St Marylebone GCSEs v A levels

[runningpram]

I am looking at sec schools for my DD. Just looking at the Sunday Times list of top 100 state schools, I noticed that a couple of sought after London secondaries don’t appear, including St M and Greycoats.

The A level A star to B rate is great at both and comparable to private/selectives on the top school list. However for St M the top grade GCSE rate is languishing behind these schools, at 47pc, not sure what is happening for GC.

I appreciate St M is comprehensive and there are lots of selectives in the list but there are other comps listed too.
Would be great for some insight from St M parents - what goes on at sixth form to make the A levels so great?. Do lots of girls who have attended Year 7 get booted out and they bring in lots of bright kids from elsewhere?

If you go to the DfE website, you can look at the prior attainment for the GCSE cohort for all mainstream state schools - is that 47% evenly spread across the intake? How evenly spread was that years intake across low / medium / high prior attainment?

For all state schools with a sixth form, year 12 is a new point of entry and so the other place to look is the overall and subject specific grades required. A levels are the 'academic' end of the Level 3 spectrum, whereas a comprehensive school cannot apply academic entry criteria to its whole intake at yr7, even if some places are awarded in that way, so the requirements set to start an A level course will be beyond some of the year 11 in most / all comprehensive schools.

Like all schools considerate to be “top” of the comprehensive sector they have lots of private school kids coming in for A-levels.

they are selective for a level. so those with less than min. grades can't stay on and as frogusha said, they take in other students

As PP have stated, a lot of comprehensive schools set minimum entry requirements for A levels. DD's school was fully comprehensive in year 7, but were pretty selective for year 12. It is the only school in our LA with a 6th form and it is over subscribed, so they do set an entry criteria.

Roughly half of the pupils stay on for 6th form and the rest go on to 6th form college for A levels or further education college for more vocational qualifications.