Find your local grammar school: A guide to UK consortiums

If you're applying for a grammar school place in England, you'll quickly run into the word "consortium". It means a group of grammar schools in a single area that have agreed to share one 11+ test, so your child sits one exam and that result is used by all the schools in the group.

That's the upside. The downside is that consortium boundaries don't always match local authority boundaries, and the test format, registration window and qualifying score vary from one area to the next. This guide walks through the main consortiums currently operating in England, what each one tests, and how to figure out which one applies to you.

A grammar school consortium is a group of selective state schools in one area that pool their entrance testing into a single 11+ exam. Your child sits one test, and the results are shared between all the schools in the consortium.

The practical effect is that you can apply to several grammar schools in an area without sitting four separate exams. You still apply to each school individually through your local authority's secondary admissions form, and each school still applies its own oversubscription criteria. The test result is the part that's shared.

There are currently around 163 grammar schools in England (DfE state-funded schools data), and most are in formal consortium arrangements. A few sit outside, which usually means a separate test on a different date.

Here's a quick overview of the largest consortium arrangements parents tend to come across, with the broad shape of each test. Specific dates, scores and member schools shift each year, so use the table as a starting point for further research rather than a definitive checklist.

Most consortium tests follow a similar shape, even if the providers differ. Your child usually sits two papers on the same day, covering some combination of English, maths, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning. The test happens in early to mid September, with results released around mid-October, before the secondary application deadline of 31 October.

Scores are age-standardised. This adjusts each child's raw score against the average for their exact age in months, so a child born in August isn't disadvantaged against a child born in September. The standardised score is what schools use to rank candidates.

Each consortium publishes its own qualifying score, which is the minimum standardised score a child needs to be considered for a place. Hitting the qualifying score doesn't guarantee an offer. After that point, schools apply their own oversubscription criteria, which usually include distance from the school, sibling links and feeder primary arrangements.

Start with the school, not the area. Pick one or two grammar schools you'd realistically want your child to attend and read their admissions page. Each grammar school's website spells out which test it accepts, the registration deadline, the exam date and what counts as a qualifying score.

From there you'll see whether the school is part of a wider consortium. If it is, you only need to register once with the consortium. If it isn't, you'll either need to sit a separate test on a different day or you may be looking at a privately-administered exam.

A few areas to double-check. Some grammar schools in counties like Lincolnshire and Kent still allow children from outside the county to sit the test, but they prioritise local applicants in the oversubscription criteria, which can make an out-of-area place very hard to secure. And some London areas (Sutton, Kingston, Wilson's) coordinate eligibility tests but then run a second-stage exam, so the consortium test only gets you onto the shortlist.

A handful of grammar schools sit outside their local consortium and use a different admissions test. The most well-known examples are Chelmsford County High School for Girls (the one Essex grammar outside CSSE, which now uses the FSCE entrance test) and Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet (which sits outside any London consortium and runs its own single-stage selection: two GL Assessment multiple-choice papers in English and maths, sat over one of two consecutive days in September).

The practical implication is more test sittings, more registration deadlines to track, and sometimes a separate fee. If you're applying to both a consortium school and an out-of-consortium school, build a single planning document early so you don't miss a date.