How to prepare for the Farnborough Hill 11+

Exam format not yet verified. We have not confirmed this school's exam board or paper format from an official source. Where this guide describes the test, treat it as a working assumption and check the school's admissions page before relying on it.

The exam at a glance

Farnborough Hill is an independent girls’ school with Year 7 as one of its main entry points. For September 2028 entry, the school’s admissions process for Year 7 includes three parts: a school reference, a meeting with the Headmistress, and an entrance assessment.

For 2028 entry, the working assumption for this guide, not yet verified with the school, is a school-run assessment using a GL Assessment-style paper covering Maths, English, Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning. Delivery is mixed, so parents should be ready for a combination of test styles rather than assuming everything is done in exactly the same way.

The school’s own admissions page also says that Year 7 applicants sit an entrance assessment made up of online Quest tests and a creative writing paper. Because ElevenReady’s directory (not yet verified with the school) describes the 2028 format as a GL-style paper across all four subjects, parents should prepare broadly and steadily across Maths, English, verbal and non-verbal reasoning, while also making sure their child is comfortable writing independently under time pressure.

In practice, the assessment day is likely to feel like a structured school admissions session rather than a single long public exam. Children may complete more than one paper or section, with timed parts that test core academic skills and reasoning. Alongside this, families should expect the wider admissions process to include a reference from the current school and a meeting with the Headmistress.

The most useful preparation mindset is calm breadth rather than cramming one favourite topic. A child who can read questions carefully, keep a steady pace, and switch sensibly between numerical, written and reasoning tasks is usually in a much stronger position than one who has only practised one paper type.

Registration and key dates

Farnborough Hill handles its own admissions rather than using a local authority 11+ portal. The school’s admissions page invites parents to register with the school, after which appointments for meetings with the Headmistress are offered from April onwards. The page says these meetings take place in the Summer Term of Year 5 and the Autumn Term of Year 6.

The school also states that the 11+ assessment is taken in the Autumn Term for admission the following September. For families aiming at September 2028 entry, that means the assessment should fall in the autumn of Year 6.

At the time of writing, the school page available to us gives exact dates for September 2027 entry, not yet for 2028 entry. Those published dates were:

Registration deadline: 2 November 2026
Entrance assessment: 14 December 2026

Because those are for the previous admissions round, parents should treat them as an indication of the school’s recent pattern rather than as confirmed 2028 dates. Based on the published school page, registration appears to run well before the assessment date, and families should not leave contact with the school until late in Year 6.

What should you do now if your child will start Year 7 in September 2028?

Visit the school’s entrance assessment page and register interest directly with Farnborough Hill.
Ask what documents they need for Year 7 registration. The school page we found does not list a full document checklist, so check this with admissions when registering.
Book a Headmistress meeting when invited.
Watch for the school’s confirmed 2028 deadline and assessment date on its admissions page.

If you want a simple way to keep track, you can use Free email alerts for this school's key dates. For a quick overview page, see The Farnborough Hill 11+ guide (format, catchment, dates).

Who can apply: catchment and admissions

Farnborough Hill is an independent school, so it does not work like a grammar school with a local authority 11+ qualification and a published state-school admissions catchment. The school’s admissions information for Year 7 focuses instead on suitability for the school, assessed through registration, a reference, a meeting with the Headmistress and the entrance assessment.

The school identifies Year 7, Year 9 and Sixth Form as its main entry points. For Year 7, the admissions process is selective but school-run.

We did not find a verified published catchment area, distance rule, fixed Year 7 pass mark or standardised qualifying score on the sources reviewed. Parents should therefore avoid relying on unofficial claims about cut-offs or “safe scores”. For this school, the right next step is to read the school’s own admissions page and contact admissions directly if you need clarification on how places are decided.

We also did not find a published number of Year 7 places on the sources reviewed for this guide. If this matters to your planning, ask the school directly at the point of registration.

For independent-school admissions like this one, it is sensible to think about fit as well as performance. The school reference and Headmistress meeting mean that a child’s wider readiness for the school environment is likely to matter alongside the assessment itself.

A month-by-month preparation plan

For a Year 5 child aiming for an autumn Year 6 assessment, a steady plan works far better than an intense final burst. The goal is secure basics, familiarity with reasoning styles, and enough timed practice that the real assessment does not feel strange.

January to March of Year 5

Keep it light: around 1 to 1.5 hours a week in short sessions. Focus on arithmetic fluency, careful reading, vocabulary building and gentle reasoning exposure. At this stage, untimed work is fine. You are building confidence and spotting weak areas early.

April to June of Year 5

Increase to about 1.5 to 2 hours a week. This is a good time to register with the school if admissions invites appointments from April onwards, and to arrange a Headmistress meeting when available. In preparation terms, start covering all four areas every fortnight: Maths, English, Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning. Keep a notebook of recurring mistakes.

July to August before Year 6

Aim for 2 to 3 hours a week, still spread across several short sessions. Summer is the ideal time to broaden familiarity with question types without making everything feel like a test. Start small amounts of timed work, perhaps one short section at a time rather than full papers. Include regular reading and one short piece of independent writing each week.

September of Year 6

Move to around 3 hours a week. Now the balance shifts from learning question types to applying them efficiently. Start doing timed sections properly, then review them in detail. Look for patterns: rushing, dropped marks on easy questions, missed instructions, weak vocabulary, or slow mental arithmetic.

October of Year 6

Keep to 3 to 4 hours a week. This is often the point to begin occasional mixed practice sessions that combine subjects, because switching between styles can be tiring if a child has only ever practised one topic at a time. If your child is coping well, introduce a fuller mock-style paper every couple of weeks.

November onwards in Year 6

If the school’s timeline again places the assessment later in the autumn term, maintain 3 to 4 hours a week and focus on consistency. By now, full timed papers can be useful, but not so many that motivation drops. In the last fortnight, prioritise sleep, routine and confidence over squeezing in extra content.

A good rule throughout is this: when scores dip, reduce pressure and increase review. Children improve most when they understand why they made errors, not when they simply sit more papers.

Subject by subject: what to practise

Maths

For Farnborough Hill, prepare for standard 11+ Maths skills at a GL-style level: number operations, fractions, decimals, percentages, ratio, basic algebraic thinking, measures, shape, data handling and multi-step word problems. The key habit is accuracy under time pressure. Practise mental arithmetic daily, then add short timed sections with mixed topics. When reviewing, ask whether mistakes came from method, calculation, or misreading the question.

English

English preparation should cover both comprehension and writing. For comprehension, practise retrieving information, inferring meaning, explaining word choice and working carefully with evidence from the text. Vocabulary matters a great deal, so regular reading is one of the best forms of preparation. The school’s admissions page also refers to a creative writing paper, so children should practise planning quickly, writing clearly structured pieces, and checking punctuation and sentence control at the end.

Verbal Reasoning

Verbal Reasoning usually rewards familiarity with recurring question types as much as raw ability. Children should get used to codes, letter and number sequences, word relationships, vocabulary-based tasks and instruction-heavy formats where one missed detail can cost several marks. Practise in short bursts at first. Encourage your child to annotate lightly, watch for patterns, and move on briskly if a question is taking too long.

Non-Verbal Reasoning

Non-Verbal Reasoning focuses on patterns, transformations, similarities, rotations, reflections and spatial logic. Improvement often comes from learning to spot a small set of common rules quickly. Practise one pattern family at a time, then mix them. If your child finds NVR abstract, use step-by-step verbal explanations at first: what changes, what stays the same, and in what order.

Across all four subjects, the best preparation is balanced practice. Because the verified 2028 format spans Maths, English, Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning, it is risky to over-focus on only one area.

Practice papers and mock exams

Use practice papers to build familiarity, not fear. Start with untimed or lightly timed work so your child learns the method for each question type. Once that feels secure, introduce proper timing in short sections, then eventually in fuller papers.

After every paper, spend at least as long reviewing as your child spent answering. Ask:

Which questions were genuinely difficult?
Which were lost through rushing?
Did timing break down in one section?
Were there patterns in careless errors?

For free school-specific materials, use Free Farnborough Hill practice papers (one per tested subject, with answers). For the overview of exam format and admissions details, see The Farnborough Hill 11+ guide (format, catchment, dates).

If you use mock exams, choose them carefully. The aim is to rehearse routine: listening to instructions, managing nerves, pacing through timed sections and recovering after a tricky question. One or two well-chosen mocks are usually more helpful than a long run of back-to-back tests.

Keep the final weeks sensible. By then, practice should sharpen confidence and timing, not create exhaustion. A child who walks into the assessment feeling fresh will usually perform better than one who has been over-tested.

On the day

Keep the morning simple. Leave plenty of travel time, bring whatever the school has asked for, and avoid last-minute coaching in the car. Children usually do better with calm familiarity: breakfast, water, a jumper, and a reassuring reminder that they only need to try one question at a time.

If there is more than one component to the assessment, encourage your child to treat each section as a fresh start. A difficult question early on does not predict the rest of the paper. In timed assessments, it is better to keep moving than to get stuck proving a point to one stubborn question.

For writing tasks, remind your child to spend a minute planning before starting. For reasoning tasks, remind them to read the instructions twice. For Maths, remind them to check signs, units and what the question is actually asking.

Most of all, keep your own tone steady. Children take their cue from the adults around them. A calm parent is one of the most useful forms of exam support.

After the exam: results, allocation and appeals

For an independent school such as Farnborough Hill, the post-exam process is different from state grammar allocation. There is no local authority secondary allocation on National Offer Day deciding the place on the school’s behalf. Instead, the school reviews the whole application process, including assessment performance and the other admissions elements it has asked for.

At the time of writing, we did not find a verified published results date for 2028 entry on the sources reviewed. The school’s admissions page should be your first point of reference for when decisions are normally communicated.

If your child is offered a place, the school will normally explain the next steps for acceptance. If your child is not offered a place, ask politely whether there is a waiting list and whether there is any formal review or appeal route for independent-school admissions decisions. Processes vary by school, so it is important to follow Farnborough Hill’s own published admissions information rather than assumptions borrowed from grammar schools.

If you are applying to both independent and state schools, keep a simple calendar of deadlines so that one process does not accidentally disrupt the other.

What has changed recently

The school’s current entrance assessment page describes the Year 7 process as including online Quest tests and a creative writing paper, alongside a reference and a meeting with the Headmistress. The same page also gives exact dates for the September 2027 entry round, namely a registration deadline of 2 November 2026 and an entrance assessment on 14 December 2026.

ElevenReady’s directory (not yet verified with the school) for 2028 entry records the assessment format as a school paper using a GL Assessment-style format across Maths, English, Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning, with mixed delivery. Because these descriptions are not perfectly aligned, parents should prepare broadly across all four tested subjects and check the school’s admissions page for the latest wording when 2028 registration opens.

We did not find any other clearly announced recent change to catchment, published place numbers, or a newly published score threshold in the sources reviewed.

Frequently asked questions

When does the Farnborough Hill 11+ take place?

The school says the Year 7 entrance assessment is taken in the Autumn Term for entry the following September. The exact 2028 date was not yet published in the sources reviewed, so check the school’s admissions page.

What subjects should my child prepare for?

For 2028 entry, prepare across Maths, English, Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning. The school page also refers to a creative writing paper, so writing practice matters too.

Is Farnborough Hill part of the local authority 11+ process?

No. Farnborough Hill is an independent school and runs its own admissions process, including registration with the school, a reference, a meeting with the Headmistress and an entrance assessment.

Does Farnborough Hill publish a pass mark?

We did not find a published pass mark, qualifying score or cut-off in the sources reviewed. Check the school’s admissions information directly rather than relying on unofficial figures.

When should my child start preparing?

For most children, steady preparation from Year 5 is sensible. Start gently, build confidence across all four subjects, and add timed work gradually during Year 6.

Are there free practice papers for Farnborough Hill?

Yes. You can use ElevenReady’s free school-specific papers here: /schools/farnborough-hill-mock-tests.

📄 Free Farnborough Hill practice papers Start free and track readiness for Farnborough Hill 🔔 Email me this school's key dates

Sources

Farnborough Hill – Entrance Assessment: School-run admissions process; Year 7 entry includes reference, meeting with the Headmistress and entrance assessment; 11+ assessment is taken in the Autumn Term for admission the following September; meetings with the Headmistress take place in the Summer Term of Year 5 and Autumn Term of Year 6; a
Farnborough Hill – School website: School identity as an independent girls’ school in Farnborough; main entry points include Year 7, Year 9 and Sixth Form.

Preparing for other schools in Hampshire

Written by ElevenReady from the school's published information and reviewed by a person before publishing. Last reviewed 4 October 2026. Exam arrangements change. Check the school's admissions page for the current year.