Practical, local advice for families sitting the unified GL Assessment test: the format, the 19 grammar schools, standardised scores and dates, explained without the jargon.
⚡ Interactive & auto-marked
The number is age-standardised around a median of 200, not a percentage. What 205 and 224 each buy, and why catchment decides more than the score does.
Ranking a school first does not help you there, and believing it does costs places every year. Plus what two marks looked like for two of my students.
Two deadlines, two different bodies, months apart. Registration in May, the September test, results mid-October, and the 31 October form that is the actual application.
The form takes ten minutes. What costs families is the two uploads inside it, one of which needs your child's school to act.
Six weeks is the floor, not the target. Why the holidays matter more than term time, what a week actually looks like, and the column most plans leave out.
A quarter of the marks and the only section school never teaches. Every question type, the two that separate children, and what the official guide leaves out.
A branch of English, not a puzzle subject. Which types can be taught in an afternoon, which cannot be taught at all without reading, and where the gap really opens.
Most children who struggle are not bad at maths. They are unpacking a worded problem across three topics at once, against a clock that cannot be borrowed from.
Half the marks rest here and on verbal reasoning, and both rest on reading. What the section asks, and the single assessment that predicts a result best.
Year 4, about twenty-four months out. Why that is the optimum, what Year 3 should be spent on, and the honest answer on starting in Year 5.
The partnership says its test measures reasoning between shapes and space. Its own familiarisation guide shows no 3D example at all. What is confirmed, and what is not.
There is no single pass mark. The age-standardised scale around a median of 200, the 205 and 224 Foundation thresholds, and why Walsall sets different numbers entirely.
The ward-based catchment maps, the 205 qualifying score and the 224 priority score, and how Foundation places are actually allocated, category by category.
Year 4 or Year 5? An honest timeline from a tutor of 20+ years: how much practice is enough, and how to keep it calm rather than crushing.
All eight compared: which belong to the King Edward VI Foundation, which is the only co-educational option, the shared entrance test, and how to order your preferences.
The only co-educational grammar in Birmingham: 180 places, the fifteen catchment wards, and the order places are actually allocated in.
Two schools on one road in Kings Heath, an identical catchment, and a thirty place gap between the boys' 120 and the girls' 150.
140 boys' places and the widest Foundation catchment: thirty wards across Birmingham and Solihull, including every Sutton Coldfield ward.
Not a matched pair: 150 places for boys and 192 for girls, catchments of 17 and 47 wards, and a sibling link that works both ways.
The Birmingham grammar where your address barely matters: 192 places, no catchment area, no sibling priority, and places ranked on the mark alone.
180 places, no residence requirement, and 1,175 applications in 2025. How Sutton's two grammar schools mirror each other, and why neither cares where you live.
What 205 and 224 actually mean for your application, why the two-part score confuses parents, and how the West Midlands 200 scale differs from the national 100 scale.
Twenty questions in twenty minutes, in the GL Assessment format the West Midlands grammar schools use. Marked instantly, with a topic-by-topic breakdown. Nothing to sign up for.
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