Tiffin School is increasingly becoming one of the most desirable schools in the United Kingdom. Based in Kingston-upon-Thames in South-West London, it is a state-funded, selective grammar school that accepts boys from Year 7 to 11, and its Sixth Form is co-educational.
Tiffin Boys’ academic prowess is well-documented; it consistently ranks in the top 10 for UK state schools for both GCSE and A Level results (and within the top 3 for boys-only state schools). A huge majority of Tiffin’s leavers move on to leading universities in the United Kingdom, with over 30 per year gaining places at Oxbridge. Leavers have also undertaken various apprenticeships, including the Amazon Degree apprenticeship, with several students even ending up studying in the USA, gaining places at Ivy League universities such as Princeton.
Extracurriculars include a wide variety of sports, clubs and societies. There are over 70 clubs, ranging from Bridge Club to Robotics Club. In terms of sports, Tiffin offers students a rich selection, from rugby to rowing. There is a state-of-the-art sports centre on site, as well as easy access to various offsite facilities.
Year-on-year, Tiffin has become more and more oversubscribed, which has led to a huge amount of competition for places, particularly at the 11+ entry point.
Entry Points
There are two entry points for Tiffin Boys’: the 11+ entry in year 7, and the 16+ entry in Sixth Form. Unlike many schools, there is no entry point at 13+. The 11+ is the main entry point for students, which offers around 180 places and has recently had over ten times that amount of applicants. From September 2025 entry onwards, the school has introduced a ‘Sporting Aptitude Assessment’ and a ‘Music Aptitude Assessment’, from which they award up to 10% of their places for students who show promise in either sports or music.
At 16+, Tiffin offers around 120 places every year (with the number of applicants much higher than that); generally, two thirds of those are awarded to girls. The Sixth Form is relatively large, and has around 550 students in total.
Admission Requirements for 11+ Entry
Tiffin Boys’ uses a 2-stage process to select which candidates are awarded a place, with certain students being selected to move onto the next stage, based on their performance.
- The Stage One test occurs in late September or early October of Year 6. It is a multiple-choice test, which means that candidates are given a choice of around five possible answers for each question. The test typically contains 50 questions in mathematics, and 50 questions in English, both of which are in timed conditions of around 50 minutes each. Students are scored in both of these papers, and their combined score determines whether they will be invited back to stage two; typically, around 700 boys are invited back.
- Stage Two is a written test around a month after Stage One, looking again at both mathematics and English. The English paper tends to include a reading comprehension with open-ended questions, rather than multiplechoice. It also includes a creative writing task, testing students’ abilities in grammar, vocabulary and structure. The mathematics paper tests similar topics to stage one, but the questions are often more complex, requiring written working and multi-step problem solving. Offers are typically sent to parents in March of Year 6.
Example questions in the Tiffin Boys' School Admissions test
What types of questions might come up in Stage One?
Tiffin does not release past papers, like many other schools, and recent candidates have reported on the relative difficulty of both the English and Mathematics tests. In English, students are presented with a text, from which they answer various questions, testing their abilities to extract relevant information from the passage, as well as to ‘read between the lines’. The chosen texts have been said to have been fairly advanced, often including complex sentences and elevated vocabulary.
As well as this, students will be tested on their overall understanding of grammar. Here are several examples of questions that have been known to come up over the past few years:
Odd Word Out
These questions ask candidates to identify which word does not fit into the group, which may be based on meaning, letter arrangement or their ‘part of speech’. For example:
Q: joyful — miserable — excited — confusion — anxious
Q: plant — print — paint — point — plait
Identifying Textual Errors
These questions ask you to highlight any errors in a sentence, either with regard to spelling or punctuation. For example:
Q: How many spelling errors are in this sentence?
The manager apoligised for the inconvienence caused by the delay.
Q: Which punctuation marks are missing from the sentence below:
The land which had previously lain barren had finally flourished thanks to the rain.
Parts of Speech
These questions test your knowledge of parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs or adjectives. For example:
Q: Which word in the sentence is a preposition?
Melanie has been curiously studying mathematics since dawn.
Q: Which word in this sentence is an adverb?
Arabella arrived late to her afternoon piano lesson.
In mathematics, a wide variety of topics within the KS2 specification have come up over the past few years. The topics examined have included fractions, percentages, area, ratio and order of operations. Here are some examples of questions that have been asked:
Q: 3/5 of a school’s rugby team are late to their opening match of the season. If 12 students are late, how many students are in the team altogether?
Q: In a poll, 72% of a year group say that mathematics is their favourite subject. If there are 250 students in the year group, how many students choose mathematics as their favourite subject?
Q: In order to make a cake, flour, sugar and milk are used in the ratio 5:2:3. If the cake ends up weighing 600g, how much milk was used?
Q: Work out 3 + 9 x (7 - 2)
What types of questions might come up in Stage Two?
In English, the comprehension questions are typically open-ended, unlike in Stage One. Each question will typically award a certain number of marks, and the more marks each question holds, the more points the candidate is expected to make. On certain questions, candidates have been asked to provide quotes from the text to support points.
For the creative writing task, students may be asked to write a descriptive piece from a prompt, a narrative piece or even a discursive piece. In mathematics, the main difference between Stage One and Stage Two is that candidates are expected to show their working in Stage Two, as well as the fact that the questions are also not multiple-choice.
16+ (Sixth Form) Admission Requirements
Offers are made based on the strength of candidates’ GCSE results. These should be submitted on results day, and offers go out to candidates the day after. There is currently no specific exam that candidates must take to be awarded a place, unlike for 11+ entry.
Appeals
Under the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, parents of boys who have not been offered a place have the right to appeal. For the 11+ entry point, parents are notified of the appeals process by their Home Local Authority in March of Year 6. For the 16+ entry point, parents and students are able to appeal separately or jointly against any decision refusing a student’s admission.
Waiting List
For 11+ entry, the top 450 boys who take the Stage Two exams and are not awarded a place are added to a waiting list. Some of the 180 places that are initially awarded may not be accepted by those students, so those places are awarded to boys on the waiting list - the higher your initial score, the further up you will be on the waiting list. If two or more boys have the same score, priority is given to the student living in a ‘priority area’ - anywhere within 10 kilometres of the school. The waiting list is active from March until the end of the academic year. Additionally, when applying for state-funded secondary schools, you rank your choices in order of preference - in London, you can usually choose up to six. For example:
1. School X
2. Tiffin Boys’
3. School Y
If a candidate is successful with more than one of his listed schools, he will automatically be offered the highest one on his list. Therefore, if a candidate meets the criteria for both School X and Tiffin, they’ll be offered a place at School X, and will not be added to Tiffin’s waiting list, seeing as it is a lower preference.
Preparation Tips for the Entrance Test for Tiffin School
Due to the increasingly competitive nature of the 11+ exams in particular, thorough preparation is more important than ever. Candidates should possess a comprehensive understanding of all of the relevant topics within the KS2 specification, as well as some experience with past papers under timed conditions - all of which are greatly helped by tuition. Keystone have provided specialist grammar school entrance tutors for these exams for over a decade, who are experienced and can guide candidates through the entire process. For more details on how Keystone can help with preparation for the Tiffin Boys’ exam, feel free to call the office for a chat with one of our client managers, or contact us via our request a tutor form.
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