Common Entrance Exam 13+: What Schools Actually Require

Common Entrance at 13+ is an ISEB examination sat in Year 8 and marked by the senior school that has already offered the place. ISEB publishes no pass mark; two of the ten schools here publish an expectation of their own — Harrow 65%, Sherborne 55%. Papers are marked out of 100 and converted into grades, and each school decides what it wants. UK entry costs £140, with three sessions a year and dates published through Summer 2029.

Updated for 2027 and 2028 entry — August 2026: ISEB publishes no pass mark and no percentage thresholds — senior schools mark the scripts themselves and set their own grade boundaries. All ten schools below were read on their own admissions pages: eight publish no figure, and two do. Harrow’s admissions FAQ answers its own question “What is Harrow’s Common Entrance pass mark?” with “There is no Common Entrance pass mark per se. However, we would hope that applicants would achieve an average of 65% across all subjects, as a minimum.” Sherborne’s admissions FAQ states “As a rule of thumb, we expect our pupils to achieve a minimum of 55 per cent in Common Entrance Level Two papers.” Both are quoted and attributed below. Sherborne uses Common Entrance to set pupils. Rugby School no longer uses CE in its published 13+ route, and Marlborough College’s admissions policy states that a place is not dependent on the outcome. The per-school table below quotes each school’s own admissions page.

Why Common Entrance Has No Pass Mark

ISEB sets the papers. It does not mark them, and it does not decide what counts as a pass. Its guidance to schools puts it plainly: “It is up to senior schools to set their own criteria for establishing grade boundaries, both within subjects and between levels.” The same guidance asks senior schools to tell prep schools “what percentages their grades represent and how they distinguish between levels” — an instruction that only makes sense if the percentages are different at every school.

The marking arrangement is unusual and it explains everything else. ISEB tells examination centres that “all scripts should be sent to senior schools for marking on the day of the examination”, dispatched by a secure method so they arrive the following morning. The school your child has an offer from is the school that marks your child’s paper. ISEB then instructs that “senior schools should assess examination scripts by grades”, and its guide for families confirms the mechanism: “Papers are marked out of 100, with scores converted into grades (e.g., A–E). Each senior school will determine its own grade requirements for acceptance.”

Two of the schools that still use CE say the same thing about it in their own words. Harrow School’s Year 9 entry page states that “while there is no set pass mark for CE, the results that a boy achieves will be used to determine the initial sets into which he will be placed when he arrives at Harrow”. Radley College tells applicants that “all boys are required to sit some form of assessment at the end of Year 8 as these results will be used to determine the initial sets your son will be placed into”, and lists Common Entrance as one acceptable option among several. At both schools the exam is a setting instrument, not a gate.

That is the board’s position, and it is not the same as saying no number exists anywhere. A senior school is free to publish an expectation of its own, and two of the ten schools on this page have. Harrow’s admissions FAQ puts the question and the answer in the same breath: “What is Harrow’s Common Entrance pass mark? There is no Common Entrance pass mark per se. However, we would hope that applicants would achieve an average of 65% across all subjects, as a minimum.” Sherborne School’s admissions FAQ goes further, because at Sherborne the offer does not rest on CE at all: “We use Common Entrance results to set pupils, but rely on our own assessments to offer places to the School. In a handful of cases, boys may be given an offer subject to their attainment of a certain level in Common Entrance. As a rule of thumb, we expect our pupils to achieve a minimum of 55 per cent in Common Entrance Level Two papers.” Read the two together and the shape of the thing is clear. Neither figure is a Common Entrance pass mark. Harrow’s is a hope, stated as a minimum and explicitly not a pass mark; Sherborne’s is a rule of thumb attached to a small number of conditional offers, at a school that decides on its own assessments. They are two schools’ own expectations, published by those schools, and they are worth nothing at the other eight.

There is exactly one percentage ISEB publishes anywhere in the 13+ material, and it is not a pass mark. The Science specification advises that “candidates who are expected to achieve less than an average of 35% on the three Core papers consider using the Foundation level paper”. That is a tiering recommendation addressed to teachers choosing a paper, made before the examination rather than after it.

So a sentence like “60% is a pass at Common Entrance” is not a fact about Common Entrance. At best it is a memory of what one school wanted in one year, and there is no way to tell which school or which year. If a school has given your child a conditional offer, the only number that matters is the one that school will tell you when you ask.

The point holds even where no senior school is involved. ISEB allows prep schools to enter pupils whose destination school does not use CE, marking the scripts in-house — and in that case, ISEB says, “prep schools will need to decide their own grade boundaries”. Nobody sets them centrally, at any stage, for anyone.

Which Schools Still Use Common Entrance at 13+?

This is the question the sector answers worst, because the position changed school by school over the last decade and most guides were written before it did. Each row below was read on that school’s own admissions pages on 16 August 2026. Where a school publishes a figure, it is quoted. Most publish nothing at all; Harrow and Sherborne are the two exceptions, and both frame their number as an expectation rather than a pass mark.

Three patterns are worth separating. The first is Eton, Harrow, Oundle and Radley, where CE is genuinely sat in Year 8 but sits after the decision rather than before it: the place was won at the pre-test or assessment stage in Year 6, and CE confirms it and sorts the sets. The second is Marlborough and Sherborne, which both ask for CE and both say in writing that the place does not rest on it: Marlborough’s policy states the place “is not dependent on the outcome of these examinations”, and Sherborne “rel[ies] on our own assessments to offer places to the School” while using CE to set pupils. Sherborne is the one school in the group that attaches a number to it, for the handful of boys whose offers are made conditional. The third is Charterhouse, Tonbridge, Rugby and Winchester, which have replaced CE with their own assessments — and where preparing a child for Common Entrance papers is preparation for the wrong examination. Six of the ten still have CE somewhere in the published route; four do not.

What most of these schools do have in common is the earlier stage. Harrow requires the ISEB Common Pre-Test of all standard applicants “between 1 October and the end of November in Year 6”. Charterhouse takes it in the Autumn Term of Year 6, Marlborough between September and December of Year 6 or 7, Radley in October or November of Year 6, and Tonbridge in Year 6. Sherborne is the exception at this stage rather than the later one: it uses no pre-test at all, because its own online assessments, designed with Quest and sat in Year 6 or Year 7, do that job — and it then uses Common Entrance in Year 8 for setting. For most families, the assessment in Year 6 is the one that decides the outcome; CE in Year 8 is what happens afterwards.

Has ISEB Retired Common Entrance at 13+?

No. ISEB describes CE at 13+ as its transition assessment “since 1903”, runs three sessions a year in November, January and May/June, and has published dates as far ahead as Summer 2029: Autumn 2028 on 6–10 November 2028, Spring 2029 on 22–26 January 2029, and Summer 2029 with speaking and listening on 14–18 May and written papers on 4–8 June. The 2027 cycle runs 2–6 November 2026, 25–29 January 2027, and 7–11 June 2027 for the written papers with speaking and listening on 17–22 May. ISEB has said it is reviewing the timetables during the 2026–27 academic year after feedback from prep schools.

The exam has not been withdrawn; individual senior schools have left it, which is a different thing and produces a different answer for every family. Entry for a UK candidate costs £140, or £30 for a single subject only. Late entries carry £50 per school after the closing date, changes to a candidate’s details £5 each, and a certificate reprint £10.

There are three compulsory papers — English, mathematics and science — and optional papers in French, geography, German, Classical Greek, history, Latin, Theology, Philosophy and Religion (TPR) and Spanish. ISEB notes that senior schools usually expect most candidates to offer geography, history, TPR and a language, but the examination is deliberately flexible: candidates from schools that do not teach the traditional range may offer a reduced number of papers. One rule constrains everything else — ISEB’s guidance to families is that candidates “should only be entered for CE at 13+ if they have been offered a place at a senior school subject to their passing the CE at 13+ exams”. CE is not an application. It is the confirmation of one.

What Is Each Common Entrance Paper Marked Out Of?

These totals come from ISEB’s current subject specifications, read as PDFs rather than summarised. They are the closest thing to an objective standard that exists at 13+, because the marks are fixed even though the grade boundaries are not.

Two of these totals surprise people. Mathematics carries the most marks by a wide margin — 240 across the two Core papers and the mental arithmetic test, or 340 if the Additional paper is taken — so a school looking at a profile is weighting maths heavily whether it means to or not. TPR is the smallest paper on the timetable at 40 marks, because candidates answer questions from only two of its three sections.

Where the Marks Sit Inside Each Paper

The totals matter less than their distribution, and this is where preparation is usually mis-aimed. The English Writing paper at 13+ awards 30 marks for Response — use of the prompts, organisation of ideas, features appropriate to purpose and form, perspective and register — and 20 marks for Language, which is spelling, sentence punctuation, variety of sentence structures, expression and vocabulary, and consistent use of tense. Two fifths of that paper is technical accuracy. A child who writes imaginatively but punctuates carelessly is capped at 30 out of 50 before the content is read.

The Reading paper, Foundation or Core, splits the same way at both levels: Section A is eight multiple-choice questions worth 15 marks, Section B carries 25 marks for graded questions on inference and the effects of language, and Section C is a single 10-mark extended response “clearly structured and developed across three paragraphs of argument” using a Point, Explanation, Evidence, Analysis model. Section C is a fifth of the paper and it is a rehearsable format.

In mathematics, the mental arithmetic test is 40 marks in 10 minutes, and ISEB confirms that “the same mental arithmetic test is taken by both Foundation and Core candidates” — the one paper on which tier gives no advantage. In science, ISEB requires that “a minimum of 25% of the marks in every paper will be based on the Thinking and Working as a Scientist section of the specification”, so at least a quarter of each 60-mark Core paper tests experimental method rather than recall.

Geography is the subject families most often start too late, because 20% of the final mark is coursework rather than examination. The fieldwork enquiry is worth 40 marks, allocated as 4 for the introduction, 8 for methods of data collection, 8 for results and presentation, 8 for data analysis and conclusion, 4 for evaluation and 8 for fieldwork expertise. Submission deadlines are 15 October for the autumn session, 15 January for spring and 15 March for summer. The 80-mark written paper contains an Ordnance Survey map and colour resources, with 10–15 marks for location knowledge, 10–15 for map reading and 25–30 each for physical and for human and environmental geography.

History is 60 minutes for 50 marks: a 20-mark unseen evidence question suggested at 20–25 minutes, and a 30-mark essay at 35–40 minutes. French is assessed across four skills of 25 marks each, and the speaking test breaks down as 9 marks for the role play, 8 for the text-based task and 8 for the open conversation. That speaking test is conducted by the candidate’s own teacher-examiner, with recordings of every candidate submitted for moderation.

What to Ask Your Target School Before Year 8

Because the standard is set by the school and not the board, the useful preparation is a conversation, and it should happen in Year 6 or Year 7 rather than the spring of Year 8. Four questions cover it.

Which grade, in which subjects? ISEB asks senior schools to tell prep schools what percentage range each grade represents, so the information exists and is meant to be shared. Ask for the grade the school wants and the papers it applies to, rather than an overall average.

Which level should the papers be sat at? Most subjects run at Foundation and Core, and mathematics adds an Additional paper. ISEB is explicit that where there is doubt, “prep schools should contact senior schools”, and that senior schools “may, if they wish, state which level they prefer in English, mathematics, and science”. Harrow, for example, expects Core English, Core Science and Core Mathematics “and preferably the Additional paper” from candidates whose schools do not prepare for CE.

Which subjects are required at all? Harrow’s requirement varies by what the candidate’s current school teaches: a pupil at a school preparing the full suite sits “Mathematics, English, Science, French, Latin, History, Geography and perhaps Theology, Philosophy and Religion (TPR)”, while a pupil from a state or overseas school sits three papers as a minimum. That is a large difference in workload decided entirely by the receiving school.

When is the registration deadline? These fall much earlier than families expect and are set by the school, not by ISEB. For 2029 entry Eton requires registration by 31 August 2026, at the end of Year 5, with a £480 registration fee including VAT. Harrow asks for registration by 30 September of Year 6 with a £450 fee, Charterhouse by 30 September of Year 6 at £420, Marlborough by 9 October of Year 6 at £360, Tonbridge by 1 September of Year 6 at £350, and Sherborne recommends the end of Year 5, with a £300 fee. Oundle charges £300 at registration.

Three administrative dates are worth putting in the calendar once entry is confirmed. A Head’s report must reach the senior school at least two weeks before the first day of the examination session. Geography fieldwork is due on 15 October, 15 January or 15 March depending on the session. Results reach prep schools on the Thursday of the week following an autumn or spring session, and on the Friday of the week following the summer session, with parents told the Monday after. If English is not your child’s first language and they have studied in English for fewer than three years, ISEB allows up to 10% extra time — but it “must be agreed in advance with the candidate’s first-choice senior school”.

Leading Tuition prepares pupils across the full CE subject range and for the school-specific assessments that have replaced it. Our tutors work from the mark allocations above rather than a target percentage, which is the only approach the published evidence supports. We are rated 4.8/5 on Trustpilot, and 91% of our students achieve their desired grades. For the earlier stage that decides most 13+ outcomes, see our guide to the ISEB Common Pre-Test; for school-by-school detail, start at the 13+ preparation hub; and past papers are collected in our 13+ resources library.

Frequently Asked Questions