Birmingham 11+ Key Dates: The Two Deadlines Parents Miss
The Birmingham 11+ is not one application. It is two separate processes, with two separate deadlines, four months apart — and missing either one ends your child’s chances for that year. Neither is run by the school, and neither will chase you.
Here is the full cycle, using the most recently published set of dates.
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| 5 May 2026 | Registration opens at westmidlandsgrammarschools.co.uk |
| 12 June 2026, 4pm | Deadline for reasonable adjustment requests, with supporting evidence |
| 26 June 2026, 4pm | Registration closes. Miss this and your child cannot sit the test |
| 12 September 2026 | Test day. Morning and afternoon sessions |
| 16 October 2026 | Results sent to parents |
| 31 October 2026 | Local authority preference form deadline |
| 1 March 2027 | National offer day |
Deadline one: registering for the test
Registration is done at westmidlandsgrammarschools.co.uk — not through the school, and not through the council. It opens in early May and closes at 4pm at the end of June.
That timing is the problem. The window falls entirely within the summer term of Year 5, when families are thinking about sports day and holidays rather than an exam fifteen months away. There is no reminder and no late entry. Put it in your calendar the day your child starts Year 5.
The deadline almost nobody knows about
If your child needs a reasonable adjustment — extra time, a modified paper, coloured overlays, anything supporting a diagnosed need — that request has its own deadline, two weeks before registration closes, and it must arrive with supporting evidence.
This catches families out every year. Parents assume they can raise it when they register, or nearer the test. They cannot. If there is any chance your child will need an adjustment, start gathering the evidence in the spring term, not in June.
Deadline two: the preference form
Sitting the test does not apply to any school. The actual application is the common application form you submit to your local authority, and it closes on 31 October.
Results arrive on 16 October, so you have around a fortnight in which you already know your child’s score. You are not choosing blind, and that matters more than most families realise.
Use that fortnight properly
Your child may qualify at more than one school, and the one they are offered is the highest-ranked school on your form at which they qualify. So the order is not a formality. Put a safer school above a more ambitious one and you will be given the safer school, even in a year your child qualified for both.
Once you have the score, work out which admissions category your child falls into at each school you are considering, then rank honestly. Our guide to the eight schools sets out how the categories work and why an in-catchment score of 224 can beat an out-of-catchment 253.
What the timetable tells you about preparation
The test falls a few days into Year 6. Whatever your child knows walking into that hall, they learned in Year 5 or earlier — the first weeks of Year 6 change nothing.
That is the single most useful thing in this timetable. Preparation that starts in the summer before the test is preparation that has already run out of time. Work spread across Year 5, or earlier for children who need longer, is steady and calm. The same work compressed into August is neither.
Where does your child stand?
Our free Saturday assessments at the Edgbaston centre look at a sample of all four 11+ subjects to find where your child is strong and where the gaps are. It is not a timed exam, and we are measuring more than a score — the question is how much room there is to improve towards grammar school entrance level.
Book a free assessment, or read about the Year 3, Year 4 and Year 5 programmes.