Sidcup, Greater London · Bexley
Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School
In its own sworn evidence to a Schools Adjudicator, the school stated plainly: 'the vast majority of our students are offered a place due to the distance criteria' — not by how far above the pass bar they scored.
Opened in 1931 and co-educational since 1973, this school's admissions authority status was legally tested and confirmed in a 2022 Schools Adjudicator determination: the school's own single-academy trust, not Bexley Council, is the admissions authority, though the council administers the shared borough-wide 'Bexley Selection Test' and co-sets the annual pass/fail threshold via a joint panel of council officers and headteachers. That legal ruling also revealed something distinctive about how this school allocates places: once a child clears the shared eligibility bar (around a third of test-takers do), admission here is decided overwhelmingly by home-to-school distance and siblings, not by score — a genuinely different mechanism from a superselective school, and worth checking against how the other three Bexley grammar schools in this project apply their own version of the shared 'top scorer' category, since the exact split between score-rank and distance may not be identical across all four.
Key facts
- Gender
- co-ed
- Age range
- 11-18
- Region
- London
- Local authority
- Bexley
- Established
- 1931
- DfE URN
- 137423
- Website
- https://www.csgrammar.com
Admissions
- Admissions authority
- The school sets its own test and criteria
- Entrance test board
- Named inconsistently across sources: a 2022 Schools Adjudicator determination names the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM); several 2025 tutoring guides name Quest Assessments; the school's own current site references 'the test provider, GL' (GL Assessment). This may reflect genuine provider turnover over time rather than a single error, but wasn't reconciled during this research.sources conflict
Named differently across three sources spanning different years (CEM in 2022, Quest Assessments per 2025 tutoring guides, GL Assessment per the school's current site) — possibly genuine provider turnover, not resolved.
- Test format
- The shared 'Bexley Selection Test,' administered by the council on behalf of all four Bexley grammar schools so children sit it once: two multiple-choice papers of around 50 minutes each in one session, covering verbal reasoning and English comprehension, non-verbal reasoning, and mathematical/numerical reasoning, weighted 50% verbal, 25% numerical, 25% non-verbal, age-standardised (borough average score around 200).
- Qualifying / pass mark
- No fixed numeric pass mark is published, by explicit design — confirmed independently by both the school and Bexley Council, which state the score needed to be 'deemed selective' is agreed jointly by the council and the four grammar schools' Selection Panel each year. Borough-wide pass rates: for September 2026 entry, 5,866 children sat the test and 2,070 (35%) were deemed selective, competing for 818 places across all four Bexley grammar schools combined.
- Superselective?
- No
Confirmed with high confidence directly from the school's own sworn evidence in a 2022 Schools Adjudicator determination (a legally binding primary source): 'the vast majority of our students are offered a place due to the distance criteria following being deemed selective.' Once a child clears the single shared eligibility threshold, this school's own places are allocated overwhelmingly by home-to-school distance (around 78% of intake, per the adjudicator's own admissions data) and siblings (around 20%), with only a small number of places going to the shared borough-wide 'top scorer' category. Per the local authority's own submission in that same case, the number of students admitted via the top-scorer route is low across all four Bexley grammar schools. This is worth flagging against this project's Beths Grammar School write-up, whose own current admissions policy document describes its equivalent 'top scorer' criterion in terms that suggest a much larger share of its own intake — up to 180 of its 192 places — is allocated by pure score rank rather than distance. Whether this reflects a genuine difference between how individual Bexley schools apply the shared mechanism, or a change since this school's 2022 legal case, wasn't resolved and is worth checking directly against each school's current policy before treating either description as the template for the whole borough.
Catchment & priority criteria
No defined catchment zone or boundary. Home-to-school straight-line distance is used as the dominant oversubscription criterion among applicants who cleared the eligibility threshold, measured as of the National Offer Day distances published by Bexley Council.
- Looked-after and previously looked-after children
- Children with an EHC Plan naming the school
- The highest-scoring 'deemed selective' children across the shared Bexley test, in a borough-wide 'top scorer' category described by the council as yielding low numbers at any single school
- Siblings attending the school at the time of application
- Children of staff employed at the school for 2+ years
- Remaining places allocated by straight-line home-to-school distance, closest first — the route that accounts for the large majority of the intake
- Tie-break: independently verified random allocation
Results
| Year | Attainment 8 | GCSE 5+ Eng & Maths | Progress 8 | A*–A | A*–B |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 76 | 97.4% | +0.82 ('Well above average', confidence interval +0.61 to +1.03) — this was the last cohort with a calculable Progress 8 figure before the COVID-era gap | — | — |
| A-level (239 students): average grade B (41.49 points per entry, Bexley LA average C+/34.99, England average C+/34.38), retention 98.4%. | |||||
| 2025 | 75.6 | 98.9% | Not calculated — confirmed directly on DfE's own page as the nationwide COVID-era gap for this cohort | verify with school | verify with school |
| A-level (258 students): average grade B (41.22 points per entry, Bexley LA average B-/35.75, England average B-/36.1), value-added progress score +0.02 ('Average', confidence interval -0.06 to +0.09), retention 99.6%. 27.2% achieved AAB+ with 2 facilitating subjects (Bexley LA 16.5%, England 17.5%). | |||||
Ofsted
- Rating
- Good overall (this was a full graded inspection under the pre-September 2024 framework — no inspection has occurred since, so this remains the current rating).
- Date
- 13 December 2022
- 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/137423
- 2. Office of the Schools Adjudicator determination ADA3935, 12 October 2022 — https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63497bbb8fa8f53465d139f9/ADA3935_Chislehurst_and_Sidcup_Grammar_School_Bexley_12_October_2022.pdf
- 3. School's own Admissions Year 7 page — https://www.csgrammar.com/admissions/admissions-year-7
- 4. London Borough of Bexley — About the Bexley Selection Test — https://www.bexley.gov.uk/services/schools-and-education/selection-tests/about-test
- 5. Ofsted report, inspected 13 December 2022 — https://files.ofsted.gov.uk/v1/file/50207377
- 6. School's own History page — https://www.csgrammar.com/about-us/our-history
- 7. DfE Compare School Performance — Progress 8, 2023 and 2024 — https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/school/137423/chislehurst-and-sidcup-grammar-school/secondary/progress-measures-for-2023-and-2024
- 8. DfE Compare School Performance — A-level qualifications — https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/school/137423/chislehurst-and-sidcup-grammar-school/16-to-18/advanced-level-qualifications
Last updated 2026-09-01. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.