Why Some Senior Schools Dropped Common Entrance — and What They Use Instead

For over a century, Common Entrance was simply how you got into an independent senior school at thirteen. Prep schools existed, in large part, to prepare children for it; senior schools built their intakes on it; the June sitting at the end of Year 8 was the hinge of the whole system. And then, within not much more than a decade, a run of well-known senior schools stopped requiring it — some loudly, some quietly — while others kept it, and prep schools carried on teaching it either way.

If you are a parent trying to plan around this, the confusing part is not that things changed but that they changed unevenly: the answer to "does my child need to sit CE?" now genuinely differs school by school and year by year. This article will not give you a roster of who requires what this season — any such list starts rotting the day it is published, and school policies are precisely the kind of fact that changes without notice. What it will give you is the dynamic: why the shift happened, what schools use instead, and how to read your own school's position. Understand the dynamic and every individual policy becomes legible.

The short version

Common Entrance did not fail. It was stranded — by the pre-test.

CE was built to select: a common exam that let any senior school assess any prep school's pupils at the point of entry. But from roughly the 2010s onwards, senior schools moved their real selecting earlier, onto pre-tests sat in Year 6 or 7 — the ISEB Common Pre-Test chief among them. Once a school's places were effectively allocated two years before CE was sat, the exam was no longer choosing anyone. It had become a confirmation step — while still carrying the full costs of a selection exam: a syllabus that shaped two years of prep school teaching, a high-stakes June for children whose places were already settled, and a marking exercise whose outcome was, for the overwhelming majority, a foregone conclusion.

An exam doing confirmation work at selection prices is an exam waiting for someone to ask why. Eventually, schools did.

The pressures, one by one

1. The pre-test took the selecting job

This is the load-bearing cause and the one that explains the timing. Senior schools wanted certainty earlier — for their own planning, and because families wanted answers earlier. Pre-testing gave it to them. But every school that moved to firm-in-practice offers off a Year 6/7 pre-test hollowed out its own CE requirement: the exam stopped changing outcomes, and requirements that don't change outcomes are the first to be questioned.

2. The curriculum argument

Prep school heads had chafed for years at how tightly the CE syllabuses scripted Years 7 and 8 — two years that, freed from exam preparation, could hold broader projects, deeper reading, more creative work at exactly the age children can take it. Once CE was no longer selecting, "the exam justifies the syllabus" stopped answering the objection. Schools that dropped the requirement almost always cited curriculum freedom as a reason; whatever weight you give the stated motive, the argument only became winnable when the exam's selecting function had already gone.

3. Wellbeing

A serious exam season for thirteen-year-olds is a cost. It is a defensible cost when the exam decides something. When it doesn't, subjecting Year 8 to a high-stakes June — mock seasons, revision timetables, exam-hall pressure — for places already held began to look, to a growing number of heads, like ceremony purchased with children's stress. The wellbeing argument was not new; like the curriculum argument, it became decisive only after the selecting had moved.

4. The pandemic ran the experiment

When schools closed in the spring of 2020, the summer's Common Entrance could not run as normal — and Year 9 entry happened anyway. Senior schools admitted their incoming year on the information they already had: pre-test results, school reports, their own judgement. For schools already questioning CE, this was the natural experiment that settled it: the system had functioned without the exam. Several prominent moves away from CE followed shortly after; among the most reported, Westminster School and St Paul's School announced in 2021 that they would no longer require Common Entrance for entry. (That is a dated statement about announcements made at the time, not a claim about any school's policy today — always check the current admissions page.)

5. The quiet economics

Marked by each receiving school, CE consumed real staff time at the busiest point of the school year — to confirm decisions already made. Nobody dropped CE primarily to save marking hours, but when the other arguments were in the room, this one nodded along.

What replaced it

Schools that dropped the CE requirement did not replace it with nothing; they replaced it with things they already had, plus targeted additions:

The pre-test result, which was doing the selecting anyway.
Their own entrance papers — where a school still wants an exam-shaped look at candidates, it sets its own: typically fewer subjects than CE (often English and maths, sometimes more), marked internally, pitched to its own intake.
Reports from the current school — sustained attainment and conduct across Years 7–8, which many heads will tell you predicts a child's Year 9 better than one June's scripts.
Interviews — already standard at most selective schools, and carrying more weight where exams carry less. (What interviews actually assess is its own article.)
Project-based work — ISEB itself has developed project-style alternatives for the Year 6–8 span, and some schools value extended project work in Years 7–8 as evidence of exactly the independent study habits senior schools want.

Notice what is missing from that list: anything a family needs to add. For most children, the post-CE requirement is "keep working well where you are" — which is easier to satisfy and harder to game, and that is rather the point.

Why CE is still very much alive

It would be easy to read the above as an obituary. It isn't, for two reasons.

Plenty of senior schools still require CE. The moves away have been real but partial; a substantial number of destinations kept the requirement, and for families headed there, what CE consists of remains entirely practical knowledge.

Prep schools kept teaching it anyway — including for children whose destination schools no longer ask for it. This is the development outsiders find oddest and prep school heads find obvious: the CE framework gives Years 7 and 8 a structured, rigorous, externally-benchmarked curriculum with a serious set of exams at the end, and many schools judge that worth keeping on its educational merits. A child can therefore perfectly well sit Common Entrance in June without any senior school requiring it — as a capstone rather than a gate. If your child's prep school does this, it is not a bureaucratic error; it is a curriculum choice, and arguably a good one: arriving at a demanding senior school with real exam experience, gained in a low-stakes June, is a quiet advantage.

What this means for your family

Four practical conclusions:

Never assume; always check. Whether your child's target school requires CE, its own papers, or neither is answerable only from that school's current admissions material. Policies have changed within short windows; treat every secondhand account, including dated statements in this article, as a prompt to verify rather than a fact to rely on.
Expect asymmetry across your list. With several target schools, you may find one requires CE, another its own English and maths papers, a third nothing beyond reports. The prep school will navigate this — it does so for a whole year group annually — but ask early how the combination will be handled.
Do not let "no CE" mean "no Year 8". Where the formal exam has gone, reports have taken its place — which means the condition on the offer is, in effect, the whole of Years 7 and 8. Steady work matters more, not less, under the replacement regime.
Read the direction of travel, gently. The system has moved selection early and made confirmation lighter-touch. Nothing about that trend is guaranteed to continue, but a family planning today should weight the pre-test years — Years 5 to 7 — as the consequential ones, whatever June holds.

FAQ

Why did senior schools move away from Common Entrance?

Because pre-tests sat in Year 6/7 had already taken over the selecting. Once places were effectively decided years before CE, the exam was doing confirmation work at exam-level cost — two years of syllabus-bound teaching and a high-stakes June for thirteen-year-olds whose places were already settled.