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 GL Assessment test of verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning and English, sat on 2, 3 or 4 September 2026. The second is an English and Mathematics paper in the week of 5 October. There are 120 places. Leading Tuition prepares girls for both.
Updated for September 2027 entry, August 2026. Corrected against the school's own admissions FAQs. This page previously stated that HBS "does not use a standardised GL Assessment or CEM paper" and that the examination "covers English and Mathematics". Both were wrong. The first round is GL Assessment, it tests verbal and non-verbal reasoning as well as English, and the school confirms its papers are marked and scored by GL statisticians. The Published Admission Number for September 2027 entry is 120.
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 thirds of it, and they are skills with their own techniques — letter and number sequences, codes, analogies, matrices, rotations, reflections — that are not taught anywhere in the primary curriculum. The school publishes GL Assessment familiarisation booklets for this round and says outright that it releases no past papers.
Round Two drops reasoning entirely 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, and even there the demand shifts — comprehension and vocabulary in the first round, sustained written analysis in the second.
The compression at the end is the part families do not see coming. First-round results and second-round invitations go out by 28 September 2026, and the second round is the week beginning 5 October. That is roughly a week to move a child from reasoning to mathematics and written English, in the same fortnight she learns 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 match your daughter to 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 there is nothing. 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 that is the end of it.
So nobody outside the school has the second-round paper, and any tutor or publisher selling one is selling a reconstruction. We say that plainly because families are sold the opposite every year.
What we build instead is honest about what it is: material written to the two subjects the school names, at the level a girl who has already cleared a super-selective first round will meet, and sat under the timing the round is known to use. It is our best reconstruction of an unpublished 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. The second round is in the first week of that month. So you rank your preferences roughly four months before you learn anything about how she did.
Some widely read 11+ guides tell parents the opposite — that final results arrive by email before the common application deadline. Check any such claim against the school's own FAQ document before you build a preference list on it.
The practical consequence for us is that our own assessment data is the only calibration a family gets. 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 has nothing else 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." That sentence gets quoted a great deal, and on its own it is misleading.
Distance returns at the end. Among the candidates who clear the second round, 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 three miles, a strong second-round performance is close to decisive. For a family outside it, clearing the second round is necessary and nowhere near sufficient: what matters is where in the rank order she lands, and that ordering is never disclosed. 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. It informs only the top 60 of their position. Movement is real, and it is not something to build a plan around.
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 opens on 1 April 2026 and closes at 5pm on 1 July 2026, with the Open Day on 30 June for current Year 5 students only, so by early summer the plan should already be set rather than being decided.
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 are issued by 17 August 2026 and the round itself falls on 2, 3 or 4 September; the school allocates the day and session and will not change it 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; second-round English is close reading and sustained written analysis. 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.
If the match is wrong you get a rematch, free, without having to argue for it, and 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%.
We are rated Excellent on Trustpilot, 4.8 out of 5, and 91% of our students achieve their desired grades. Those two are practice-wide figures 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.
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 are not taught in primary school, and they 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 falling on 2, 3 or 4 September 2026 the runway is short, and we will tell you honestly at the diagnostic whether it is enough.
Both, in different rounds. The school publishes GL Assessment familiarisation booklets for the first round and confirms that GL statisticians mark and score its papers. The second round is an English and Mathematics test for which the school publishes nothing at all. Anyone who tells you HBS sets an entirely in-house exam is describing the second round and forgetting the first — a mistake this page itself carried until August 2026, and one that leaves reasoning out of a child's preparation.
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 is a reconstruction, whoever is selling it. We write our own second-round material to the two subjects the school names, at the level a girl who has already cleared the first round will meet, and we describe it to parents as exactly that rather than dressing it up as the real thing.
No, and this catches families out every year. The school does not release scores or rankings for second-round candidates, and it has stopped the banding information parents were once given. The Common Application Form is due on 31 October 2026, months before anything is disclosed. Scores can be requested only after National Offer Day, only if she was not offered a place and does not want to stay on the waiting list. Our own mock data is the only calibration you will have when you rank your preferences.
Yes, at the end. Any girl may apply and sit the first round. But among candidates who clear the second round, 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. The English and mathematics work carries across almost every selective test in North London, and the reasoning work carries to any GL school. What needs planning is the autumn: the HBS first round falls on 2, 3 or 4 September 2026 and the second round in the week of 5 October, and the school will not move a candidate's allocated day for a clash. 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 on 2, 3 or 4 September 2026, with mathematics and written analysis running underneath it for the second round in the week of 5 October. 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.
Reviewed August 2026: the two-round structure, the entry dates, the 120 admission number and the three-mile priority were checked against the school's own admissions page and Admissions FAQs.
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