Results on the 15th. Closing on the 16th.

There is a particular kind of quiet in a house between the middle of September and the middle of October.

The tests are done. Your child has walked into a hall, sat down, and come out again, and you have asked them how it went and received the answer every parent receives, which is fine. And now there is nothing to do but wait five weeks.

Most families use those five weeks to worry. We would like to suggest a better use for them, and it starts with two dates that sit one day apart.

Kent Test results are emailed on Thursday 15th October 2026.

Trinity School Croydon closes registration for 2027 entry on Friday 16th October 2026.

Read that again. If your plan is to see how grammar goes and then think about independent schools, you have one day to absorb the result, have the conversation with your partner, make a decision, complete a registration form, pay a fee and find your child some preparation.

It gets tighter, not looser

Trinity is the first to close, but the rest follow quickly.

Bromley High closes on Friday 23rd October and sits its exam on Saturday 21st November, which is less than five weeks after Kent results land. Dulwich closes at midday on Monday 2nd November. Whitgift on the 6th. Eltham on the 9th. JAGS on the 10th. Alleyn’s and Colfe’s both on Friday 13th November.

By the middle of November, every door on that list is shut.

We have the full diary, with the assessment dates as well, in a separate post. It is worth ten minutes of your evening.

Why intelligent, organised parents still miss this

Because the sequence feels obvious and it is wrong.

You apply for grammar school. You sit the test in September. You get the result in October. Naturally, you assume that the result tells you what to do next.

It does not, because independent schools are not running on the grammar school calendar. They set their deadlines to suit their own admissions cycle, and that cycle opens in September and closes in November. They are not waiting for Kent County Council, and they will not extend a deadline because your result arrived the day before.

So the two processes overlap almost completely, and the only families who come through it calmly are the ones who ran both at the same time.

Registering is not committing

This is the part that unlocks it, and it is the sentence we repeat most often to Year 6 parents.

You do not have to decide about independent school in October. You have to register in October. Those are entirely different things.

Registering costs you a form and a fee. That is all it commits you to. The actual decision comes in February, when offers are in front of you rather than deadlines, and when you know how grammar went, and when you can sit down with a coffee and compare real options rather than hypothetical ones.

What you cannot do is decide in February and register in February, because by then the door closed in November.

Most families we work with register for two or three schools. Almost none of them regret it. The ones who do have regrets are the ones who registered for none, got a grammar result they were not expecting, and discovered in late October that the alternatives had already closed.

What those five waiting weeks are actually for

They are not dead time. They are the last uninterrupted preparation window before independent exams start on 21st November.

Your child has just sat a serious paper, which means they are match fit in a way they will not be again until Christmas. Vocabulary, comprehension and reasoning are all sitting right at the front of their mind. That is a good position to build from, and it decays if you leave it alone for five weeks.

So the honest answer to what you should do while you wait is this. Register for the schools on your list. Keep your child reading. And keep the reasoning ticking over, because reasoning is on almost every independent paper and it is taught in almost no primary school.

If you want a hand with it

Our independent school 11+ groups run at Catford, at Beckenham, and live online. They cover English and maths at independent entrance standard, verbal and non-verbal reasoning, two timed mock papers, and interview practice from November.

If you want to know honestly whether the time remaining is enough for your child, book a free assessment. An hour, a written report, and a fifteen minute call where we tell you the truth rather than what would be convenient for us.

/https://www.geekschool.co.uk/book-a-free-assessment-for-your-child/

Whatever you decide about tuition, put those two dates in your calendar. The 15th and the 16th of October. That part matters more than anything else in this post.