Quest Admissions Part 1: An exam guide for parents

Quest Admissions is the assessment provider used by around 130 independent senior schools in the UK. If your child is applying to an independent school at 11+ or 13+, there's a reasonable chance they'll sit a Quest test as part of the process.

This guide focuses on Part 1, which is the initial computer-based screening exam. It's the part that usually decides whether your child moves forward to the school's own second-stage selection. If you've just had a registration email mentioning Quest, this is what you're looking at.

Quest Admissions Part 1 is a computer-based assessment that lasts around an hour. It covers four areas: English, maths, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning. The test is taken at your target school or at an approved test centre, on the school's chosen sitting date.

The role of Part 1 is to give participating schools a consistent, standardised score for each candidate so they can compare applicants fairly. Schools then use the Part 1 result to decide which children move forward to Part 2, which is school-specific and can include interviews, group activities, creative writing tasks or further written papers.

The exam blends four subject areas into one sitting. Each section has its own approach to questioning:

An adaptive test changes the difficulty of the next question based on how a child has answered the previous ones. Get a question right and the test serves up a harder one. Get one wrong and it serves up an easier one.

The practical effect is that no two children take exactly the same test. The platform builds a personalised picture of where each child's ability sits, usually faster than a fixed-format test could. It's also designed to reduce test anxiety, because children spend less time stuck on questions that are either far too easy or far too hard.

For parents, the most useful thing to understand is that you can't compare "how many questions my child got right" to a peer's score. Different children will have seen different questions. The standardised score Quest reports back to the school is the meaningful figure.

Scores are age-standardised, meaning the platform adjusts each child's performance against the average for their exact age in months. This protects younger children in the school year from being directly compared with older classmates.

Quest doesn't publish a single pass mark, because schools use the results differently. Some schools use Part 1 purely as a shortlist for interview. Others combine it with school reports and Part 2 activities into a weighted overall ranking. A few use it as a hard cut-off. Your target school's admissions page or registrar is the right place to ask how the score is used.

Schools usually tell candidates within a few weeks whether they've been invited to Part 2. The exact wait depends on the school's admissions timeline.

Part 2 varies a lot from one school to another. Common elements include a one-to-one interview, a group task or workshop, a creative writing or extended-response paper, and sometimes a subject-specific written exam. The aim of Part 2 is usually to see how the child thinks and contributes in person, beyond what a computer-based test can show.

A strong Part 1 result is generally treated as a green light to invite the child to Part 2, but it isn't an offer. Plenty of children who do well at Part 1 still need to perform in interview to receive a place.

The four sections cover skills that build over time rather than knowledge that can be crammed. The most useful preparation is steady work across Year 5 on the underlying skills, plus enough familiarisation with the test interface that the format itself doesn't slow your child down.

For English, focus on reading widely and explicit work on vocabulary, grammar and punctuation. For maths, cover the Key Stage 2 curriculum thoroughly with timed mental arithmetic. For verbal and non-verbal reasoning, six to eight weeks of structured practice tends to be enough for many children to get comfortable with the common question types.

Quest provides familiarisation materials and practice tests through the school you're applying to. Use those first, because they match the actual interface your child will see on the day. After that, generic GL-style or CEM-style practice books can build broader confidence with the question types, even if they don't replicate the adaptive engine exactly.