What Is Actually on the Birmingham 11+ Paper?
A surprising number of families start preparing before they know what the test contains. It is worth ten minutes now, because the shape of the paper tells you where the points are — and the weighting is not what most parents expect.
Two papers, about an hour each
The Birmingham entrance test is set by GL Assessment on behalf of the King Edward VI Foundation. Children sit two papers, each around 60 minutes. That hour includes the instructions and worked examples read out at the start, so the time actually spent answering questions is shorter than it sounds.
Everything is multiple choice, and answers go on separate answer sheets rather than in the question booklet. That sounds like a small detail. It is not: transferring answers to a separate sheet under time pressure is its own skill, and it is where a surprising number of avoidable points disappear.
Four subjects, and each of them is worth 25%
The papers cover four areas:
- English comprehension
- Verbal reasoning
- Mathematics
- Non-verbal and spatial reasoning
The weighting is where families are caught out:
- 50% — English and verbal reasoning combined
- 25% — mathematics
- 25% — non-verbal reasoning
Half the points in the whole test rest on English and verbal reasoning. Maths, which is where most families instinctively start, carries a quarter.
That does not make maths unimportant. It means a child who is strong at maths and average at comprehension is not as well placed as their parents often assume, and that reading is the single highest-leverage thing you can do at home.
Scores are standardised for age
Raw scores are converted into a standardised score that adjusts for how old a child is in months. A summer-born child is not competing on level terms with a September-born one in raw scores, so the standardisation corrects for it. You cannot influence this, and it is not something to worry about — but it does mean your child’s reported score is not simply the number of questions they got right.
When it happens
The test is sat on a Saturday in September, at the start of Year 6. Registration closes the previous June — for the September 2026 test, the deadline was 4pm on Friday 26 June 2026. Offers follow in the March afterwards, on national offer day.
Two things follow from that timetable. First, the deadline is a hard one and it falls in the summer term, when families are thinking about anything but exams. Put it in the calendar the moment your child starts Year 5. Second, the test comes only a few days into Year 6, which means the preparation that counts happens across Year 5 — not in a scramble over the summer holidays.
One detail worth knowing: your child’s result arrives before the deadline for submitting your school preferences to the local authority, which falls on 31 October. You are not choosing blind. Use that fortnight properly — a score that comfortably clears one school and falls short at another should change how you rank them.
One test, many schools
The same paper serves eight grammar schools in Birmingham, and is shared regionally with nineteen across the West Midlands. Your child sits it once. You then rank schools on your local authority application, and each school works down its own ranked list.
So the paper is the same wherever you apply. What differs is how high the bar sits at each school, which we cover in our guide to what score your child actually needs.
What this means for how you prepare
If you take one thing from the structure: protect the reading. Half the points depend on it, comprehension is the slowest skill to build, and it is the one that cannot be crammed in the final term. Non-verbal reasoning, by contrast, responds quickly to focused practice — it is a pattern-spotting skill, and most children improve on it fast once they know what they are looking at.
Timed practice matters too, but later. Getting the thinking right comes first; getting it right at speed comes after.
Find out where your child stands
The real test is timed. Our free Saturday assessment deliberately is not. We work through a sample of all four subjects to find the strengths and the gaps, because what matters two years out is not today’s score but how much room there is to improve towards grammar school entrance level. Book a free assessment, or look at the Year 3, Year 4 and Year 5 programmes.