Not all grammar schools are the same, and the admissions basis matters far more to preparation strategy than most families realise when they first start looking at schools.
The two models
Superselective grammars operate without a catchment area. Every qualified applicant competes in a single national pool, and places are offered in strict rank order of score. Queen Elizabeth’s School in Barnet is one of the best-known superselectives: it selects purely on the entrance test and is widely documented as admitting boys from across London and beyond without a catchment area, with distance appearing only as a tiebreaker for identical scores. Always confirm the current place count and oversubscription criteria in the school’s published admissions guide before relying on any figure.
Local (distance-based) grammars work differently. They set a qualifying score that a child must reach, but once oversubscribed, the tiebreaker is not a higher score — it is proximity. Tonbridge Grammar School in Kent, for example, divides its 180 places between girls living inside a defined priority area and those living outside it; within each category, places go in score order but the area boundary is a hard filter first. Living two miles away matters in a way it simply does not at a superselective.
Why this changes preparation
At a local grammar, the goal is a secure pass — reaching the qualifying threshold with enough margin to feel confident rather than borderline. For a child who lives within the catchment, a solid pass may be all that stands between them and an offer. Intensive drilling for exceptional scores carries diminishing returns.
At a superselective, the dynamics are reversed. The qualifying mark is the start of the conversation, not the end. Because applicants travel from a wide area and the pool is large, the effective score needed to secure a place tends to sit well above the stated threshold — sometimes substantially so. Children need genuine fluency across every tested skill (verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, English and maths, depending on the test used), not just reliability on the easier questions.
Choosing realistic targets
Before committing to a preparation plan, it is worth establishing what type of school each of your targets actually is. Check the school’s published admissions arrangements or its oversubscription criteria on your local authority’s website — look for whether distance or catchment appears as a primary criterion or only as a last-resort tiebreaker. That single detail tells you more about what a child needs to achieve than almost any other piece of information.
A good tutor will help you read those admissions arrangements, assess where your child currently stands, and tailor the work accordingly — so that you are preparing for the right threshold, not just preparing generically.