CEM has gone: which 11+ exam your child is actually sitting

What happened

CEM — the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring, originally at Durham University — withdrew from the paper-based 11+ market in 2022/23. Pure CEM grammar school tests no longer exist.

This matters because a great deal of advice online, and a great deal of the material still on sale, was written when CEM was live. If you are reading a guide that presents GL and CEM as the two options, you are reading something that has not been updated in three years.

Former CEM areas did not simply vanish. They moved — most to GL Assessment, some to their own bespoke papers, and a growing number to a newer provider.

GL Assessment

GL is now the format used across most grammar school regions. It sets separate papers by subject: English, maths, verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning, though not every school uses all four.

Its defining feature, from a parent's point of view, is that it is predictable. GL publishes past papers. The question types recur. You can prepare for the shape of the thing, and that preparation is not wasted.

That predictability cuts both ways. Because everyone can prepare for it, being prepared is the baseline rather than an advantage.

FSCE — the new one

FSCE stands for Future Stories Community Enterprise, an organisation linked to Reading School. It is the newest provider and it is growing.

Around ten grammar schools currently use it, concentrated in the North West and Yorkshire, with Reading School and Chelmsford County High School for Girls in the South East. Schools using or moving to it include Colyton, Crossley Heath, Heckmondwike, North Halifax, Ermysted's, Queen Elizabeth Grammar School Penrith and Clitheroe Royal.

In April 2026 the seven Gloucestershire grammar schools appointed FSCE as their admissions test provider for entry from 2028.

The format is paper-based and covers English, maths and creative writing. From September 2025, papers at some schools may also draw on a broader range of Key Stage 2 subjects — art and design, computing, design and technology, geography, history, languages, music, PE and science.

A test that can draw on the whole of Key Stage 2 cannot be crammed, which is precisely the intention. It was designed to be harder to coach.

Bespoke school papers

Some grammar schools — Barnet and Kingston among them — set their own entrance tests entirely. If your target school does this, generic practice material will only take you so far, and the school's own guidance is worth more than anything you can buy.

What to do about it

Ask the school directly, and ask about the year your child will sit.

Not the year that is running now. These arrangements are announced years in advance and change: Gloucestershire's move was announced in April 2026 for entry in 2028. A parent researching in 2026 on the basis of the current paper would be preparing for the wrong exam.

Ask in writing, ask which provider, and ask whether the format is changing. It is an ordinary question and admissions offices answer it.

What is worth practising whichever it is

Here is the part that does not change with the exam board.

Every one of these papers is, underneath, a reading test. GL's comprehension is a reading test. FSCE's creative writing is a reading test with a pen in your hand. A maths word problem is a reading test about trains.

A child who reads comfortably starts every paper ahead. A child who does not finds all of them hard, whichever logo is on the front — and no amount of technique closes that gap in the last few months.

Which is why, if you are going to start anywhere, vocabulary and reading are the things that pay across all three formats rather than one. If you already know your area, our guides to the Kent Test, the Medway Test and the Buckinghamshire test go through the papers one by one.

Sources: Atom Learning, 11 Plus Leap, Exam Papers Plus and Lionheart Education. Checked 9 September 2026. Arrangements change by region and by year — always confirm with the school.