How do Sixth Form applications work?

[ItsPeggyOlson]

DC is Year 10 and doesn’t want to stay on in current school post-GCSEs. How do we go about researching sixth forms and when do you need to apply? We are in London so the possibilities are vast.

I know school will give pupils info, but are they likely to do this in Year 10? I’d like to get a head start with open evenings but am unfamiliar with schools beyond our borough or how the system works in England.

A Levels TBD, possibly law or biology for uni.

I don't know about London, but am South East. Schools will sometimes do Sixth Form Open Days/Evening in the summer of Year 10...others wait until the autumn term of Year 11.

Application process will generally be from autumn term of Year 11. There may be meetings/taster days etc..generally before Y11 study leave... But then generally down to results

He can apply for as many as he likes. And at any distance.

Look out for course specs, entry requirements and if there are any other entry criteria.

Noone will think you are put of place emailing schools now to ask about open events...just be clear which intake Year (so 2028 in your case) so they point you at the right time )it might be .."check our website in May 27 for Sept 28 Open Events" - but it gives you a timeline.

Nothing to stop you going now to any autumn ones..but you will be a year early, so courses etc may change for 2028 intake.

Encourage your DS to get the best results he can...it keeps his options/choices far wider .

Good luck.

Thank you for taking the time to share so much detail, this is very useful. Much appreciated.

Each area will have a process you complete around October of year 11. Where we lived when my dc did it they used UCAS (called ucas progress for 6th form)

I am in Hants. We went to some open days autumn y10 just to get a feel, then more serious looks summer y10/autumn y11.

You can apply to as many as you want.
Have a plan B and plan C in case results aren't as high as predicted.

Thanks for the October of Year 11 info. So we would presumably need to have a list to where to apply by then.

We’ve just been through it, although on a much smaller scale due to where we live and there only being a small number of available options.
It’s really bizarre! Each school sets its own process and has its own criteria. There is no centralisation at all. It is up to you how many schools you apply to and which one you end up accepting.
All of the 6th forms themselves are very different too. DD is still pretty much in uniform and has to be on the school site from 8:30 - 3:30 each day. One of her really good friends who has gone to a different school but also doing 3 A levels can wear what she wants, only has to be there for the morning on Monday, the afternoon on Tuesday, all day Weds & Thurs and nothing on Friday.

@FoxandDuck Knowing all the processes are different will save me a lot of confusion - thank you for mentioning this!

Where we are, also London, 6th form Open Days are next month so it's a good time to start looking around. Details are on the school/college websites and sometimes you will need to book tickets. Very oversubscribed settings may get full so it's worth doing it asap. At my DS's 6th form they had 2,000 applications!

Grammar schools and private schools also have 6th form places come up for very high achieving students. You're talking a grade average of 7-9. Sometimes the DC may also need to sit an additional entry test.

My DS has just started 6th form and he has to be in at 8.30 four days a week so although it is true that they can go anywhere, that is something to consider. My DS already has an enormous amount of homework so I wouldn't want to add a long commute into that.

The 6th form application system is very odd as others have said. If you are an external student applying to another state school that has a 6th form, the internal students get priority. So once he gets his results on results day in the morning, he will then need to rush over to his first choice to enrol. Providing he has met the entry criteria. It may be that by the time he gets there, the courses he wants to enrol on are full. I have known that happen. There's a lot of competition where I am in London for a couple of highly regarded state sixth forms.

Each setting will also have somewhere on their website what their entry requirements are for each A level course. For A levels it's usually a minimum of 6 in the subject they want to study (7 in maths) and 5s/6s in maths/English.

You are definitely doing the right thing thinking about it now.

Also in London and just gone through the process for Dd1.

For us most applications had to be in January not October as a PP said. Some schools that have internal exams - Latymer Grammar & Harris Westminster are a couple that come to mind - had earlier deadlines but a few were later. Open days were in Autumn of Y11. But DD was really undecided about whether or not she was going to leave and what subjects she wanted so we applied for quite a few that we didn't see and just kicked the decision making further down the line. By the summer, she had a better idea of what she wanted to study, and one of the subjects was only offered at a handful of places so that helped narrow it down.

One of the colleges she'd applied to did an interview before giving offers. Most of the schools also run taster days in the last week of June and first week of July for offer holders. These are really helpful for giving them a taster of subjects as well as the school especially if they're thinking of doing something new like economics or psychology.

You also need predicted grades from the current school to apply so it's an added incentive to do well in Y10 mocks so they can give you higher grades, depending on where you're aiming for.

On results day, we found schools had allocated time slots when you could enrol so it wasn't a mad dash for us as @Toomanyminifigs says above. Some high achieving colleges did allow the students with the highest grades to enrol first, so I guess that is a factor.

This isn’t strictly true. In S & W Yorks we applied to school sixth forms and colleges individually. There may be UCAS /other collective application systems in some places, but not all.

Thank you all for all the additional details. Gosh I am starting to panic now about oversubscription and a dash to the college on results day. Good to know about additional tests too. Time to get researching. Thanks again to everyone who has helped.

The point about predicted grades from Year 10 mocks is also hugely helpful, thank you.

It's not your 10 mocks -it's October mocks year 11

Which lots of schools don't do.

So maybe best to say 'best that your most recent set of internal exams leading to predicted grades are good'.

OP - you could move to Hants, vast 6th form colleges, no rushing anywhere.

At DS's school, on results day the internal students were let in first. They picked up their grades and if they had met the requirements they had already been pre-enrolled (based on their last mock results) and could quickly leave to celebrate.

The internal students who missed out their required results were triaged in the hall. I guess this will have been to see if there were other courses they could do or to offer support for their next steps. Conversely, those students who had done better than expected are encouraged to maybe rethink their options.

Then at about 10.30 the school opened for external students who had applied. They were queuing outside and had been given numbers. The numbers were based on their position in the queue not their results.

Now at DS's school the entry requirements to do say chemistry are a 6 in chemistry and a 6 in maths. So you could have the situation where number 31 in the queue has 6s and is enrolled then number 32 has 9s but the course is full so they don't get on.
Having said that, as there aren't strict limits on sixth form numbers, I wonder if a setting would take the 9's student anyway. Several kids don't even turn up to start so there's probably a fair bit of flexibility.
Some popular courses like psychology are always massively oversubscribed though every year and they are full within a couple of hours. Hence the rush.

I believe grammar schools operate a different system based on results. My DS is at a 'normal' state school.

Just a point re 'interviews' - for application to a state school sixth form, the school can only hold an individual meeting with an applicant to discuss their intended subject choices and e.g. suitability of those choices for intended further study or career. The school must not use these meetings as part of the actual decision making process as to whether a place is offered.

Independent schools and stand alone sixth forms are not bound by the Admissions Code, and can actually 'interview' as part of their application process.

This is really true - it’s so different to all other education type applications: primary school, secondary school and uni applications are all very centralised and sixth form places are just totally different!

In our bit of Surrey, you can apply to as many as you want, then weirdly, you can accept as many as you want (we didn’t have to list a firm / insurance, or put them in order of preference or anything). You could hold all these acceptances till after you get your gcse results then choose which one to go and actually enroll at. And this was the process - it wasn’t sneaky or anything to accept eg three of them.

It must be a nightmare for schools / colleges to organise. And I would say that for us, all of the places we were applying to were big sixth form colleges as barely any schools have sixth forms round here. So I’m totally unfamiliar with differences that might come up when applying to smaller school sixth forms.

Same here.

I found it really odd that you could hedge your bets and accept offers from multiple places.

Must make planning numbers so hard.

At Dd's school, the Y11 mocks were held in January, so the Y10 ones were the ones they used for predicted grades along with general performance as assessed by the teacher.

@MarchingFrogs I mentioned interviews. The one DD went to was for a 6th form college rather than a school. They said in the information that they get 4,000 applicants, interview 2,000, and then offer 1,000 for around 400 places.

Also at Dd's London grammar school, the internal students were enrolled first at 9.30 - you needed a minimum of 7 in six subjects to stay, as well as 7s in A level subjects. The external students were enrolled at 12.30 I think but it wasn't a bun fight or first come first serve. They only offer around 50 places and then have a waiting list so don't over offer.

I am reading all of your replies, so much to take in, thank you. Does the current school help pupils make sense of any local
processes or is it general up to individual families to figure their way through?

Round here there is only one school with a 6th form (which is oversubscribed), a 6th form college in town and a 6th form college in another town 17 miles away.

Open days for all of these are at the beginning of October.

We live in London and my son applied to his existing school, a grammar and a college. None of them expected us to be there on results day and we were actually abroad. It was a bit of a stressful morning working out which offer to accept and uploading all the documents etc but there was no race to get to the schools. Because it's not centralised you can in theory accept more than one place on results day if you're not ready to decide. I personally didn't feel comfortable to do this but I know of others who did. I only know of a couple of schools that expect pupils to enroll in person on results day.

Thanks @Doobiesista for the different experience that you had. Good to know we will need various documents to hand in this sort of situation. And that you can accept multiple offers, although that might create anxiety by kicking the can down the road as well as being unfair on the colleges.

In my experience they didn't. I think they are concentrating on retaining their pupils. We had to do it all ourselves and like people say all the processes are different and deadlines differ too.

Our school advised us to apply to at least three settings and to accept more than one offer (assuming you had more than one) so you have a back up plan if you don't make the grades for your first choice.

We are in north London and DC applied to 7 sixth forms and had offers from three including her own school. The other two had slightly lower grade offers so we ended up also accepting them in case she didn't get what she needed for her own school's requirement. Some of the other places that she didn't get, she had the grades for but others living closer wanting the same subjects got the places. For these two, both encouraged her to actually turn up on the day and there may be space for. She didn't do this, as had already decided to stay at current school, but I do know someone else who did it for one of those sixth forms - and they were given a place on the day despite not holding an offer.

Most deadlines were around January, February time of Y11, but some were much earlier (one she applied to was November). Some have internal exams (and sometimes an interview as well), a pp already mentioned Latymer and Harris Westminster as two of these, I would add the two maths schools (Kings and Imperial) to that if your DC is maths-y.