How to choose which grammar schools to apply to

Most families choose their 11+ schools the wrong way round. They start with a league table, fall for the school at the top, and only later discover it is a ninety minute journey, or that it is super-selective and takes forty children from six hundred applicants, or that it sets a different test from the one their child has spent a year practising for.

A better order is: geography, then admissions policy, then quality, then feel. Here is what each step involves.

Start with a map and a stopwatch

Draw a circle around where you live and be honest about the commute, because your eleven year old will make it twice a day for seven years.

Journey time is the single most underrated factor in secondary school choice. An hour each way is ten hours a week, which comes out of sleep, homework and everything a child does for fun. It also quietly decides whether they can stay for clubs, and whether their friends live near enough to see at the weekend.

While the map is open, check what happens with siblings, and check the bus routes rather than assuming the drive is representative.

Then read the admissions policy, not the prospectus

This is the document that decides whether your child can get in, and almost nobody reads it. It is published on every school's website, usually as a PDF called "admission arrangements".

What to look for:

• Which test the school sets. Areas and consortia differ, and so do the formats. Confirm this before buying anything, as covered in what the 11+ actually is.
• Qualifying score or rank order. A school with a fixed qualifying score plus distance criteria behaves completely differently from a super-selective that ranks every candidate on score alone.
• Catchment and priority areas. Some grammar schools have an inner catchment with a lower effective threshold, some have none at all.
• The oversubscription criteria, in order. Looked-after children, siblings, distance, feeder schools, faith. This ordering tells you where you sit in the queue if your child qualifies.
• How many places, and how many applicants last year. Both are usually published, and they turn "competitive" into a number.

The school data worth reading

Ofsted ratings are a blunt instrument, and the top of a league table mostly tells you which school selects hardest. Two measures are more useful:

• Progress 8 measures how much children improve between primary and GCSE relative to similar starting points. For a selective school this is far more informative than raw attainment, which is largely a function of the intake.
• Attainment 8 and the destinations data tell you where the children actually end up, which is usually what parents are really asking about.

Beyond that, look at cohort size (a year group of 90 is a very different school from one of 240), sixth form provision, and whether the subjects your child loves are actually offered.

(Pulling this together per school is tedious, so 11max keeps a school profile for every state secondary in England, with the published performance data, the intake and the admissions details in one place, and a deep dive that reads the school's own documents so you do not have to open five PDFs per school.)

Then visit, because the data stops here

Open evenings are marketing, and worth attending anyway. Go on a normal weekday if the school allows it, and take your child.

What to watch for: how the children talk to each other and to staff, what is on the walls, what the head says about children who are not top of the class, and whether your child looked comfortable. That last one is not sentimental. A child who thrives at a school with a slightly lower average result will do better than one who is miserable at the top-ranked one.

Building the list

Your local authority form takes up to six preferences, ranked, and preference order is confidential, so schools never see where you put them. That makes the strategy simple:

1. One or two aspirational, including the super-selective if there is one in reach.
2. Two realistic, where the published qualifying score and your distance both look achievable.
3. At least one non-selective school you would genuinely be happy with. This is the most important line in the whole post. A form listing only grammar schools, in an area where they are all oversubscribed, can end with no offer at all and a place allocated somewhere you never chose.

Put them in the order you actually want them. There is no tactical advantage to any other ordering, and every year families lose their first choice by trying to be clever.

When to do all this

Earlier than the application deadline, because test registration closes long before it, usually in the early summer of Year 5. The school list decides which tests your child registers for, which decides what they practise. Work backwards from that, and the rest of the year gets much calmer.