West Kirby, Merseyside · Wirral

Calday Grange Grammar School

Its 'Good' Ofsted rating dates to a full inspection in January 2016, carried forward unchanged through two later ungraded visits that explicitly issue no grade — not a recent assessment, despite the most recent visit being December 2024.

Founded in 1636, Calday Grange is one of four non-Catholic Wirral grammar schools sharing the council-administered 'Wirral Admissions Test' — alongside West Kirby Grammar, Wirral Grammar School for Boys, and Wirral Grammar School for Girls, all also researched in this project. The two Catholic Wirral grammars, St Anselm's College and Upton Hall FCJ, run entirely separate tests. Wirral Council states plainly there's no fixed pass mark for the shared test — the qualifying score is set fresh each year after marking, undercutting any figure quoted online as a stable number. Uniquely clear among the schools researched so far: the school's own policy uses explicit pass/fail language and then allocates places purely by category (care status, medical need, Free School Meals, siblings, distance) with no score-ranking step at all.

Key facts

Gender: boys
Age range: 11-18
Region: North West
Local authority: Wirral
Established: 1636
DfE URN: 139144
Website: https://calday.co.uk

Admissions

Admissions authority: The school sets its own test and criteria
Entrance test board: Quest Assessments, as of the September 2026 test sitting — switched from GL Assessment, per Wirral Council's own admissions page.
Test format: Two test papers sat in the final year of primary school, covering Verbal Reasoning, Non-Verbal Reasoning, and Mathematics. Scores are age-adjusted into a Standardised Age Score and summed.
Qualifying / pass mark: Not a fixed figure — Wirral Council's own admissions page states explicitly there is no set pass mark, and the qualifying score is decided by the admissions authority only after all tests are marked each year. A figure of 236 is widely quoted by tutoring sites for a recent cycle but isn't confirmed as current or stable.partly verified
236 comes only from tutoring/aggregator sites, not Wirral Council or the school directly, and Wirral Council's own page confirms there's no fixed pass mark — this figure shouldn't be presented as a stable current number.
Superselective?: No

Catchment & priority criteria

None. No defined catchment area or zone exists. Shortest walking distance is used only within the Free School Meals priority category and as the final tiebreak among qualifying applicants, not as an eligibility boundary.

Looked-after and previously looked-after children
Children with a valid medical or social reason supported in writing by a doctor, social worker, or other appropriate professional
Up to 15 places for children on Free School Meals who meet the qualifying score, ranked by shortest walking distance
Siblings of children who will be at the school at the time of admission
Shortest walking distance from the school, via local authority computer mapping
Random allocation to break any remaining ties

Results

Year	Attainment 8	GCSE 5+ Eng & Maths	Progress 8	A*–A	A*–B
2024	verify with school	verify with school	A figure of +0.31 circulates via secondary aggregators, but its cohort year wasn't clearly stated by those sources and couldn't be independently confirmed — this cohort predates the COVID-era gap, so a genuine DfE figure should exist even though it wasn't verified here.	37.9%	65.4%
School's own press release (a different metric from DfE's pupil-level measures): 43.3% of GCSE grades were in the 9-7 band, 85.4% in the 9-5 band, EBacc entry 86.8%. A-level (school's own press release): average grade B, average points per entry 39.84, pass rate 99.5%. A-A 37.9%, A-B 65.4%.
2025	verify with school	verify with school	Not calculated — no KS2 baseline data for this cohort nationally	43.6%	72.7%
A-level (moderately confident but not independently pinned to a specific dated primary-source article): average grade B, average points per entry 42.34, pass rate 99.5%, A-A around 43.6%, A-B around 72.7%.

Ofsted

Rating: Good — this rating dates to a full graded inspection in January 2016 and has been carried forward unchanged through two later ungraded visits (2019 and December 2024) that explicitly confirm but do not re-grade the school. The December 2024 report states outright: 'We do not give graded judgements on an ungraded inspection.' This is not the new report-card framework — no fresh graded assessment has occurred since 2016.
Date: 17-18 December 2024 (most recent inspection activity; the underlying grade dates to 19 January 2016)
Report: Read the full report

Sources

1. DfE Get Information About Schools — URN, status, gender, LA — https://get-information-schools.service.gov.uk/Establishments/Establishment/Details/139144
2. School's own Admissions Policy, entry September 2027 — https://calday.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/cggs_adm_sept2027-admissions-policy-for-entry-in-september-2027_approved.pdf
3. Wirral Council — grammar school assessment page — https://wirral.gov.uk/schools-and-learning/school-admissions/step-by-step/apply-secondary-school-place/assessment-grammar
4. Ofsted report, ungraded inspection 17-18 December 2024 — https://files.ofsted.gov.uk/v1/file/50268366
5. Ofsted report, graded inspection 19 January 2016 (Good) — https://files.ofsted.gov.uk/v1/file/2540373
6. School's own GCSE results announcement, 22 August 2024 — https://calday.co.uk/calday-grange-grammar-school-celebrates-strong-gcse-results/
7. School's own A-level results announcement, 15 August 2024 — https://calday.co.uk/calday-grange-grammar-school-celebrates-outstanding-a-level-results/

Last updated 2026-09-01. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.