The Open Event Sessions for entry into Year 7 in September 2027 will take place on Wednesday 22nd April 2026. The sessions will take place in either the morning or afternoon and will last approximately 1½ hours. There will be a tour of the school with our students, and a talk by the Headteacher, Ms Kattirtzi and our Student Leader Team.  

BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL. Car parking is not available on the school site.

Information on how to book a ticket will be published here in due course. 

The online application form opened on 1st May 2026 and will close at midnight on 1st July 2026. The link to the application form will be published below in due course along with further information on the admission process.

Please read the following carefully:

• We strongly advise parents who live outside of the designated area NOT to register their child to sit our test - no candidate, whatever the score they attain, who lives outside of our designated area has been offered a place at Kendrick School since the introduction of the designated area in 2013.
• The postcodes that are within our designated area can be found here.
• By registering your child for Kendrick School admission test, we will be unable to accommodate any non-attendance on the test date due to your child's participation in other entrance tests held on the same day. 
•  The vast majority of individual and groups of grammar schools set their tests in the first two or three weeks of September. There is no liaison between any of them with regard to the day that is selected. It is ultimately for parents to decide which schools they wish to name as a preference for their child, and this may require them making a decision about which grammar school tests their child sits. 

Candidates who live outside of our designated area will not sit the test on Friday 18th September 2026, but on a later date to be advised in due course.

The aim of our Widening Horizons Project is to work with local primary schools to raise the aspirations of local children and to raise awareness of Kendrick School.

For those students who are in Year 5 and are pupil premium, service premium or children in care and live in the school’s designated area and are interested in taking our admission tests, we provide a free familiarisation programme.  The programme starts as soon as you register your child for the admission tests, and includes access to online familiarisation material, face to face and/or online sessions, and workbooks.

We also run hold a virtual Inspire Club on a Tuesday after school for girls in Years 3, 4 and 5 who meet the Widening Horizons criteria.  We have had such positive feedback for the Inspire Club! ‘It wasn’t boring and I had fun!’ and ‘It gave my daughter confidence that she could sit the exam because the familiarisation sessions built on her confidence’. Every Tuesday our students work online with the primary school children on a variety of topics, and once a term we invite Years 3-5 students into Kendrick for face-to-face activities.

For more information on how to register your child for the familiarisation programme and/or Inspire Club please email admissions@kendrick.reading.sch.uk 

The tests will take place on Friday 18th September 2026 at Kendrick School, in either the morning or the afternoon. No alternative test date will be offered to candidates who wish to sit a test for another grammar school on the same day.

Candidates will sit two test papers, each approximately one hour, with questions covering a combination of verbal and non-verbal reasoning, English and mathematics. All marking and standardisation will be carried out by GL Assessment.

There is no creative writing element to the admission tests.

Familiarisation material is provided by GL Assessment and can be found below.  

To follow.

The following information and material is provided by GL Assessment.

We recommend children familiarise themselves with the multiple-choice layout of the test, content and examples of some types of questions they will face. To give all children the opportunity to experience sample questions across a range of question types in advance of the test, we provide 10 hours of free familiarisation materials. These are particularly useful for verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning tests as children may not have encountered these types of questions before. The exact timings for, and number of questions in, your local 11+ test may differ from those in our familiarisation and practice materials.

Familiarisation papers and practice papers each provide useful support when preparing for an 11+ test. They differ in the following aspects: Firstly, while familiarisation papers are freely available for download, practice papers are only accessible for purchase. Familiarisation papers are in PDF format for home printing, whereas practice papers come in printed booklet format. Each set has its own exclusive content, ensuring a unique testing experience. Familiarisation papers aim for general familiarity with test styles, while practice papers offer comprehensive preparation, including timed test conditions.

The free familiarisation materials can be found on GL Assessments' website here.