Sutton Grammar Schools 11+: SET and 2027 Entry

The Selective Eligibility Test (SET) is the shared first-stage 11+ exam for six schools in the London Borough of Sutton, and it contains no verbal reasoning and no non-verbal reasoning. It is one multiple-choice Maths paper and one multiple-choice English paper, each lasting between 40 and 50 minutes. For 2027 entry the SET falls on 15 September 2026. Passing it makes a child eligible for a school's second stage; it does not offer a place.

What Is Actually in the Selective Eligibility Test?

The consortium's shared FAQ, published on each participating school's website, answers this without ambiguity: “The test is made up of two papers; a multiple-choice Maths paper and a multiple-choice English paper. The tests do not include verbal reasoning or non-verbal reasoning.”

That sentence matters more than it looks, because a great deal of Sutton 11+ preparation is sold on the opposite assumption. Families arrive having spent a year on cloze passages, letter sequences and shape rotation, none of which appears on the paper their child sits. The reasoning content that dominates the Buckinghamshire and Kent tests is simply absent here.

What the SET does test is narrower and, in its way, harder to fake. Both papers are answered on a separate machine-readable sheet, with candidates filling a lozenge for answer A, B, C, D or E. The papers run between 40 and 50 minutes each, with a rest and toilet break between them. The content, in the consortium's words, “is broadly based on the Key Stage 2 curriculum” — so the ceiling is set by how securely a child holds primary material under timed multiple-choice conditions, not by how many exotic question types they have memorised.

Two further details are worth knowing because they change how you should coach a child through the paper. First, the schools do not publish specimen papers: “We do not provide specimen papers,” the FAQ states, though sample questions for both subjects are offered. Second, marking is not a single pass — “All SET answer sheets are marked twice as a matter of course: firstly by machine and then by hand.” There is no re-mark service, because the double-marking is the check.

It is also the total that counts, not each paper separately. The FAQ is explicit: “It is the total score that determines whether your child has passed the test: so for example, a very good performance in English can compensate for one that is a little weaker in Maths.” That is the opposite of the second stage, as the next sections explain, and it is a genuine strategic difference — at stage one a lopsided candidate is not penalised for being lopsided.

Which Six Schools Use the SET, and What Does Each Do With the Score?

Six schools participate, not five. The consortium names them: “Greenshaw High School, Nonsuch High School for Girls, Sutton Grammar School, Wallington County Grammar School, Wallington High School for Girls and Wilson's School.” Greenshaw is the one most often left off lists like this, and it works differently from the other five: it is a comprehensive that uses the SET only to identify children eligible for one of its 60 ability places, and a child who misses the pass mark “may still be eligible for a place at Greenshaw under one of the school's other criteria.”

The other five are fully selective, and they split into two second-stage groups. Sutton Grammar School, Wallington County Grammar School and Wilson's School share one second-stage paper for boys. Nonsuch High School for Girls and Wallington High School for Girls share a different one, the Nonsuch and Wallington Second Stage Entrance Examination.

One caution on the numbers above. Sutton Grammar School's own determined policy for 2027 entry states a published admission number of 150, while the London Borough of Sutton's National Offer Day allocation table still lists the school at 135. That table carries no date of its own, but its own figure dates it: 135 was Sutton Grammar's published admission number for 2025 entry, and the school's determined policies for both 2026 and 2027 entry state 150. The council page is reporting a round that has already been allocated, not the round you are applying for. Where a school's determined arrangements and a council summary table disagree, the determined arrangements are the document that governs the round you are applying in. Check the school's own policy PDF before you rely on any figure, including ours.

Why Does the Same Score Pass at One School and Fail at Another?

This is the part no single page assembles, and it is where most of the confusion in Sutton comes from. There is one test, but there is not one admissions system. The consortium FAQ says so directly: “Each school may apply their own specific ratio and you are advised to look further at the websites of the individual schools.”

Wilson's School puts the same point more bluntly on its own admissions pages, and it is the single most useful sentence a Sutton parent can read: “Wilson's School, Wallington County Grammar School and Sutton Grammar School have different Admissions Criteria and different methods of determining a SET pass, combining the scores from the SET and Second Stage Examinations and of calculating the final outcome of the entrance tests for our respective schools. This means that it is possible that a boy may pass the examinations for one of our schools and not for the other.”

The published ratios differ, and they differ by more than most families are told. Wilson's aggregates “the SET and the two elements of the second stage Entrance Examination for Wilson's School in the ratio 1:2:2”. Working that through: one part out of five, so the SET is one fifth of the final rank-order score and the second stage is four fifths.

The girls' schools reach almost exactly the same place by a different route. Their final total is “the sum of the SET score (re-standardised and divided by 2), the standardised Maths NWSSEE score and the standardised English NWSSEE score”. A half-weight SET against two full-weight second-stage papers is a half out of two and a half — again one fifth to the SET, four fifths to the second stage.

Sutton Grammar School is where that warning matters most, because its own two documents say different things. Its determined admissions policy publishes no ratio — it says only that “the marks from both the second stage test and the Selective Eligibility Test (SET) will be used by the School to determine the required standard”. The school's admissions FAQ is far more specific. Four standardised scores are used: the multiple-choice English items and the multiple-choice Maths items from the SET, and the English and Maths papers from the second stage. Those four “will be weighted in the ratio 2:2:3:3, an age allowance will be added, and the total rounded to the nearest four marks to give the final score”. Two parts plus two parts out of ten is four tenths — so at Sutton Grammar the SET is two fifths of the final score and the second stage three fifths. That is double the weight the SET carries at Wilson's, and it is the single most consequential difference between the two schools.

Wallington County Grammar School arrives at the same two fifths, and states it in words rather than as a ratio. Its determined Admission Arrangements 2027/28, adopted by the Greenshaw Learning Trust board on 13 February 2026, say that “the total standardised score is made up of two fifths from the SET total score and three fifths from the Second Stage total score”. That is the governing document for this round, and it is published directly by the admissions authority, so no older FAQ wording is needed to establish the figure. It puts Wallington County alongside Sutton Grammar on weighting rather than alongside Wilson's. The school's own 2027 FAQ page adds nothing to it — it links out to the consortium's shared document rather than restating a figure.

Sutton Grammar also does something none of the others do: it adjusts marks “for a boy's age and income deprivation score”, using the Government's Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index published in 2019. Two boys with identical raw marks can therefore be separated at Sutton Grammar by postcode-level deprivation data before any oversubscription criterion is applied.

The practical consequence for preparation is straightforward, but it is not the same advice for every family, and this is where generic Sutton guidance does real damage. If you are aiming at Wilson's, Nonsuch or Wallington High School for Girls, four fifths of the decision sits in the second stage, and that is where the work should go once eligibility is secured — for those three the SET really is a gate rather than a score you carry. If you are aiming at Sutton Grammar School, it is not: two fifths of the final score is the SET, so a bare pass at stage one is a materially worse starting position than a strong one, and the mark follows your son into the final reckoning.

How Does the Second Stage Differ From the SET?

It is a different kind of paper, and children who prepare for it as though it were more of the same are caught out. The consortium describes it this way: “The second-stage test is made up of two papers; a Maths paper and an English paper. The tests will not include verbal or non-verbal reasoning, and are not multiple choice. Each paper will be around 45 minutes to 1 hour in length.”

Two changes matter. The multiple-choice scaffolding disappears, so a child must produce answers rather than recognise them, and written English is assessed on what the child actually writes. And the compensation rule reverses: at Wilson's, “candidates must pass both the English and the Mathematics papers and must also have met the overall pass mark”. A strong Maths mark no longer rescues a weak English one. Nonsuch and Wallington High School for Girls apply the same both-papers requirement to their examination.

The dates diverge as well, which trips up families with a son and a daughter in the same year. Girls sit their second stage on Saturday 26 September 2026; boys sit theirs a week later, on Saturday 3 October 2026. Wilson's then runs a third day of testing that no other school holds, on Saturday 10 October 2026, for its sport and music aptitude places.

How Many Places Are Open Before Geography Narrows the Field?

Rank order does not fill a year group. Each school reserves blocks of places before open competition begins, and the blocks are structured so differently that the same child's realistic chances vary sharply between schools a mile apart. This is the arithmetic, taken from each school's determined arrangements.

Sutton Grammar School, 150 places. After children with an EHCP, looked-after children and staff children, the policy sets aside “up to 10 places” for boys receiving Pupil Premium funding whose home address is in postcodes SM1–SM7, KT4, KT17, CR0 or CR4, and a further “75 places by rank order of the combined scores” restricted to those same postcodes. Ten plus 75 is 85 places tied to a specific postcode list — well over half the intake. That leaves roughly 65 open to a boy from any postcode.

Wilson's School, 186 places. Wilson's reserves 14 places for boys eligible for Free School Meals, 9 for sport aptitude and 9 for music aptitude, then allocates “remaining places including any unallocated places under criteria 2, 3 and 4 … according to their position in the rank order of standardised score”. That is 32 places reserved and about 154 allocated purely on score. Wilson's applies no catchment area and no distance criterion at all — distance is used only to separate boys who tie.

Nonsuch High School for Girls, 210 places. Nonsuch splits its intake explicitly: “85 places on the basis of the score in the Entrance Test in order of highest score, irrespective of home address”, and “up to 125 places linked to our catchment area circle” for girls living within 5.25 km of the school's front door. It also runs a Pupil Premium concession, and it is not alone in that: up to 35 places for eligible girls whose score is “up to 20% lower than the standardised pass mark”, with Wallington High School for Girls carrying the identical 35-place criterion and the identical 20% allowance in its own 2027 arrangements. Wallington County Grammar holds up to 25 Pupil Premium places, but attaches no score concession to them. The policy gives a worked example — if the pass mark were 200, an eligible girl would need 160.

Read across that table and the strategic picture is clear. A high-scoring boy living outside the Sutton postcode list is competing for about 65 places at Sutton Grammar but about 154 at Wilson's, on the same test. A girl living six kilometres from Nonsuch is competing for 85 places rather than 210. None of this appears on the score report, and none of it is visible from the test result alone. It is worth checking against the schools' own pages for Wilson's School, Nonsuch High School for Girls, Wallington County Grammar School and Wallington High School for Girls before you order your preferences.

One further point that reassures more families than it worries. The London Borough of Sutton's allocation table records no distance cut-off for any of the five selective schools — the furthest-distance column reads “N/A” for each of them, against 1,108 metres for Greenshaw. Places at the grammar schools run out on rank order, not on the map, with proximity used only when candidates tie.

What Is the Pass Mark for the Sutton SET?

There is not one, and no honest guide can give you a number. The consortium's answer is worth quoting whole, because it is the single claim most often invented on Sutton 11+ forums: “It is not possible to state a pass mark in advance of the test. The pass mark will be decided by the participating schools after the test has been marked. Each School may determine its own pass mark.”

The same applies at the second stage: “It is not possible to state pass marks in advance of the examination. Pass marks will be decided by each individual school after the papers have been marked.” If a site quotes you a standardised qualifying range for a Sutton school, it has been reverse-engineered from parent reports, not published — and because each of the six schools sets its own mark on a cohort that changes every year, last year's figure is not a target.

Nor will you be told your child's score. Parents whose child passes are told only that the required standard has been met and are invited to second-stage testing. Scores are not released. What you can rely on is that the marks are age-standardised: “A standardisation for age mechanism is applied to the outcome of the Selective Eligibility Test … There is no fixed amount for the age adjustment. It is calculated for each test separately.” A summer-born child is not competing on raw marks against a child eleven months older.

What Are the Dates for 2027 Entry?

Registration is a single online form, submitted once, that covers every participating school; it is available from the website of any of the six. The form is not the school application. You must also name each school you want on the Common Application Form issued by your home local authority by 31 October 2026, and a child who passes every test but is not named on the form cannot be offered a place. For the borough-level picture, including the non-selective options, see our guide to the 11+ in Sutton; for a stage-by-stage walkthrough of the exam itself, see our complete guide to the Sutton SET. The official dates and FAQ are published on the Sutton consortium's shared admissions FAQ.

Frequently Asked Questions

Reviewed August 2026: paper format, test dates, admission numbers and oversubscription quotas checked against the six schools' own determined admission arrangements and the consortium's shared SET FAQ. The score weightings were re-checked at source on 16 August 2026, against each school's own admissions FAQ, after an error was found in the Sutton Grammar figure.