What is the 11 Plus pass mark?

Two areas side by side

These are the published rules as of October 2026. Other areas, such as Kent, publish their own rules on their council websites.

Buckinghamshire: 121 qualifies

Your child gets separate verbal, maths and non-verbal scores. These are combined into one Secondary Transfer Test Score: half comes from the verbal score, a quarter from maths and a quarter from non-verbal. So verbal skills count for twice as much as either of the others.

A score of 121 or more qualifies your child for any Buckinghamshire grammar school. A higher score doesn’t give extra priority, because the schools don’t rank children by score when they allocate places.

Northern Ireland: scores and bands, no pass

SEAG gives each child a score for English (or Gaeilge) and one for maths, each with an average of 100. Added together, they make the total score, with an average of 200. Your child is also placed in a band from 1 to 6. Band 1 is the top band: every child in it has a cohort percentile of 60 or higher.

SEAG plays no part in how schools use these results. Each grammar school’s Board of Governors publishes its own admissions criteria.

Why there isn’t a percentage to aim for

11+ scores are standardised. That means your child’s raw mark is adjusted for their age on the test day and for how hard the paper was. So you can’t say “60 out of 80 is a pass”. Our free practice test uses 70% as a target, but that’s only a goal for practice.