We present for the first time Washington CT_1_ photometry for 11 unstudied or poorly studied candidate star clusters. The selected objects are of small angular size, contain a handful of stars, and are projected towards the innermost regions of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The respective colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) were cleaned of the unavoidable star field contamination by taking advantage of a procedure which makes use of variable size CMD cells. This method has shown to be able to eliminate stochastic effects in the cluster CMDs caused by the presence of isolated bright stars, as well as to make a finer cleaning in the most populous CMD regions. Our results suggest that nearly one-third of the studied candidate star clusters would appear to be genuine physical systems.