Alternative School scramble

[Trixiebell06]

Hi , my child is in year 11 so will be sitting GCSE exams this year . However there is a criteria for grades to enable the children to stay for A levels if these grades arenot obtained they have to find an alternative school
My child needs to improve their grades a couple of notches up to remain at the school .

We have been looking at alternative schools in case things don’t go to plan but we are really stuck for good schools
if my child doesn’t obtain the grades do we start applying for schools and if accepted turn them down if our child obtains the grades
Yes we have left it pretty late

Any advice ? Has anyone been in this situation?

Is it a state or private school?
Normally you apply for sixth form places in the first term of Y11 - you can accept multiple state school offers and then enrol once the GCSE results are out

Not sure about where you are, but round here you would have been expected to have applied for sixth form places by now.
I would suggest it's worth proactively getting in contact to see if anywhere you are interested in is still open for applications. Otherwise you will have to ring around after your child gets their GCSE results. At this point you will most likely have to be very flexible - both on things like distance/type of setting and possibly subject choice as you will need to slot into any available space. If he only just misses grades, there may also be some option for flexibility at his current school (certainly worth a conversation anyway).

I'd also suggest you need to think about what you mean by a "good" school. If you mean that ones with the best A Level results, they are probably also the ones that have the highest entry criteria.

There tend to be two sorts of grade requirements for sixth form:

1. High, because the school/college knows it can fill its places and wants to keep out those who might not get top A-level grade.
2. Moderate, because experience shows that those with grades below that tend not to cope with the A-level course.

If your school's are in the latter category, then consider different courses as well as different institutions. BTec might be a better fit.

Sixth form application seems to work quite differently from area to area. The school ought to be able to point you at advice.

One thing to be aware of is that if one of the missed requirements is a 4 in either English or maths, that may rule out quite a number of sixth forms, as they would have to provide a GCSE retake class - it obviously isn't financially viable to run that for small numbers, so it's much simpler to tell those students to go elsewhere.