Bexley Grammar and Dartford Grammar catchment area

[Subhro]

Hi,
we live at Dartford. Our son goes to year 2 class. We are looking for buying home around Dartford or Crayford or Bexley. We are considering future schooling of our child as priority. We want to be either Dartford Grammar or Bexley Grammar catchment area . Which one of these is easier to get entry? Can we apply for both if our son passes both 11+ exam of Bexley and Kent? Which catchment area should I prefer to live at? Thank you if you have any valuable suggestions.

They are both v competitive schools.

if a child passes the Kent and bexley tests they can list both in the 5 schools they apply to.

bexley grammar- unless you score in the top 180- you need to live pretty close to the school as it’s so oversubscribed.

Dartford have different admission scores depending on whether you live in or out if catchment.

its all on the websites.

If your DC is only in Yr2 now, they won't be starting secondary school until September 2029.

The admissions policies for all schools for 2029 entry will be published in March 2028.

If a school (or the LA on its behalf, if the school concerned is a Communuty school) wishes to make amendments to its admissions policy, it must consult on those changes, and the consultation period for 2029 entry will be for 6 weeks at some point between 1st October 2027 and 31st January 2028.

In the meantime, the admissions policies could have been consulted on and changed more than once from what they are for entry in September 2025, which will be the latest policy currently published.

So you need to keep looking at both the policies for all the schools in which you are interested, and for any relevant consultations. Wherever you decide to settle, you should also consider the local non-selective schools which you would ne applying for as a fall-back, should your DC not do as well as you hope in any selective school entrance tests that they take, or not be ranked high enough for a place at the selective schools you go for. Remember that a candidate's score is a function of how well s/he does in relation to others who sit the test, and that even if they get a 'pass' score, the actual oversubscription criteria for the individual schools determine how they are ranked if they apply (and tbere is time for those to change between then and now).

Currently, Bexley only assesses fail / pass / top 180 on the total standardised score, with no reference to how well the candidate did in the various component parts of the test, whereas to pass the Kent Test requires not only a threshold overall score, but also a pass in each of the three components. So e.g. a total standardised score of 382 sounds lbrilliant, but not if it is made up of 2 x 141 and a 100 . Again, there is scope for change between now and March 2028.

The Kent CC website helpfully has community / VC school and 'own admission authority' school admissions policies collected up in two documents, so you don't have to trawl through lots of individual school websites.