Henrietta Barnett School is a girls grammar school in Hampstead Garden Suburb, Barnet, founded in 1911 with an annual Year 7 intake of around 93 places. Entry is via the CEM-style route used across the wider Barnet area, with admissions then ranked by cohort top decile then distance.
Single-sex / co-ed character
Henrietta Barnett School is a single-sex girls' grammar. Girls' grammar places in selective areas are routinely the most contested in the system; many local girls' grammars receive two to three times the registrations of their boys' counterparts, which pushes catchment areas tighter even where the official qualifying score is the same.
Test format
The school selects via a CEM-style consortium test. CEM-style papers mix subjects within a single sitting and reward broad vocabulary and reading fluency more than rote technique. Daily reading from Year 4 is the single highest-leverage preparation; format-specific practice papers are limited in supply but worth seeking.
Catchment & oversubscription
Admissions here use a super-selective effect: a top-tier of places goes to the highest-scoring children regardless of distance, and only the remaining places are awarded by catchment. Practically, this means that for a strong candidate, distance is irrelevant; for a borderline candidate, distance becomes decisive.
What sets it apart
Notable strength of Henrietta Barnett School: Top girls' results in London. This is the kind of factor worth weighing alongside raw academic results when deciding how to rank the school on your preference list — two schools with identical qualifying scores can offer very different day-to-day experiences.
Preparation specifics
The most reliable preparation pattern for Henrietta Barnett School families: establish a baseline using a CEM-style familiarisation paper at the start of Year 5; address the two weakest topic areas through topic-by-topic workbooks across the spring and summer; sit a full timed paper every fortnight from the summer holidays; and deliberately wind down practice in the final fortnight before the test. Last-minute drilling reduces confidence more often than it raises scores.
Common pitfalls
Common pitfall to avoid: HBS very small intake intensifies competition. Families who plan around this from the start typically find the application process much smoother than families who only discover the issue in the autumn of Year 6.
How Henrietta Barnett School fits into the wider Barnet picture
Most Barnet families do not apply to a single school in isolation. The Barnet 11+ parent guide on this site sets out the full county-level admissions calendar, registration windows and qualifying score history; the Barnet regional papers page catalogues every practice paper we hold for the relevant test format. A typical preference list for this area will rank three to five schools deliberately — distance, single-sex/co-ed character, sixth-form pathway and journey time all matter alongside raw academic results.