Schools move 11-plus to July to stop summer of cramming by middle class parents

Grammar schools are moving 11-Plus exams from September to July to save students from a tense summer break.

Eight schools have adopted the move so far, and more are expected to follow if it is successful.

In addition to protecting children’s summer holidays, it is also aimed to help poor families who cannot pay the fee for intensive lessons during the holiday.

Headteachers also said bringing the exams forward would tackle summer learning loss, which saw children lose some skills during the six weeks they were away from school.

Historically, grammar schools held Year 7 entrance exams at the beginning of Year 6, the final year of primary school.

However, Reading School, a state grammar school for boys in Berkshire, will hold its examination for the September 2027 intake for the first time in July this year, at the end of Year 5.

Meanwhile, seven grammar classes in Gloucestershire, where students take an all-school exam, will also be moved to summer from next year.

James Richardson, headteacher at Pate Grammar School in Cheltenham, said: ‘Moving 11-Plus testing to the end of the summer term in Year 5 means every child will be on this learning track. ‘Get your 11-Plus done and out of the way and then you can have a summer holiday like all ten-year-olds should.’

Pate’s is one of the most successful schools in the country; Last year, it sent 13 students to Cambridge and 12 to Oxford.

Chris Evans, headteacher of Reading School, founded in 1125, said they were ‘happy to be guinea pigs’ for an exam in July and hoped there would be more to come.

he said Sunday Times: ‘If you have a household with a lot of illiteracy and no access to resources, you will find that you are not improving your vocabulary in August. ‘You can’t continue to learn and grow like a child who is constantly taken to the library to buy books.’

This follows a study of primary school children in the United States published in 2020 over an average three-month summer break, which found that these children lost 17 percent to 28 percent of the English knowledge they had gained in the previous nine months.

They lost 25 percent to 34 percent of the knowledge they had learned about mathematics.

Gloucestershire schools have appointed a testing provider run by Reading School to make their 11+ exams ‘teacher approved’.

Reading has over 11 testing sections called Future Stories Community Enterprise, which runs a test based solely on national curriculum content.

This is in contrast to most grammars, which test skills such as verbal and nonverbal reasoning.

Mr Evans said: ‘We suspect that over time there will be a gradual transition to testing in July when the data shows that children are still improving.’