Upton, Merseyside · Wirral
Upton Hall School FCJ
All six of its oversubscription categories are defined by care status or by being Catholic or seeking a Catholic education — there's no generic 'any other qualified applicant' category at all, however high a non-Catholic girl scores.
Founded in 1849 by the Faithful Companions of Jesus, Upton Hall is one of two Catholic grammar schools on the Wirral peninsula that sit entirely outside the four-school 'Wirral Grammar Schools Consortium' shared by Calday Grange, West Kirby Grammar, and both Wirral Grammar Schools — confirmed directly on Wirral Council's own admissions page, which states plainly that Upton Hall and St Anselm's College run their own separate assessments. Academic ability functions as a gate here, not a ranking: any girl who clears the school's 'Qualifying Standard' enters a pool sorted by six ordered categories defined entirely by care status or Catholic faith/faith-seeking status, with exam score used only to break ties within a category. A family that isn't Catholic and isn't seeking a Catholic education doesn't fit any of the six categories, regardless of test score.
Key facts
- Gender
- girls
- Age range
- 11-18
- Region
- North West
- Local authority
- Wirral
- Established
- 1849
- DfE URN
- 137929
- Website
- https://www.uptonhallschool.co.uk
Admissions
- Admissions authority
- The school sets its own test and criteria
- Entrance test board
- Not named in any primary source — the school describes it only as its own 'Entrance Examination,' administered under external-exam-condition rules. Whether an external body sets or marks the papers wasn't confirmed.verify with school
No primary source names an external test-setting body for this school's own entrance exam.
- Test format
- Two papers sat the same day: Verbal Reasoning (50 minutes) and an English paper covering comprehension, spelling, punctuation and grammar (45 minutes). Scores are combined with an age-weighted allowance.
- Qualifying / pass mark
- Not published as a fixed number — the school's own admissions policy states only that candidates must achieve the 'Qualifying Standard,' including minimum standards in each part of the test, recalculated each cycle. Secondary tutoring sites report an age-standardised total around 236 for a recent cycle, and an unverified FOI-derived figure suggests September 2024 entry offers ranged roughly 236-295 depending on category — neither figure was independently confirmed from a primary source.verify with school
No numeric pass mark is published in the school's own policy. The commonly-cited figure of 236 and a wider 2024-entry FOI range (236-295) come only from secondary sources and an FOI archive that couldn't be directly accessed during this research.
- Superselective?
- No
The school's own admissions policy shows admission isn't decided by ranking all qualified applicants purely by score. Of those who clear the Qualifying Standard, places are allocated through six sequential faith and care-status categories, with exam score used only as a tiebreak within each category, not as the primary cross-applicant sort. This categorical, faith-priority structure is fundamentally different from how a conventional superselective operates. A secondary source separately describes the qualifying threshold itself as roughly the top 60% of test-takers, far more generous than the top 20-25% typically associated with superselective status, though this specific figure wasn't independently confirmed.
Catchment & priority criteria
None. No geographic catchment or priority area exists. Distance from school is used only as the final tiebreak within an oversubscription category, after exam score, never as an eligibility filter.
- Threshold applying to every applicant regardless of faith: must sit the entrance exam and achieve the Qualifying Standard in both papers — faith plays no role in clearing this threshold
- Only once cleared: looked-after and previously looked-after children
- Baptised Roman Catholic girls eligible for Free School Meals
- Baptised Roman Catholic girls not eligible for Free School Meals
- Children of staff with 2+ years' continuous employment
- Non-baptised girls whose parents wish them to have a Roman Catholic education, eligible for Free School Meals
- Non-baptised girls whose parents wish them to have a Roman Catholic education, not eligible for Free School Meals
- Within any category: higher entrance-exam score is the first tiebreak, then shortest walking distance to school
Results
| Year | Attainment 8 | GCSE 5+ Eng & Maths | Progress 8 | A*–A | A*–B |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | verify with school — DfE's Compare School Performance service was inaccessible during this research | verify with school | Not calculated — no KS2 baseline data for this cohort nationally | — | — |
| Calculated directly from the school's own published subject-by-subject grade tables (not an official DfE figure): grade 5+ in English Language alone 94.3%, in Maths alone 91.1%. A-level, similarly calculated: A*-A around 28%, A*-B around 62%. | |||||
| 2025 | 68.2 (secondary source, not independently confirmed against DfE directly, which was inaccessible during this research) | 89.9% (secondary source, same caveat — sanity-checked against the school's own single-subject figures of 93.4% English and 90.7% Maths, which are plausible against this joint figure but don't independently confirm it) | Not calculated — confirmed directly on DfE's own service, which lists no Progress 8 row at all for this school's current results. A stale figure of +0.91 circulates on at least one secondary aggregator and is almost certainly leftover pre-COVID data mis-attached to the current cohort — not used here. | 28% | 64% |
| Calculated directly from the school's own published subject-by-subject grade tables: A*-A around 28%, A*-B around 64%, not an official DfE-published percentage. | |||||
Ofsted
- Rating
- Outstanding, in every category: quality of education, behaviour and attitudes, personal development, leadership and management, and sixth-form provision. This was a full graded inspection under the pre-September 2024 framework — no inspection has occurred since. A separate Catholic Schools Inspectorate (Section 48) inspection, on behalf of the Diocese of Shrewsbury, also rated the school Grade 1 Outstanding overall in May 2025 — though its Collective Worship category's leadership sub-judgement specifically was Good, not Outstanding. This is a different inspectorate on a different cycle, not to be merged with the Ofsted rating.
- Date
- 28-29 June 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/137929
- 2. School's own Admission Policy 2027 (Approved) — https://www.uptonhallschool.co.uk/attachments/download.asp?file=3792&type=doc
- 3. Wirral Council — secondary education information for parents (confirms Upton Hall runs its own separate test) — https://www.wirral.gov.uk/schools-and-learning/school-admissions/secondary-education-information-parents
- 4. Ofsted report, inspected 28-29 June 2022 — https://files.ofsted.gov.uk/v1/file/50194316
- 5. Catholic Schools Inspectorate report, 15-16 May 2025 — https://www.uptonhallschool.co.uk/_site/data/files/00-2024-2025-updates/48E7280EEA57C1E2170AC60D7539F7E3.pdf
- 6. School's own Academic Achievements and Pupil Destinations 2024-2025 — https://www.uptonhallschool.co.uk/_site/data/files/2025-2026/3A1C9FC76A8267126685B198F51B7533.pdf
- 7. School's own History page — https://www.uptonhallschool.co.uk/page/?title=History&pid=41
Last updated 2026-09-01. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.