages and workbook ranges written for a previous cycle can be well informed and still describe a test that no longer exists in your area. Check the date on anything you rely on. Our guides to 11 plus exam papers and standardised scores cover what transfers between areas and what does not.

What we have not been able to establish

Being straight about the gaps is part of the point of this page.

Several sizeable areas publish no provider we could verify, including Sutton and Bromley, and the arrangements in Kingston upon Thames differ between schools. We could not establish a provider for Lincolnshire, Calderdale, Kirklees, North Yorkshire, Torbay, Stoke-on-Trent or Worcestershire. Kent’s provider for 2028 entry onwards was not published when this page was last updated, and Kent is one of the largest areas in the country, so its outcome will change the national picture on its own.

We have also left out anything we could only find on a tutoring or revision site. A school linking to a provider’s free familiarisation booklet is not evidence that the provider supplies its test, and at least one school links to material from two different providers. Where this page says “not established”, it means we could not find it published by the admissions authority.

Where 11+ Daily fits

11+ Daily is practice, not an admissions service, and it does not know your area. Questions are organised by skill and are not tagged to any area, board or school, so the arrangements above are something you look up for yourself. The Today screen picks one subject and one specific skill for a session of roughly seven to ten minutes, and a parents area shows which skills have been covered and how accurately. We are not connected to GL Assessment. The 14-day free trial needs no card.

Questions parents ask