Eleven Plus Vault is a free library of UK 11+ practice-paper study guides and parent-friendly guidance. We were built by a small team of parents who lived through the 11+ process across three different grammar school regions — and quickly discovered that the practical information families actually need is scattered across forums, blog comments and the small print of school admissions PDFs.
What we do
We do three things. First, we maintain a structured catalogue of 11+ practice-paper study guides, organised by region, subject and year so the format your child will face is easy to find. Second, each study guide explains the typical booklet format, how parents use that kind of paper at home, and what the mark scheme rewards — we do not host or distribute the paper booklets themselves. Third, we maintain plain-English explainers of the bits of the 11+ system that confuse most families on first contact: scaled scores, age standardisation, sitting dates, appeals processes and the differences between GL Assessment, CEM and bespoke consortium tests.
What we don't do
We do not sell tutoring, revision courses, or paid downloads. We do not host, distribute or link to past paper downloads — papers remain with their original publishers. We do not run adverts, and we do not collect personal data on visitors beyond standard server logs.
Editorial policy
Every guidance article on the site is written by a parent who has been through the 11+ in the relevant region. Where we describe a region's test arrangements (sitting dates, provider, paper format), always verify the current details with the local authority or school before relying on them. Where regional practice has changed in recent years, we note the change explicitly rather than letting old information drift quietly out of date.
How we are funded
Eleven Plus Vault is an independently run free resource. It currently shows no adverts and accepts no sponsored content, paid placements, or affiliate arrangements. If you find the site useful, the most helpful thing you can do is share it with another parent who is starting the 11+ journey.
School profile data: sources & methodology
Since September 2026, 80 of the 140 school profile pages on this site carry an "Official school record" panel sourced from two UK government datasets. This section documents exactly how that panel was built.
Sources
- Get Information About Schools (GIAS) — the Department for Education's "all establishment data" download, get-information-schools.service.gov.uk/Downloads. Data as of 11 September 2026. Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0; the publisher's own footer attribution reads “All content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0, except where otherwise stated” with “© Crown copyright”.
- Ofsted “State-funded schools inspections and outcomes”, as at 31 August 2025 — gov.uk/government/statistics/state-funded-schools-inspections-and-outcomes-as-at-31-august-2025. Also Open Government Licence v3.0, Crown copyright.
Both licences require only attribution, which is given above and repeated on every panel that uses the data; both are re-use permissive with no ambiguity for this kind of non-commercial, non-endorsing re-publication.
Selection and join method
We took the GIAS establishment-data file and kept only rows where AdmissionsPolicy (name) = "Selective" and EstablishmentStatus (name) = "Open" — 540 rows nationally. This site does not store Department for Education URNs against its own school pages, so each of our 140 school profile pages was joined by exact, normalised school name against that 540-row subset (case/punctuation-insensitive; leading "The" ignored). Every name that matched was unique within the 540 rows — there were no ambiguous name collisions. As a second check we confirmed each match's district or region field agreed with the GIAS town or county field. Results:
- 80 pages matched and carry the official-record panel (URN, address, postcode, phase, gender, age range, admissions policy, capacity, and Ofsted overall effectiveness where a graded inspection exists).
- 6 pages had a unique name match but the district/region field didn't line up with GIAS's town/county field (mostly a locality-vs-postal-town naming difference, e.g. "Prenton" vs "Wirral", "Stretford" vs "Manchester") — held back rather than guessed: Henrietta Barnett School, Ilford County High School, The Latymer School, Shrewsbury High School, St Anselm's College, Stretford Grammar School.
- 54 pages had no unique name match in the Selective+Open subset and were left completely untouched. Seven of these are Northern Ireland schools (Belfast Royal Academy, Down High School, Glenlola Collegiate, Methodist College Belfast, Royal Belfast Academical Institution, Strathearn School, Victoria College Belfast) which sit outside GIAS's England-only coverage. The rest use a shortened or differently-formatted name on this site than their official GIAS establishment name (e.g. a missing "School"/"College" suffix), or are independent/non-maintained schools that GIAS does not code as "Selective" in this field.
No school record was invented, merged, or guessed to fill a gap. Every figure on an official-record panel is copied as recorded in the source file for that URN; a blank source field is simply omitted from the panel rather than filled in.
Fields rendered and fields withheld
Rendered: URN, address (street/locality/town as recorded), postcode, phase of education, gender of entry, statutory age range, admissions policy, school capacity, and Ofsted overall effectiveness plus its inspection date where a graded inspection exists. Ofsted's "Overall effectiveness" field is shown exactly as recorded (including the literal value "Not judged" that Ofsted now records for schools without a single headline grade) — we have not mapped legacy numeric grades (where the field still holds a bare 1–4 code) to a rating label, because we could not verify that mapping on Ofsted's own published pages this cycle; a bare code is shown rather than a guessed label.
Withheld: GIAS also carries a school telephone number, website and headteacher name for every establishment. Under our institutional-data licence policy, a facility phone number could in principle be shown, but we chose to hold it back this round rather than widen what we publish about a school mid-project — that's a decision for a deliberate future review, not something to slip in quietly. Headteacher names are withheld outright: our privacy policy treats any field keyed to a named individual as withheld regardless of source.
A correction this data surfaces
Cross-checking GIAS turned up a factual problem with our own Adams' Grammar School Newport page, independent of the join above (that page's official name doesn't match anything in the current Selective+Open subset, so it wasn't auto-updated). GIAS records the school we described as "Boys grammar" (URN 123593) as closed since 2011; its GIAS successor record (URN 137446, "Haberdashers' Adams", opened 1 September 2011, the day after the old record closed) is mixed-gender, not boys-only. We have not rewritten that page's editorial copy this cycle — the automated join legitimately doesn't reach it under the exact-name method described above, and hand-editing just this one page's copy while leaving 53 other unmatched pages untouched would be an inconsistent, ad hoc fix. We are flagging it here, on the record, so a parent researching Adams' Grammar School knows the "Boys grammar" description is out of date. Tell us if you'd like this prioritised.
What we haven't touched
The prose on school profile pages — founding dates, intake-size claims, "notable strength" / "common pitfall" text, and the preparation-pattern advice — predates this data project and we could not trace concrete figures on it (intake numbers, "founded" dates) to a named source when we sampled several pages. That existing content is left exactly as it was; the official-record panel is a separate, clearly labelled block and is not intended to vouch for the older prose next to it. If you believe a specific figure on a page is wrong, the fastest fix is to use the contact page and tell us which page, which field, and (ideally) a source for the correct value.
Corrections
Spotted an error in either the official-record panel or the older page content? Contact us with the page URL, the field you believe is wrong, and the correct value if you have a source for it.
Get in touch
Found a broken link, a fact that needs updating, or a missing region? Contact us — we read every message and update the site weekly.