One-to-one preparation for the Barnet entrance test
Book a Free ConsultationQueen Elizabeth's School, Barnet — QE Boys to almost every family who applies — is a selective boys' grammar whose entrance test is two multiple-choice papers, English and Mathematics, sat in a single session. A combined standardised score of 225 makes a boy eligible for one of 180 places. Leading Tuition prepares boys for that format and that bar.
Updated for September 2027 entry, August 2026. Corrected against what the school publishes itself. This page previously described the QE Boys exam as an extended-writing paper. It is not: the school states the test is multiple-choice in both subjects. The 2027-entry sitting falls on 16 and 17 September 2026, and the Published Admission Number is 180.
The school leaves no room for interpretation. Its entrance-test FAQs say: "Our entrance test consists of two multiple-choice format papers in English and Mathematics sat in a single session." The admissions timeline repeats it for the September 2026 sitting — boys "sit multiple-choice tests in Maths and English". Answer sheets are then "marked electronically using well-established, highly accurate, market-leading software supplied by the test provider".
Two things follow, and both change what a tutor should be doing. Method shown on the page earns nothing, because nothing on the page is read by a person. And a boy who cannot commit to an answer loses marks that a boy of identical ability, trained to decide, keeps.
This matters because a great deal of QE Boys preparation on sale trains the opposite skill. Extended written answers, marked for structure and expression, are the staple of independent-school 11+ work, and they get carried across to QE without anyone checking. We had the same error on this page until August 2026, and we would rather say so than quietly delete it.
What our sessions actually rehearse is narrower and harder than it sounds: reading a stem once and answering it, eliminating two options before considering the remaining three, tracking a per-question time budget, and transferring answers to a separate grid without losing a line. Boys who arrive from a writing-led programme usually have the comprehension and the arithmetic already. What they lack is the decision speed, and that is trainable in weeks rather than years.
The one place written work still earns its keep is diagnosis. A boy who explains his reasoning aloud shows a tutor exactly where a method breaks down, which a multiple-choice answer sheet never will. So we use written and spoken working in teaching and take it away entirely in mock conditions.
Preparing for QE Boys?
We match your son to a tutor who has prepared boys for the Barnet entrance test, and we build the programme around the format the school actually sets — two multiple-choice papers, one session, one round.
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Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppQueen Elizabeth's publishes its eligibility bar plainly: "Those candidates achieving a combined score of 225 or higher will be deemed to have met the standard required by the Governors to be eligible to be considered for admission to the school." It also says the two papers are combined into a single score, standardised for age by the company supplying the tests, and — the sentence most preparation ignores — "We do not quote a maximum standardised score for the tests."
Check that figure against whatever you have been told. Long-standing 11+ guides, including ones revised for 2027 entry, still publish a minimum qualifying score of 220 for this school. The school's own entrance test FAQs say 225. Five marks is not a rounding difference when it is the line between eligible and not, and it is the reason we work from the school's page rather than from the sector's shared memory of it.
That last point makes percentage targets useless here. A tutor who tells you to aim for a given percentage has invented a denominator the school does not publish. We do not set one. We track raw accuracy per topic and per-question timing, because those are the two numbers a boy can actually move, and we report them to parents in those terms.
The more important distinction is between eligibility and a place. Reaching 225 does not secure one. The 180 places are allocated in rank order of score, and the school confirms that where two boys tie, "the rank order for allocation of places will be determined by the distance measured in a straight line between the address point for the child's home... and the main School gate". Distance is the tie-break, not the criterion. So the working target is not 225 — it is as far clear of 225 as the boy can get, and every programme we run is built on that.
For the full oversubscription criteria and how distance is applied, our QE Boys designated area guide sets it out in detail. This page is about the preparation.
Most families who come to us start in Year 4 or at the beginning of Year 5, which puts roughly 18 months between the first session and the test. That is a preference rather than a rule; we have taken boys on with two terms to go and said yes, and we have taken boys on with two terms to go and said no. The difference is the diagnostic, not the calendar.
The first phase is assessment. Before any teaching, we sit the boy down with material pitched above his year group and find out where comprehension, vocabulary, arithmetic fluency and multi-step reasoning actually sit. That produces the plan, and it is also the only honest basis for telling a parent whether QE Boys is a realistic target.
The middle phase is subject depth, and it is the longest. Multiple-choice format does not mean shallow content: a boy still has to do the mathematics before he can recognise the right option, and he still has to read closely before he can pick the right inference. This is ordinary, unglamorous teaching, and it is where most of the eventual score comes from.
The conversion phase runs through the spring and summer before the test. Registration for September 2027 entry opened on 1 May 2026 and closed at noon on 8 July 2026, and that window is a useful marker: by the time you register, the content work should be largely done and the work should be turning towards format. Timed sections, answer grids, and mocks under the school's own one-session shape.
The last phase is the six weeks before the sitting. Volume comes down, not up. We keep two sessions a week, run one full mock, and spend the rest of the time on the specific question types that boy still gets wrong. Results are notified in early October — provisionally 1 October 2026 for the 2027 cycle — and offers come from your local authority on 1 March 2027.
Dates, registration mechanics and the criteria themselves are the school's, and they are covered in our complete QE Boys 11+ guide. Always confirm them against the school's own entrance test FAQs before you act on them.
We accept about 3% of tutor applications. That figure is the output of five stages rather than a filter applied at the CV: an application and written-communication screen, a closed-book subject knowledge test set at the level the tutor will teach, a teaching interview in which we ask them to explain a hard idea to someone pretending not to understand it, a supervised trial lesson with a real student, and an enhanced DBS check with two references taken up independently.
For QE Boys we look for one thing on top of that: a tutor who has taught to a multiple-choice super-selective before and does not treat it as a soft version of a written exam. It is a distinct teaching problem, and tutors who have not met it tend to over-teach method and under-teach pace.
If the match is wrong, you get a rematch, free and without having to make a case for it. We would rather move a boy in week three than discover in month six that he has not been talking in sessions. Tutors are reviewed after they join too — lesson recordings, parent feedback and progress data — and we part company with tutors whose results or communication slip. You can read more about how we select them on our tutors page.
QE Boys has no second door, and this is the part of the conversation most tutoring companies avoid. The school states there is no catchment; there is no sibling or multiple-birth priority; there is no priority for Pupil Premium candidates; and there are no music, sport or drama aptitude routes. Its answer to each is the same sentence: "Admission is based solely on entrance test results." A boy either clears the bar in one sitting, in one round, or he does not.
Movement afterwards is real but limited. The school reported that its waiting list for Year 7 entry in September 2026 had reached position 20 — enough that a place can appear, not enough to plan around.
So when a diagnostic says the target is unlikely, we say it, early, while there is still time to build a list that works. In practice that usually means a second Barnet super-selective and a strong local alternative running in parallel: our Henrietta Barnett School 11+ tuition page covers the girls' equivalent, our Barnet 11+ guide covers the borough, and if you are weighing the two super-selectives against each other, we have written a direct comparison of QE Boys and HBS.
Telling a parent their child is a long shot loses us work in the short run. It is still the right call, and it is the reason a fair number of the families we take on came to us from somewhere that would not say it.
QE Boys is the school our students win places at most often. In the 2025 admissions cycle we worked with 40 students sitting selective entrance examinations at 11+ and 13+, and 10 of them took up places at Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet — the largest single-school group in the cohort, ahead of Henrietta Barnett School on seven. Across that 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 a QE Boys cohort — we do not publish a school-by-school pass rate, because we do not hold one we could evidence. The placement counts above are what we can evidence, and we give the cohort size beside them deliberately: 40 students 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 son, where he is now and what else is on your list, and we tell you what a realistic programme looks like — including if we think he does not need one yet, which we say more often than you might expect.
Most of our QE Boys families begin in Year 4 or at the start of Year 5, giving roughly 18 months before the September sitting. Starting later is workable and we take those boys on regularly, but the plan changes: less time on subject depth, more on format conversion, and a franker early conversation about whether the 225 eligibility standard is reachable. We decide that from the diagnostic assessment rather than from the date, so the first step is the same whenever you come to us.
We use them as practice material, with a caveat the school makes itself. Queen Elizabeth's links to GL Assessment English and Maths sample materials on its own sample-papers page, and in the same breath warns that those resources "may not reflect the format of the School's entrance exams". The school does not name the provider of the live test anywhere; it says only that scores are standardised "by the company who supply the tests". Any tutor who tells you flatly that QE Boys sits a GL Assessment paper is stating more than the school does.
Both, and the choice is yours rather than ours. Online works well for this test in particular, because the skills that need rehearsing — timed multiple-choice sections, per-question pacing, answer-grid discipline — transfer cleanly to a screen with a paper answer sheet beside it. In-person suits boys who need the room to be quiet and the tutor to be physically there. We match on teaching fit first and format second, and families in and around Barnet regularly take either.
You tell us and we rematch, free, without asking you to justify it. It is worth using early rather than late: the most common version of this is a boy who is perfectly polite in sessions and never says he is lost, which a parent usually spots before a tutor does. We also monitor from our side through lesson recordings, parent feedback and progress data, and we will raise it ourselves if the work is not moving.
Yes, and most of our QE Boys programmes are doing exactly that. The subject depth is shared — comprehension, vocabulary and mathematics carry across every selective test in North London — and only the format work has to be split. What we plan carefully is the autumn calendar, because the QE Boys sitting on 16 and 17 September 2026 lands early in the season and several other schools test within a fortnight of it. We map the sittings before we set the schedule.
Not as a percentage, because the school does not publish a maximum standardised score and any percentage target would be invented. We track two things we can measure: accuracy by question type, and time per question against a section budget. Those roll up into full mocks sat under the school's own shape — two papers, one session — and you get the numbers, not a reassurance. Where a boy sits relative to 225 is a judgement we give you honestly, with the caveat that eligibility is not a place.
We provide one-to-one tuition built around the format Queen Elizabeth's School actually sets: two multiple-choice papers, English and Mathematics, in one session, with a combined standardised score of 225 as the eligibility bar. That means diagnostic assessment first, then subject depth, then format conversion and timed mocks in the run-up to the September sitting. Ten of the 40 students in our 2025 selective-entry cohort took up places at QE Boys, more than at any other single school.
Reviewed August 2026: the test format, the 225 eligibility standard, the 180 Published Admission Number and the September 2027 entry dates were checked against Queen Elizabeth's School's own admissions pages and entrance test FAQs.
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