Bacup and Rawtenstall Sixth Form Entry Requirements

Bacup and Rawtenstall Grammar School is a co-educational selective academy in Rossendale, Lancashire, whose sixth form admits external students on GCSE grades rather than an entrance test. Its determined admission arrangements require two GCSEs at grade 6 or above, two more at grade 5, and grade 4 in English Language and maths. The sixth form holds 250 places, with a published admission number of 70 for students joining from other schools.

Those two sentences are harder to find than they should be. The school's sixth form admissions page describes a seven-stage process without naming a single grade, and the page that does carry the grade rule is a download buried on the main admissions page. Meanwhile the third organic result for this search is a superseded policy from 2018, and the fourth publishes a points formula the school removed years ago. This page sets out what the current arrangements actually say, subject by subject, and shows where the older rule came from.

What GCSE Grades Does BRGS Require for Year 12?

The determined admission arrangements for September 2027 put it in one paragraph: “Students must achieve a minimum of two GCSEs at grade 6 or above, plus a further two GCSEs at least grade 5. Students must have a minimum of grade 4 pass in English Language and maths (these can make up the four grades required above) as well as meeting any subject specific requirements for the subjects that they wish to study.” The arrangements for September 2026 use the same wording, so this standard has been stable across two consecutive admission rounds.

Read carefully, that is four graded passes, not eight. Two must be at grade 6 or above and two more at grade 5 or above. English Language and maths must each reach at least grade 4, and the bracketed clause allows those two subjects to count towards the four where their grades are high enough. The arithmetic that follows is ours rather than the school's, and it matters to anyone deciding whether to apply:

Source: our reading of the determined sixth form admission arrangements for September 2027, published by the school.

Two further conditions sit alongside the grade rule. Grades must have been achieved within the previous two academic years before the 1 September of entry, which rules out a profile assembled slowly over several sittings. And every offer is conditional: the school issues it after interview and confirms it only when results are known, with enrolment taking place on GCSE results day itself.

Students with an education, health and care plan naming BRGS Sixth Form are admitted if they meet the required standard, outside the ranking used when applications exceed places.

Why the Best-8 GCSE Points Rule No Longer Applies at BRGS

Search for BRGS sixth form requirements and you are likely to be told, by more than one page, that entry rests on a best-8 GCSE points score. That was true once. The school's Sixth Form Admission Policy 2018-19, reviewed in October 2018 and still the third organic result for this query, says that where more applicants meet the standard than there are places, “the selection process will give priority to those students with the highest total points scores in their best 8 Level 2 qualifications”. The same document quotes 300 places for September 2019 and allows an offer “subject to a successful resit in the following November” for a student short of grade 4 in English Language or maths.

None of that survives in the arrangements now in force. The current documents contain no points formula, no resit concession and no reference to Level 2 point scores at all. The place count has moved from 300 to 250. The oversubscription list has been rewritten from six tiers to four, and the tier that used to read “students who attend BRGS” has gone, replaced by a flat statement that all BRGS students who fulfil the criteria are offered places.

The consequence for a family is practical. A student sitting down to calculate a points total from eight subjects is answering a question the school stopped asking. What the school asks now is a counting question: are there two grades at 6 or above, two more at 5 or above, and a grade 4 in each of English Language and maths? Points averaging across a wide profile neither helps a borderline candidate nor rescues a weak one.

What Grades Does Each A-Level Subject Require?

The admission arrangements say subject requirements “are updated annually and are published on the sixth form website in advance of applications being made”. In practice the school's own sixth form pages carry none of them. They live instead in the course listings on the school's verified ApplicaaOne profile, the platform BRGS uses to take applications, where each of the 19 A-level courses has its own entry requirement recorded. Collected in one place, they look like this.

Source: course entry requirements published on the school's ApplicaaOne profile.

Three things stand out. The sciences carry a hidden second condition: alongside grade 6 in the separate science, or 66 in Combined Science, each of Biology, Chemistry and Physics also asks for grade 5 in GCSE maths. A student with strong science grades and a grade 4 in maths does not meet the requirement, and this is the single most common way a plausible-looking profile fails.

Second, the ceiling sits with Further Mathematics at grade 7 in GCSE maths. That is the highest single threshold on the list, and it is worth noticing that a grade 7 in maths simultaneously discharges one of the two grade 6 passes the general standard requires.

Third, five subjects — Business Studies, Economics, Law, Psychology and Sociology — are open to students with no GCSE in them at all, and four more treat the GCSE as preferred rather than essential. A student whose Year 11 option choices were narrow is not shut out of the sixth form curriculum; they are shut out only of the eight courses with a numbered threshold.

One discrepancy is worth checking directly with the school. The sixth form curriculum page lists 20 A-level subjects including Spanish, while the ApplicaaOne course list carries 19 and does not include it. The curriculum page also notes that availability is subject to demand, so a subject appearing in one list and not the other may simply reflect whether it ran this year.

How Many Year 12 Places Are Open to External Applicants?

The arrangements give two numbers that do different jobs. The first is the total: 250 sixth form places for September 2027, and the same figure for September 2026. The second is the published admission number, which applies only to students arriving from other schools, and that is 70 for Year 12. Alongside them sits a commitment that all BRGS students who fulfil the criteria are offered places, so internal progression is not capped by the total.

How much room does 70 really represent? The school's GIAS record gives a roll of 1087 pupils against a capacity of 1260, and its Year 7 admission number is up to 180. If Years 7 to 11 run close to that intake, they account for roughly 900 pupils, leaving in the order of 187 across Years 12 and 13, or about 93 in each year group. On that estimate — ours, from the published roll and the Year 7 number, not a figure the school publishes — an external admission number of 70 is not a token allocation. It is comparable in size to the internal cohort, which makes BRGS unusually open at 16 for a selective school.

Two smaller provisions round this out. Where twins or triplets apply together and only one place remains inside the published admission number, the sixth form will go above it rather than separate them. And applications arriving after the closing date are still considered, but only after every on-time application has been dealt with, which in an oversubscribed year means a waiting list rather than a place.

Does Where You Live Affect a BRGS Sixth Form Place?

Not directly, and this is where families arriving from the Year 7 route most often go wrong. The 11+ process at BRGS runs on an entrance examination and on priority areas. The sixth form arrangements contain neither. There is no catchment at 16, no priority area, and no test.

What replaces geography is the school a student currently attends. Where applications exceed places, the four criteria run in this order:

1. Looked-after children, and children previously looked after who became subject to an adoption, child arrangements or special guardianship order, including those who were in state care outside England and left it through adoption.
2. Students who attend another Rossendale school. The arrangements name five: Alder Grange High School, All Saints Catholic School, Haslingden High School, The Valley Leadership Academy and Whitworth High School.
3. Students who attend another school within the area administered by Lancashire County Council.
4. All other students, ranked by distance from home to BRGS.

The practical effect is that a student at Haslingden High School ranks above a student at a school outside Lancashire who happens to live closer to Waterfoot. Only in the fourth tier does distance decide anything, and it is measured by Lancashire County Council as a straight line from the home to the main door of the sixth form. Identical distances — two flats in the same block, for instance — are settled by issuing numbers and drawing randomly.

Address rules follow the usual pattern and are worth reading before an application rather than after. The address must be where the student and parents live permanently, not a relative's or childminder's; where custody is shared, the address receiving child benefit is used; and parents are asked for a current council tax bill as proof.

What Happens at the BRGS Sixth Form Interview?

BRGS is not a grades-only sixth form, and the interview is easy to miss because neither of the third-party pages ranking for this search mentions it. The school publishes a seven-stage process, and the interview is stage 3, between application and offer.

Source: the school's published sixth form admissions process.

The school's own description of stage 3 is narrow: it will “ensure you have chosen the right course to suit your future aspirations”, and it is framed as a chance for the applicant to ask questions. That is a different exercise from the competitive 16+ interview run by some selective schools, and it should be prepared for accordingly — by being able to say why these three or four subjects, and what they lead to, rather than by rehearsing answers to abstract questions.

Stage 6 is the one external applicants should diarise. BRGS students enrol straight after collecting their results; students from other schools enrol from 12pm onwards on GCSE results day, with the school also open on the Friday and the Tuesday that follow. A student who has an offer but does not appear to enrol has not secured anything.

When Do the Published Sixth Form Dates Fall?

Most of the September 2026 milestones have passed, and the school's admissions page still describes that cycle rather than the next one. It records a Sixth Form Open Evening on “Thursday 13th November 6pm – 8pm”, with applications for September 2026 opening after that event. The weekday fixes the year: 13 November fell on a Thursday in 2025 and falls on a Friday in 2026, so the published event belongs to the round that has now reached its enrolment stage. Read it as the record of a completed cycle, not as a date to act on.

What carries forward is more useful than the individual dates. The determined arrangements for September 2027 were published alongside those for September 2026 and repeat them almost word for word: the same four-grade standard, the same 250 places, the same published admission number of 70, the same four oversubscription criteria and the same five Rossendale schools. A family planning for a Year 11 student now can work to the current rule with reasonable confidence, while checking the school's downloads page before applying, since subject requirements are reviewed annually.

For comparison, the Year 7 route runs on a much harder calendar: registration for the entrance examination closes at 12 noon on 14 September 2026 and the examination itself falls on Saturday 26 September 2026, for up to 180 places. Those dates belong to the 11+ process only. Nothing equivalent applies at sixth form, where the timetable is set by the school's own application portal and by results day.

If an application is refused, the appeal route is statutory and administered by Lancashire County Council on the sixth form's behalf. Families are given at least 20 school days to prepare and submit a written case, and normally 14 days' notice of the hearing. A second appeal for the same year group is not available unless circumstances have changed materially. Our 16+ entry deadline table tracks how these windows compare across selective sixth forms.

Is BRGS Co-Educational, and How Many Lancashire Grammar Schools Are There?

BRGS is co-educational at every stage. Its record on the Department for Education's Get Information about Schools register — URN 150261, DfE number 888/4032 — gives an age range of 11 to 18, a gender of entry of Mixed, and an admissions policy of Selective. There is no single-sex lower school and no switch to mixed teaching at 16; a reader arriving from a sibling grammar school page should not import that pattern here.

The same record puts the school's capacity at 1260 against a roll of 1087, with 63 pupils eligible for free school meals, or 7.3 per cent. It also shows an open date of 1 September 2023 under the reason “Fresh Start”, marking the transfer to Star Academies. One consequence of that transfer is that Ofsted has published no inspection report for the current establishment record: the register carries the note “No report yet” against URN 150261. The inspection history that families discuss belongs to the school's previous records, and we set it out in our BRGS 11+ guide.

On the wider question of how many grammar schools Lancashire has, the honest answer requires checking each school's register entry rather than trusting a list. Four establishments in the Lancashire County Council area — local authority 888 on the register — are recorded with a selective admissions policy:

Source: individual establishment records on Get Information about Schools, each checked separately.

Two cautions on that count. It covers the Lancashire County Council area only; neighbouring unitary authorities keep their own registers and their schools sit outside this figure. And the register records Lancaster Girls' Grammar School with a gender of entry of Girls, while the other three are recorded as Mixed — another reason not to generalise from one school to the next. Clitheroe Royal is the nearest comparison to BRGS, and we cover its sixth form route in our Clitheroe Royal sixth form guide.

How Much Does BRGS Sixth Form Cost, and What Support Exists?

BRGS is a state-funded academy, so there are no tuition fees at any stage, sixth form included. The costs that do fall on families are the ones the school itself lists: travel, meals, and course-related items such as equipment, books and school trips. In a valley where students may travel some distance from Bacup, Haslingden or Whitworth, travel is usually the largest of these.

The school administers the government's 16-19 Bursary Fund and pays it at three levels, described as vulnerable, discretionary and transport. Two procedural details catch families out. The applicant is the student rather than the parent or carer, and every applicant must have their own bank account — something worth opening during Year 11 rather than in the week enrolment falls. The school states that it prioritises the most vulnerable students while aiming to support as many as it can.

Preparing for the Grades That Decide the Outcome

Because BRGS sets no test at 16, everything a student can influence happens at GCSE, and it happens in named subjects. The work that changes an outcome is narrow and identifiable: a grade 7 in GCSE maths for anyone considering Further Mathematics, a grade 5 in maths for anyone taking a science, a grade 6 in English Language or English Literature for those A-levels, and enough breadth elsewhere to supply the four qualifying grades.

That specificity is an advantage. A student in Year 10 with a clear idea of three A-level subjects can be told precisely which GCSE grades matter and which do not, and preparation can be concentrated rather than spread thin. Our subject pages on GCSE Maths and A-level Further Maths set out what those two thresholds mean in practice, and our grammar schools directory covers how selective sixth forms differ from one another at 16.

Frequently Asked Questions About BRGS Sixth Form Entry

Reviewed against the school's determined sixth form admission arrangements for September 2026 and September 2027, its published sixth form admissions process, its ApplicaaOne course entry requirements, and its Get Information about Schools record, all retrieved in August 2026. Admission arrangements are reviewed annually; confirm current requirements with the school before applying. Official source: BRGS Sixth Form Admissions.