One-to-one preparation for both rounds of the entrance test
Book a Free ConsultationThe Henrietta Barnett School — HBS to the families who apply — is a girls' grammar school in Hampstead Garden Suburb that selects over two rounds. The first is a test of verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning and English, held on 2, 3 and 4 September 2026. The second, for the top 300 candidates from Round One, was scheduled for Tuesday 6 October 2026 and was to consist of a 60 minute English paper and a 50 minute Maths paper. The Published Admission Number for September 2027 entry is 120. Leading Tuition prepares girls for both.
Checked October 2026
The school's admissions page, Admissions FAQs and Admissions Policy 2027-2028 give the September 2026 test for September 2027 entry: Round One was held on 2, 3 and 4 September 2026, Round Two for the top 300 candidates was scheduled for Tuesday 6 October 2026, and the Common Application Form is due on 31 October 2026.
The school states the structure in a single sentence: admission is "by academic selection, with a First Round Entrance Test in Verbal, Non-Verbal reasoning and English, followed by a Second Round English and Mathematics test". Read that carefully, because the two rounds share exactly one subject.
Round One is reasoning-led. Verbal and non-verbal reasoning are two of its three components, and they are skills with their own techniques. The school links to GL Assessment familiarisation booklets for this round and says outright that it releases no past papers.
Round Two drops the two reasoning tests and adds Mathematics. A girl who has spent a year on verbal reasoning drills arrives at the second paper having done no mathematics preparation at all, unless someone planned for it.
This is why we run HBS as two programmes on one timetable rather than one programme with a revision phase. Reasoning work is scheduled and finished for Round One. Mathematics runs in parallel through the whole period, quietly, so that it is ready in October rather than started in October. English is the only strand that carries across both.
The compression at the end is the part families do not see coming. The school was to write to all candidates with the Round One outcome by Monday 28 September 2026, and the top 300 candidates were to be invited to sit Round Two on Tuesday 6 October 2026. That was roughly a week to move a child from reasoning to mathematics and written English, in the same fortnight she learned whether she got through at all. A programme that has not already done the mathematics cannot do it in that week.
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We plan both rounds from the start — reasoning and English for September, mathematics and written analysis running underneath it for October — and your daughter is taught by a tutor who has taught both.
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Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppFor Round One there is at least a starting point: the school links GL Assessment familiarisation booklets, and free packs come with them. For Round Two the school gives the length of each paper and says the test is on literacy and numeracy appropriate to Key Stage 2. The school does not release past papers, and it says explicitly that it offers no resources for Round Two. It does not offer remarking either — answer papers are "scanned twice and carefully checked twice by GL statisticians who mark and score the papers", and the school says details of how to appeal after National Offer Day will be on its website.
So the school releases no second-round paper, and anything sold as one has not come from the school.
What we build instead is honest about what it is: material written to the two subjects the school names, at the level we judge a girl who has cleared the first round to be working at, and sat under the 60 minute English and 50 minute Maths timings the school gives for the two papers. It is our best reconstruction of the second-round paper, and we describe it that way to parents rather than calling it a past paper.
If you want the school's own framing of the process end to end, our complete HBS admissions guide sets out the timeline and criteria, and you should confirm both against the school's own admissions page before acting on them.
This is the single most misunderstood thing about HBS entry, and it changes how a family should plan.
The school does not release second-round results. Its admissions FAQs are unambiguous: "Scores and rankings will not be released for candidates invited to sit second round tests on the basis that those who may eventually be offered a place at the School should arrive as equals." Banding, which parents were told about in earlier years, "is no longer used and you will not be given any results before you make your CAF application". Scores can be requested only after National Offer Day, only by candidates not offered a place, and only by those who do not wish to stay on the waiting list — and even then the school provides a standardised score for each round and no rankings at all.
The Common Application Form is due on 31 October 2026 and the second round was scheduled for Tuesday 6 October 2026. In late October 2026 the school writes to the parents of candidates who sat both rounds and met the required standard, stating either that the candidate falls under its Looked After Children or Pupil Premium criteria or that she performed well enough in Round One to enable her to sit the Round Two test and may be eligible for the offer of a place; candidates not invited to Round Two are told their overall standardised score and the cut-off score for the top 300 before the CAF deadline. So a Round Two candidate's family ranks its preferences without a score or a ranking; National Offer Day is Monday 1 March 2027.
The practical consequence for us is that our own assessment data is the main calibration a family has of her second-round standard. That raises the bar on it: mocks are sat under real conditions, marked consistently across the cohort we teach, and reported as numbers rather than reassurance, because a parent completing the CAF in late October 2026 is given no second-round score to go on.
HBS has no catchment. The school is explicit: "There is no catchment area – any girl can apply and any girl can sit the first round test." On its own that sentence is incomplete.
Distance returns at the end. Among the candidates who get through to the second round test, the school's FAQs state that Looked After Children, Pupil Premium candidates and "those living within 3 miles will be offered places ahead of the rest of the applicants in rank order" — and it adds, in its own parenthesis, that "the rest" has so far been the substantial majority. Barnet Council measures the distance in a straight line to the school's main entrance on Central Square, and it runs address checks on families who have moved within three miles in the last twelve months.
For a family inside 3 miles, the school's policy treats sitting the Round Two test as the necessary capability for that priority, and ranks by score only in the unlikely event of more candidates than places in that category. For a family outside it, sitting the second round is necessary and not enough: the top 300 candidates are invited back for a Published Admission Number of 120, and what matters is where in the rank order she lands, which the school does not release to Round Two candidates. We tell families which of those two situations they are in at the consultation, before they commit to anything, and we would rather lose the work than let someone spend two years without understanding it. The HBS designated area guide works through the geography properly.
The waiting list is the other thing worth knowing when you plan. The school publishes how far down it has gone: number 57 in 2021, 55 in 2022, 46 in 2023, 36 in 2024 and 45 in 2025. For September 2026 entry, the school's admissions page says offers were made on Monday 2 March 2026 and that "The top 60 on the waiting list have been advised of their position"; candidates ranked lower than 60 have not been informed of their position, as based on previous years' experience they are unlikely to receive an offer. Second round offers were made on Thursday 26 March 2026, and as of 4 September 2026 the school had offered up to number 47 on the waiting list. The school's policy says a waiting list will be maintained until the end of the first term, after which it will be cleared. Movement is real, and it is not something to build a plan around.
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Most of our HBS families start in Year 4 or at the beginning of Year 5. Reasoning is the reason: verbal and non-verbal reasoning reward long, low-intensity exposure far more than they reward a hard final term, and a girl who meets non-verbal reasoning for the first time in Year 6 is learning a new visual language under time pressure.
The first phase is diagnostic. We assess reading and comprehension against material well above Year 5, arithmetic fluency and multi-step reasoning, and — separately, because it predicts almost nothing else — how she handles her first non-verbal reasoning paper. That produces the plan and the honest answer about whether HBS is a realistic target.
Through the middle of the programme, three strands run at once: reasoning building towards September, English carrying both rounds, and mathematics kept warm for October. Registration for the September 2026 test opened on 1 April 2026 and closed at 5pm on 1 July 2026, and the school accepts no late applications; its Open Day on 30 June 2026 was for students in Year 5 only, and the school says its next Open Day will take place in the summer term 2027.
From July the work turns to format and stamina for Round One, then, in the last fortnight of September, switches deliberately to mathematics and written English so that a second-round invitation lands on a girl who is already prepared for it. Invitations to sit were due by Monday 17 August 2026 and Round One was held on 2, 3 and 4 September 2026; the school allocated each candidate one session on one of those days and says this cannot be changed for any reason, so there is no point planning around a preferred date.
We accept about 3% of tutor applications, through five stages: an application and written-communication screen, a closed-book subject knowledge test at the level the tutor will teach, a teaching interview where they explain a hard idea to someone playing the part of a confused student, a supervised trial lesson with a real student, and an enhanced DBS check with two independently taken references.
HBS narrows that pool further, because the two rounds want different teachers. Non-verbal reasoning is a technical, pattern-recognition discipline; written English is a different skill again. Tutors who are excellent at one are often indifferent at the other, and a programme that pretends otherwise loses a term. Where the right answer is two tutors rather than one, we say so.
We monitor from our side through lesson recordings, parent feedback and progress data. How we select tutors is set out on our tutors page.
In the 2025 admissions cycle we worked with 40 students sitting selective entrance examinations at 11+ and 13+. Seven of them took up places at The Henrietta Barnett School, the second-largest single-school group in that cohort. Across the cohort, 38 of the 40 received at least one offer from a school the family had genuinely targeted — a success rate of 95.0%.
91% of our students achieve their desired grades. That is a practice-wide figure across every level we teach, not an HBS cohort — we do not publish a school-by-school pass rate, because we do not hold one we could evidence. The placement count above is what we can evidence, and we give the cohort size beside it on purpose. Forty is a real number and a small one, and a success rate given without it tells you nothing.
The first step is a free consultation with no obligation. We ask about your daughter, where she is now, where you live relative to the school and what else is on your list, and you get a written view of what a realistic programme looks like — including the case for not starting yet.
Leading Tuition is rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 59 reviews, read on 3 October 2026, and 91% of our students achieve their desired grades.
Reviewed October 2026: dates, figures and rules checked against the Henrietta Barnett School admissions page, Admissions FAQs 2026 and Admissions Policy 2027-2028.
Year 4 or the beginning of Year 5 for most of our HBS families. The reason is the first round rather than the second: verbal and non-verbal reasoning reward long exposure rather than an intense final term. A Year 6 start is possible and we take those girls on, but with the first round held in early September (on 2, 3 and 4 September in 2026) the runway is short, and we will tell you honestly at the diagnostic whether it is enough.
Round One is described in the school's admissions policy as a verbal, non-verbal and English test set by a nationally recognised body. The school links GL Assessment familiarisation booklets for it, with packs of free materials, and says GL statisticians mark and score its papers. Round Two was to be an English and Mathematics test on Tuesday 6 October 2026, made up of a 60 minute English paper and a 50 minute Maths paper. The school gives no further detail about the content or the marking schemes and releases no past papers. Preparation therefore has to cover reasoning, English and mathematics.
No. The school does not release past papers and states that it offers no resources for Round Two. Anything sold as an HBS second-round past paper has not come from the school, whoever is selling it. We write our own second-round material to the two subjects the school names, at the level we judge a girl who has cleared the first round to be working at, and we describe it to parents as exactly that rather than dressing it up as the real thing.
Not for the second round. The school does not release scores or rankings to candidates invited to sit the second-round tests. The Common Application Form is due on 31 October 2026. In late October 2026 the school writes to parents of candidates who sat both rounds and met the required standard, stating either that the candidate falls under its Looked After Children or Pupil Premium criteria or that she performed well enough in Round One to enable her to sit the Round Two test and may be eligible for the offer of a place. Candidates not invited to Round Two are told their overall standardised score before that deadline. Scores can be requested after National Offer Day, but only if she was not offered a place and does not want to stay on the waiting list.
Yes, at the end. Any girl may apply and sit the first round. But among candidates who get through to the second round test, the school says Looked After Children, Pupil Premium candidates and those living within 3 miles are offered places ahead of the rest in rank order, and notes that "the rest" has so far been the substantial majority. Barnet Council measures the straight-line distance to the main entrance on Central Square. We tell you which side of that line you are on before you commit to a programme.
Usually, and it is normally the right plan. Much of the English and mathematics work carries from one selective test to another, and the reasoning work carries to any school that tests reasoning. What needs planning is the autumn: the HBS first round was held on 2, 3 and 4 September 2026 and the second round was scheduled for Tuesday 6 October 2026, and the school says it cannot offer alternative dates when another school's test clashes. We map the sittings for every school on your list before setting a schedule.
We provide one-to-one tuition planned around both rounds from the outset: reasoning and English for the first round, held on 2, 3 and 4 September 2026, with mathematics and written analysis running underneath it for the second round, scheduled for Tuesday 6 October 2026. That means a diagnostic first, three strands in parallel, and mocks that give you numbers at the point the school gives you none. Seven of our 2025 cohort took up places at HBS.
Book a free consultation and we’ll tell you what an HBS programme would look like for your daughter.
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