The Eight Birmingham Grammar Schools: How Hard Is Each One to Get Into?
Eight grammar schools in Birmingham share a single entrance test. Your child sits it once. But the eight are nowhere near equally competitive. In 2026 the open-category scores at the seven schools that made open offers ran from 216 to 255 — a spread of 39 points. At the eighth, Five Ways, no open-category applicant was offered a place at all.
Here is what the published figures actually show.
| School | Intake | Open category, 2026 | Pupil Premium, outside catchment |
|---|---|---|---|
| King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Girls | Girls | 255, and within 6,343m | No offers made |
| King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys | Boys | 254, and within 6,831m | No offers made |
| Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School | Boys | 229 | 210 |
| Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls | Girls | 227 | 215 |
| King Edward VI Handsworth School for Girls | Girls | 219, and within 8,195m | No offers made |
| King Edward VI Aston School | Boys | 217, and within 9,442m | 239 with a sibling, within 4,977m |
| King Edward VI Handsworth Grammar School for Boys | Boys | 216, and within 13,733m | 211, and within 6,776m |
| King Edward VI Five Ways School | Boys and girls | No offers made | 232, and within 5,075m |
Five Ways is the only co-educational school of the eight — the other seven are single-sex. If you have a boy and a girl, it is the one school on this list where both could end up in the same place.
What the spread means in practice
Take a child who scores 225. At Handsworth Grammar for Boys, Aston, Handsworth Girls or Sutton Coldfield Girls, that was a comfortable score in 2026 — provided the family lived close enough. At either Camp Hill school it was around 30 points short. At Five Ways it would not have mattered what they scored, because the open category received no offers at all. Same child, same morning, same paper.
This is the single most useful thing a Birmingham parent can understand early. “Will my child pass the 11+?” is not really the question. “Which of these eight is my child a realistic candidate for?” is.
How a place is actually decided
Before you compare the numbers above, it helps to know how they are produced. Each school sorts every qualifying applicant into one category, then fills its places category by category, in order. The places run out partway down — and where they run out is what gets published as a “cut-off”.
At the six King Edward VI schools the order is:
- Looked-after and previously looked-after children scoring 205 or more
- Pupil Premium children scoring 205 or more, living in catchment
- Pupil Premium children scoring 205 or more, living outside catchment
- Any child scoring 224 or more, living in catchment
- Everyone else
Bishop Vesey’s and Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls currently operate no catchment, so they run three categories: looked-after children, Pupil Premium children, and everyone else. That could change, so check before you apply.
Within a category, children are ranked by score. Where scores tie, the place goes to whoever lives nearest the school in a straight line. That is what the metre figures in the table mean — the distance the last successful applicant lived from the school, not a boundary you need to be inside.
For most families the number that matters is 224, not the headline cut-off
Look at what that order does. Category 4 is filled before Category 5 is touched. So at Camp Hill Boys in 2026, a child in catchment scoring 224 was offered a place, while a child outside catchment scoring 253 was not. Category 4 was satisfied in full at five of the six King Edward VI schools.
If you live in a school’s catchment, 224 — the priority score — is the number that decides your child’s chances, not the 254 or 255 in the table. Those open-category figures apply to families outside catchment, and to in-catchment children who fall short of 224.
Two warnings. The priority score is not fixed and can change from year to year. And at Five Ways in 2026, even Category 4 was oversubscribed — being in catchment with 224 or more still was not enough, because the last place went to a family living within 4,384 metres.
Rank your preferences honestly
Your child may qualify at more than one school. Which one they are offered is decided by the order you put the schools in on your local authority preference form: you are offered the highest-ranked school at which your child qualifies.
So list them in the order you genuinely want them. Putting a safer school above a more ambitious one will hand you the safer school, even in the year your child qualified for both.
Score is not the only filter
Look again at the open-category column. At every King Edward VI school the published outcome is a score and a distance. Handsworth Grammar for Boys reached open-category applicants out to 13,733 metres; Camp Hill Girls stopped at 6,343. A child can clear the score and still miss the place, simply because the ranked list filled before it reached them.
Bishop Vesey’s and Sutton Coldfield Grammar School for Girls published score cut-offs with no distance figure, so their arrangements work differently again. It is one more reason to read a school’s own admissions policy rather than compare numbers across schools.
Cut-offs are an outcome, not a target
Every figure above describes what happened in 2026. None of them is a threshold anyone set in advance. A cut-off is simply where the ranked list ran out of places, so it moves with the strength and the choices of each year’s applicants.
Use them to judge how competitive a school tends to be. Do not use them as a score to aim at, and be wary of anyone who tells you what this year’s number will be.
Check the arrangements yourself
Admissions arrangements are published by each school and they change. Catchment maps, sibling rules, the number of places held for each category — all of it varies, and none of it can be inferred from the score tables. Read the school’s own admissions page for any school you are seriously considering, and read it in Year 5, not Year 6.
Where does your child actually stand?
We run free Saturday assessments at our Edgbaston centre. We look at a sample of all four 11+ subjects and show you 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 real question is how much room there is to improve towards grammar school entrance level. We will tell you honestly, including when the answer is that grammar school is not the right route. We would rather tell you that early than take your money for two years.
Book a free assessment, or read about the Year 3, Year 4 and Year 5 programmes. You may also want our guides to what score your child needs and what is on the paper.