The fog every Sutton parent knows
Your child comes home with a mock score. Sixty eight per cent. Is that good? Is that Wilson's good? Is that "she will be fine", or is it "we have twelve months and we are quietly losing"?
Nobody tells you. The tutor says she is doing well. The school says she is a lovely girl. The forums say your child should already be on paper forty. And you lie awake doing the only maths that matters to you, which is whether the person you love most is going to sit in a hall one Tuesday morning and find out, in a couple of hours, that you missed something.
That fog is not an accident. Vagueness sells another term of tutoring. Very few people in this industry are paid to tell you the truth, because the truth might end the invoice.
A score counts the mistakes. It never names them. Eight questions wrong for the same reason is one problem, not eight, and it is a problem you can finish.
What the SET actually asks
Before anything else, know what you are preparing for. The Sutton schools publish this themselves, and it is not what most 11 Plus material assumes.
The Selective Eligibility Test
- Two papers: one maths, one English. Both multiple choice.
- Between 40 and 50 minutes each, with a break in between.
- Answers go on a separate sheet, filling in a lozenge from A to E. Working is done on the question paper itself.
- No verbal reasoning and no non-verbal reasoning.
- Marked as a standardised score with an adjustment for age, not as a raw mark.
The shared second stage exam
- Wilson's, Wallington County Grammar and Sutton Grammar share one paper, so an eligible boy sits it once rather than three times.
- Two papers, maths and English, and this time not multiple choice. Working and writing are marked.
- Around 45 minutes to an hour each.
- The paper is common, the criteria are not. Each school decides its own, so a child can pass for one of the three and not another.
- Sutton Grammar publishes that it weights the four standardised scores in the ratio 2:2:3:3, so the second stage carries more than the first.
Applying to Wilson's in particular? The test is the same, but the school runs its own timetable around it, including two separate applications, an aptitude assessment day and priority places most families never hear about. Those are on the Wilson's School entry page.
If your child is grinding non-verbal reasoning for the SET, they are revising for a paper that does not exist
The schools state plainly that the SET does not include verbal or non-verbal reasoning. Plenty of 11 Plus material is written for Kent, Buckinghamshire or Birmingham, where reasoning papers are real and matter. In Sutton those hours buy nothing. This is the single most common way we see families waste a year, and it costs nothing to fix once you know.
What we give you first: the honest mirror
WAJD does the thing almost nobody does. It tells you where your child actually stands, before you have paid us anything, because we do not charge.
Not a score. Scores are close to useless. A score tells you she got eight wrong. It does not tell you that she got all eight wrong for the same reason, and that the reason has a name.
Every wrong answer in WAJD is tagged to an authored mistake, so the marking does not stop at "incorrect". It says what the child did and why it made sense to her at the time. Here is a real one, exactly as it appears in our library.
That is the moment we are actually selling. The fog lifts, and you stop being frightened of a vague thing and start being in charge of a specific one. Parents describe it the same way every time: relief, then a flash of anger that nobody told them sooner.
We can do this because the mistakes were written by hand, one at a time, over months. There are 471 of them published free across 104 pages you can read right now without an account, including the ones that decide the SET: multi-step problems, word meanings, number patterns and pacing an exam.
Then the forge
Knowing is not enough. Wilson's does not reward insight, it rewards a child who is fast, calm and correct under a clock, against a hall full of other prepared children. So the honest mirror hands over to the workshop, and the named mistake becomes the thing the practice is built around.
Retrieval, not rereading
Every session pulls answers out of her head rather than putting notes in front of her. Rereading feels like learning and is not.
Revision cardsSpacing that survives to September
Topics come back on a schedule set by how well she knew them last time, so what she learns in March is still there on the morning.
Study plannerMastery gates
She does not move on while the crack is still there. A named mistake stays on the list until it is gone twice over, not once by luck.
Targeted testDifficulty that follows her
The questions find her level as she plays and stay at the edge of what she can do, which is the only place anyone gets stronger.
Challenge ArenaThe clock becomes furniture
Forty printable papers with time limits and answer sheets, so a timed room stops being the thing that goes wrong on the day.
Free papersMotivation built as engineering
Streaks that allow rest days, so a missed Sunday does not read as failure. Focus lengths scaled to her age. A wind down at the end, because a burnt out child passes nothing.
How it worksCut, not polished
The industry sells you polish. A stone goes in dull, comes out shiny, and you pay by the hour for the buffing.
That is the wrong picture. A cutter does not add anything to a diamond. Every gram of what makes it worth something was already in there. What the cutter does is remove, one named flaw at a time, in a fixed order, until the thing that was always inside is finally visible from the outside.
Your child does not need to be made brilliant. She needs the specific things standing in the way to be found, named and taken off, one at a time, with enough months left to do it calmly.
What we do not promise
- We cannot promise a place at Wilson's, Sutton Grammar or Nonsuch. Nobody honestly can, and anybody who does is selling you something.
- We do not sell tutoring, so there is no upsell waiting at the end of the diagnosis. That is exactly why we can afford to tell you the truth in it.
- We do not copy real school papers. Every paper and question on WAJD is original, written by us.
- We are not the schools. Confirm dates, criteria and arrangements on their own admissions pages before you plan around anything here.
What we can promise is the thing that actually keeps you up at night. On the night before the SET you will be calm, not because you are hoping, but because you know item by item what she can do and what she cannot, and the list of what she cannot has been shrinking in front of you with dates against it. Whatever the outcome, you will not sit there wondering whether you missed something.
Questions parents ask
When is the Sutton Selective Eligibility Test?
For entry in September 2027 the schools have published the SET as Tuesday 15 September 2026, with second stage examinations on Saturday 26 September 2026 for girls and Saturday 3 October 2026 for boys. Confirm with your school, as dates are set fresh each year.
Which schools use the SET?
Sutton Grammar School, Wilson's School, Wallington County Grammar School, Nonsuch High School for Girls and Wallington High School for Girls. Passing the SET makes a child eligible to sit a second stage exam. Each school then applies its own criteria.
Does the SET include verbal or non-verbal reasoning?
No. The schools state that the test does not include either. It is a maths paper and an English paper, both multiple choice. Reasoning practice is useful for other regions and for general thinking, but it is not what Sutton is testing.
Does my child sit a separate second stage exam for every school?
Wilson's, Wallington County Grammar and Sutton Grammar share one second stage examination, so an eligible child sits it once. The paper is common but the criteria are not, so passing for one school does not mean passing for all three.
How is it marked?
As standardised scores with an adjustment for age, so a summer born child is not judged against an autumn born child on raw marks. Sutton Grammar publishes that it combines four standardised scores across the two stages, weighted 2:2:3:3.
Is WAJD Academy really free?
Yes. Practice, papers, answer sheets and the mistake library are free, with no card details and no ads. Creating an account is optional and only exists so progress is remembered between sessions.
We are not in Sutton. Is this still useful?
The method is the same everywhere, but the papers differ by region. Start with the regional guide, which covers Kent, Essex, Birmingham, Buckinghamshire, Northern Ireland and the rest, including the areas where reasoning papers do count.
Where the facts on this page come from
Test dates, paper formats and weightings are taken from the schools' own admissions pages: Wilson's School, Year 7 applying for a place, Sutton Grammar School, Selective Eligibility Test and Sutton Grammar School admissions FAQs. Checked on 2 September 2026. WAJD Academy is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any of these schools, and school names are used only to describe the tests they publish.