A complete practice paper set matching Medway Council's own familiarisation booklet: English, Maths and Verbal Reasoning, including the choose-TWO comprehension and hidden-word question types shown in the booklet's own worked examples. Full answers and a separate answer sheet. Free, no sign-up.
Set by GL Assessment on behalf of Medway Council, the test decides grammar school suitability for children in the Medway area. Three papers, always sat in the same order.
| Paper | Time | Covers |
|---|---|---|
| English | 30 min | Comprehension, punctuation, grammar |
| Mathematics | 50 min | KS2-broad, with some harder application questions |
| Reasoning | 45 min | Spatial + Non-Verbal (20 min) and Verbal Reasoning (25 min) |
Format, weighting and dates taken from Medway Council's own published test information and familiarisation booklet.
The punctuation section asks which underlined group of words contains a mistake, or to mark N if there is no mistake at all, which rewards a child who has genuinely spotted correct English rather than one who assumes every sentence must be wrong somewhere. Verbal reasoning also includes opposite-meaning word pairs and odd-two-out questions, both shown here calibrated against Medway Council's own worked examples.
English, Maths and Verbal Reasoning, built to Medway Council's own published format, with mark schemes and a separate answer sheet. Eleven pages.
An original passage with five questions, including a genuine choose-TWO combination question.
Find the word-group with the mistake, or mark N. Plus sentence completion.
Ten questions including a decimal scale reading and a distance-time graph, mirroring the booklet's own worked examples.
Five questions, each dictionary-verified to have exactly one hidden word.
Six further verbal reasoning questions in Medway's own two remaining formats.
Every answer explained. Every maths answer is computed in code, never typed by hand.
Medway's Reasoning paper gives 20 minutes to Spatial and Non-Verbal Reasoning. Both need carefully built figures to be worth practising, so rather than reproduce them badly here, we point you to the real thing:
| Skill | Where to practise it |
|---|---|
| Non-verbal reasoning | Free 18-question Non-Verbal Reasoning paper |
| Spatial reasoning | Spatial reasoning practice hub |
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| 18 May 2026, 9am | Registration opens on the Medway Parent Portal |
| 12 June 2026, 5pm | Registration closes, a firm deadline |
| 15 and 16 September 2026 | Test days for children at Medway schools |
| 19 and 20 September 2026 | Test days for children outside Medway |
| 14 October 2026 | Results released |
Dates from Medway Council's own published admissions timetable for September 2027 entry. Always confirm against medway.gov.uk before relying on them.
The Medway Test is the entrance test used to decide grammar school suitability for children applying in the Medway area. It is set by GL Assessment on behalf of Medway Council. Children sit three separate papers, always in this order: English (30 minutes), Mathematics (50 minutes) and Reasoning (45 minutes, covering Spatial, Non-Verbal and Verbal Reasoning). Every question is multiple choice, marked on a separate computer-read answer sheet.
Medway Council publishes the exact formula. Each paper's raw score is standardised for age, then combined as (English standardised score x2) + (Maths standardised score x2) + (Reasoning standardised score x1), giving a maximum possible total of 700. Reasoning counts for half the weight of English or Maths, which makes it the one format on this site where a weaker reasoning score is easier to offset with strong English and maths.
There is no fixed pass mark published in advance. The test is designed so that the highest-scoring children, equivalent to around 25% of children attending Medway maintained schools, are assessed as suitable for grammar. Medway Council has stated the minimum qualifying score for the test sat in autumn 2025 (for September 2026 entry) was 482, and for the test sat in autumn 2024 (for September 2025 entry) was 481. As with any 11+ threshold, always confirm the current figure against Medway Council's own published results for the specific year your child is sitting.
Medway Council's own familiarisation booklet shows comprehension (including a genuine choose-TWO question, where a candidate must select exactly two correct statements from five to score any marks), punctuation (finding which underlined group of words contains an error, or marking N for no mistake), and grammar sentence completion.
The booklet shows four formats. In a hidden-word question, a word is hidden spanning the end of one word and the start of the next in a sentence, for example "The film ended happily after all", where the hidden word is MEND, spanning film and ended. In an opposite-meanings question, two groups of three words are given and the task is to find the pair, one from each group, that means the opposite of the other. In an odd-two-out question, three of five words share a category and the task is to find the two that do not. A fourth format, restoring three removed letters to complete a word, also appears in the official booklet.
Yes. The Reasoning paper gives 20 minutes combined to Spatial and Non-Verbal Reasoning, and 25 minutes to Verbal Reasoning. Spatial reasoning includes finding a hidden target shape within a more complex figure, matching the style used in several other GL-based 11+ tests. Pip publishes dedicated, separately verified free practice for both skills.
For September 2027 entry, children at Medway schools sit the test on Tuesday 15 and Wednesday 16 September 2026. Children from outside Medway sit it on Saturday 19 or Sunday 20 September 2026. Registration on the Medway Parent Portal opens at 9am on Monday 18 May 2026 and closes at 5pm on Friday 12 June 2026. Results are released on Wednesday 14 October 2026.
No. This is an original Pip practice paper written to match the question types in Medway Council's own familiarisation booklet, downloadable free from medway.gov.uk. It is not a past paper: the booklet states plainly that the question types it shows may not appear in the real test, and that the real test includes types not shown at all. Pip is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Medway Council or GL Assessment.
The neighbouring GL-based format, and how its scoring differs from Medway's weighted total.
Read the guideThe reasoning strand this paper does not cover, built and verified as its own resource.
Download freeEvery free Pip paper in one place, including the Bucks, CSSE, Tiffin and Sutton style papers.
See all printablesPip is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Medway Council or GL Assessment. These practice papers are original material written in the style of the published format and contain no official questions. The comprehension passage is our own writing.