Wiltshire grammar schools & catchment areas, in plain English.
Wiltshire has just 2 grammar schools and both are in Salisbury — Bishop Wordsworth’s for boys and South Wilts for girls, a few minutes’ walk apart. Each runs its own 11+, each takes 160 in Year 7, and each draws a designated catchment around the city with straight-line distance breaking ties. This page explains what to register for and when, and lets you check your postcode against both.
Check your postcode against both Wiltshire grammars
See whether you fall inside the designated catchment, your distance to each school and your eligibility — free, no account needed.
Real, published boundaries and the latest distance cut-offs — not straight-line estimates.
How Salisbury grammar admissions work.
There is no Wiltshire 11+. Each school sets its own test — GL Assessment papers in both cases, though not the same combination — and you register directly with the school by 1 September, at the very start of Year 6. A child applying to both sits both.
You then name the school on your home council’s application form by 31 October, which is a separate step and a separate deadline. Offers go out on 1 March.
Reaching the qualifying standard makes a child eligible rather than admitted: both schools are oversubscribed, drawing several applications for every place, so the criteria below decide.
One designated area, two schools.
Both schools use the same shape of rule: qualifying children whose permanent home is inside the school’s designated catchment area around Salisbury are placed ahead of those outside it, and straight-line distance then breaks ties — measured to the Exeter Street gate at Bishop Wordsworth’s, and to South Wilts’ Stratford Road site.
That makes the boundary genuinely binary for families in the surrounding villages: a few hundred metres decides whether you are ranked with the city or behind everyone in it. Because the area reaches into Hampshire and Dorset in places, plenty of families who do not think of themselves as Salisbury residents are inside it — and some inside Wiltshire are not.
The rest of Wiltshire — Swindon, Chippenham, Trowbridge, Devizes and the north of the county — is entirely comprehensive; these 2 are the county’s complete set of grammar schools. GrammarBound maps both catchments and the distance tie-break — open the map or check your postcode above.
Both Wiltshire grammar schools.
Bishop Wordsworth’s and South Wilts, both in Salisbury. Each links to a plain-English admissions guide with that school’s exact catchment, test and deadlines.