What Is a Good 11+ Score? Standardised Scores Explained for Parents

A standardised score is not a percentage and it is not a grade. It is your child's raw mark converted onto a scale where 100 is the average for children of exactly the same age, and where about two-thirds of children land between 85 and 115. So 118 is above average. Whether it is 'good enough' is a different question, and the answer depends on whether your area publishes a qualifying threshold or simply ranks everyone who sat the test.

That second question is where the autumn panic comes from. So: the 11 plus standardised score explained properly, starting with how a raw mark becomes a score, why two children with different raw marks can swap places, what a figure like Trafford's 334 is counting, and how to read a mock without reading it wrongly.

The 11 plus standardised score explained: what is the number measuring?

A raw mark answers one question. How many did she get right? It cannot tell you whether 58 out of 80 was strong, because it says nothing about how hard that paper was or who else sat it.

A standardised score answers a more useful question: how did this child perform against a national sample of children the same age? GL Assessment, whose tests are used across most selective areas in England, describes its Standard Age Score as a conversion that takes into account the pupil's age in years and months and gives an indication of how the pupil is performing relative to a national sample of pupils of the same age. The average score is 100.

Those two facts together are why 118 is genuinely encouraging. If two-thirds of children sit between 85 and 115, roughly one child in six is above 115 and one in six below 85. A score in the high teens above 100 puts a child inside that top sixth without needing a percentile table.

How does a raw mark become a standardised score?

Four things happen between the answer sheet and the letter you open.

The confidence band is the part parents skip, and it is the part that saves sanity. GL describes it as an indication of the range within which a pupil's score lies, with a narrower band meaning a more reliable score. In practical terms, a standardised score is an estimate with an error bar around it, not a measurement to the decimal place. Two children three points apart are, statistically speaking, performing at the same level.

Why did a lower raw mark produce a higher score?

Children in the same school year can be almost twelve months apart. A child born in September sits the same paper as a child born the following August, and at age ten that gap still shows. Age standardisation corrects for it by comparing each child only with others of the same age, so pupils of different ages with identical standardised scores have performed equally well relative to their own age group even when their raw marks differ.

This is the single most-argued point on parent forums, and it is not a fudge in favour of summer-borns. It is the only way to compare a ten-year-old with an eleven-year-old on the same paper and mean anything by it.

Why is Trafford's qualifying score 334 when the average is 100?

Because 334 is a total, not a single score. The five schools in the Trafford Grammar Schools Consortium each publish a minimum qualifying score of 334 for September 2027 entry, and Stretford Grammar's own admissions FAQ confirms the results are age standardised and that the test is two papers of about an hour covering verbal, non-verbal and mathematical skills. A qualifying figure in the 300s cannot be one score on a 100-average scale. It is more than one standardised element added together.

Once you know that, 334 stops looking like a wall: it is an average-ish score across several papers, set a comfortable distance above 100.

Is there a pass mark, or is your child simply ranked?

Both systems exist a few hours' drive apart, which is why generic advice about 'the 11+ pass mark' is useless.

Marling School, one of the Gloucestershire grammars, states plainly that students are ranked in order of result and that only children with a qualifying score are considered for entry. Gloucestershire County Council follows the same logic: after the test, every grammar school you opted to share the score with tells you whether your child qualified for that school. There is no county-wide number to aim at, and anyone quoting you one is quoting last year.

So what counts as a good 11+ score?

That tells you how your child performed, not whether they will get a place. The honest answer to 'is 115 good?' is always 'good compared with what?' A score that clears one school's qualifying standard can sit below the effective cut-off at a more competitive school in the same county.

How do you read a mock result without panicking?

Most of the distress we see in October comes from mock papers, not real results, and mocks are the easiest scores to misread.

If the format itself is still unfamiliar, our GL Assessment 11+ explainer walks through the four papers and the question types behind each of those scores.

What can a tutor actually do with a score report?

More than re-teach everything, which is the usual response to a disappointing number and the least useful one. A paper-by-paper breakdown points at a specific problem: comprehension inference, shuffled-sentence questions, or running out of time on paper two. In more than ten years of preparing children for entrance exams, our founder's experience is that the fix is almost always narrower than the panic suggests.

Our 11+ online tutoring is one-to-one, one hour per lesson, from £15 per lesson, on Google Meet in the browser with nothing to install. There is no sign-up fee and no contract. We work with families across Manchester and Trafford, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, London and Gloucestershire, and the first thing we do with a score report is tell you honestly what it shows, including when a child is already on track and does not need us.

And if the score has already arrived and it was below the mark, what happens after an 11+ result you did not want covers the two clocks that matter in that fortnight: the review deadline set by the test provider, and the local authority preference form due on 31 October.