Bexley Grammar Schools: The Selection Test and How Entry Works

Four state grammar schools sit within the London Borough of Bexley, and all four share a single entrance route: the Bexley Selection Test, registered centrally through the local authority; individual schools do not handle registration. A child who registers sits one set of papers in September of Year 6, and that single result is then used by every Bexley grammar school named on the family's secondary application form, which keeps the process simpler than boroughs where each school sets its own paper.

This guide draws on the schools' own admissions pages and Bexley Council's own pages on the selection test and secondary admissions, setting out which schools exist, what the test covers, how registration and the wider timetable work, how places are prioritised when a school is oversubscribed, and what happens if an appeal becomes necessary.

The four grammar schools in Bexley

Bexley's grammar provision is split across four schools, covering boys', girls' and mixed intakes across three towns within the borough.

• Beths Grammar School, Bexley (boys)
• Bexley Grammar School, Welling (mixed)
• Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School, Sidcup (mixed)
• Townley Grammar School, Bexleyheath (girls, with a co-educational sixth form)

Who runs the test and what it covers

The Bexley Selection Test is administered centrally by the London Borough of Bexley, with no individual school responsible for running it; The test papers are supplied by Quest Assessments. The test is sat on paper at a supervised venue; it is not taken at home or on a computer.

The assessment is split into two booklets, each lasting around fifty minutes, with the full session running to two and a half to three hours once instructions and a break are included. Between them, the papers cover verbal ability and English comprehension, numerical reasoning pitched at no higher than Year 5 expectations, and non-verbal reasoning built around pattern recognition and logical deduction. Beths Grammar School describes the same structure as two papers each mixing question types across verbal ability and comprehension, numerical ability, and non-verbal reasoning.

Scoring weights verbal ability at 50% and numerical and non-verbal ability at 25% each, with results age-standardised around an average of 200. Children reaching the qualifying standard are recorded as selective and become eligible for consideration at any Bexley grammar school named on their application; a further band, the top 180 scorers borough-wide, carries guaranteed priority ahead of the wider selective pool at schools such as Beths and Townley.

Registration and the yearly timetable

Registration for the test is separate from, and earlier than, the secondary school application itself, and is completed online through Bexley Council; it is not completed through a chosen school. Children eligible to sit are those in Year 5 who will start secondary school the following September; the council does not accept late registrations under any circumstances.

Children attending a Bexley primary school normally sit the test at their own school in early September, while children from outside Bexley sit at one of the grammar school venues slightly later in the same month. Results follow in early October, after which families complete the common secondary application form, listing up to six preferences, by the national closing date of 31 October. National offers day for secondary places falls on 1 March, with appeal deadlines typically falling toward the end of March for families not offered their preferred school.

Catchment, priority and out-of-borough applicants

Bexley Council states plainly that it does not operate catchment areas for its schools, so proximity functions as a tie-breaker within each school's published oversubscription criteria; it does not act as a hard boundary. Any child, whether resident in Bexley or in a neighbouring borough, may register for and sit the test; eligibility to sit remains equal, and what differs is the likelihood of a place, since most schools rank remaining applicants by straight-line distance to the school once higher-priority criteria are satisfied, and children from further afield in neighbouring boroughs compete on that same distance measure against applicants living closer to the school.

Individual schools layer their own priority order on top of the test result. Beths Grammar School, for instance, places looked-after children first, then the borough's top 180 scorers, then siblings of current pupils, then children of permanent staff, then a reserved allocation for pupils eligible for Pupil Premium or free school meals, before falling back on straight-line distance to the school's east entrance as the main deciding factor, with test score used to break ties between applicants living equally far away. Townley Grammar School follows a broadly similar order: looked-after children, a reserved Pupil Premium allocation, the top 180 scorers, siblings, staff children, and then distance. Bexley Grammar School in Welling and Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School in Sidcup publish their own versions of the same structure, prioritising looked-after children, siblings and staff children ahead of distance-based allocation for remaining places.

How places are allocated

Allocation runs through the single coordinated secondary application, not through separate applications to each grammar school. Each school ranks every applicant who named it against its own published oversubscription criteria, and a child who qualifies for more than one preference is offered a place at whichever qualifying school sits highest on their list; the council will only fall back to the nearest school with a vacancy where none of a family's stated preferences can be met.

Only children recorded as selective, or otherwise meeting a school's published criteria, can be offered a grammar place, and Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School notes that only pupils who sat the Bexley Selection Test and were deemed selective are eligible for consideration there at all.

Appeals

Families not offered a place at their preferred school have the right to appeal to an independent panel, since every Bexley secondary school is an academy and appeals are therefore made directly to the school, not to the council. Panels sit apart from both the council and the school, in line with the Department for Education's code of practice, and include members with education experience alongside lay members who had no part in the original admissions decision.

An appeal must be made in writing, setting out its grounds, and parents are given the opportunity to attend and speak at the hearing; accepting an offered place at another school does not affect the right to appeal for a preferred one. Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School and Beths Grammar School both report that Year 7 appeals for their places are very rarely upheld.

How families prepare

Because the test is set by the borough, not by individual schools, preparation centres on the three tested areas, not on any individual school's own paper: verbal ability and comprehension, numerical reasoning kept within Year 5 expectations, and non-verbal reasoning based on pattern recognition. Several of the schools point families toward official familiarisation materials as a starting point; Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School, for example, directs applicants to the borough's familiarisation guide and to practice materials aligned with the test provider, while Bexley Grammar School and Townley Grammar School each publish their own free 11+ familiarisation resources.

Working steadily through the tested skills across Year 5, instead of concentrating preparation into the weeks before the September sitting, tends to leave a child more comfortable with the timed format and less fatigued across the two back-to-back papers.

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