Superselective vs local grammar schools: what's the difference?

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 grammars work differently. They give priority to children from their own area, but each school does it in its own way, and a pass is not always enough. Tonbridge Grammar School in Kent shows why. For entry in September 2027 it has 180 places, and every girl must first qualify through the Kent Test. Up to 135 are Area places, for girls who live in the Tonbridge and Malling, Tunbridge Wells or Sevenoaks council areas. Another 30 are Trustee places, for girls who live outside them. Both lists go in order of total Kent Test score, and distance from the school only separates girls on the same score. A further 15 places are for girls eligible for Pupil Premium who qualified but scored below the Area cut-off, and those do go by distance.

So where a girl lives decides which list she is on, but on the two main lists her score decides whether she gets a place. For September 2026 entry, the Kent pass mark was a total score of 332. The last first-round Area place went to a score of 378.

Why this changes preparation

At a local grammar, find out what happens after a pass before you set a target. Tonbridge ranks its two main lists by score, so a bare pass may not be enough there. The school publishes the lowest score that won a place in each recent year. Treat those as a guide to what has been needed before, not a promise for next year.

At a superselective, 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.