Boston High School Sixth Form Entry Requirements

Boston High School is a selective girls' grammar school in Boston, Lincolnshire, whose Sixth Form is co-educational and admits candidates from other secondary schools. Lincolnshire County Council sets the external admission number at 30, run as a minimum, against a combined Year 12 and Year 13 capacity of 300. Every applicant needs at least five GCSEs at grade 4-9 including English or Maths before any subject-specific requirement applies.

Does Boston High School's Sixth Form Take Students From Other Schools?

Yes, and this is worth settling first because Boston High School's own name causes genuine confusion locally. Years 7 to 11 at Boston High are girls-only, but the Sixth Form is mixed, and Lincolnshire County Council's admissions record classifies the school's gender category as "Girls with mixed sixth form." The council's record states the school "extend[s] a warm welcome to applications from students attending other schools," and sets the published admission number for those external candidates at 30 -- a figure the school explicitly operates as a floor, not a cap.

That external allocation sits inside a combined Sixth Form maximum of 300 places, split 150 for Year 12 and 150 for Year 13. Against that ceiling, the council's most recent roll figures show 228 students aged 16 to 18, compared with 589 across Years 7 to 11. Boston High's own Year 11 students have the right to transfer into the Sixth Form automatically provided they meet the academic standard and the school can accommodate their chosen subjects, which means the external places compete alongside a large internal cohort rather than instead of one.

Put another way: if every one of Boston High's roughly 118 girls in an average Year 11 cohort (589 divided across five year groups) transferred internally, the Sixth Form would still have room within its 300-place ceiling for well over 100 external students across both year groups, and the council's minimum of 30 external places a year is exactly that -- a guaranteed floor, not a competitive cap that shrinks once internal transfers are counted. In practice the actual number of external offers made each year depends on how many Year 11 leavers choose to stay and how many of Boston High's own girls meet the subject thresholds set out below, both of which vary year to year and are not published as a fixed figure.

One clarification worth making plainly: Boston High School is not the same institution as Boston Grammar School, the boys' grammar on South End. The two schools shared a federation that ended on 1 January 2013, and each now holds its own Department for Education number, its own headteacher and its own sixth form admissions arrangements. A family researching "Boston sixth form entry" should check which of the two schools they mean before reading either school's grade requirements, since the figures below apply to Boston High School specifically and do not transfer across.

The GCSE Entry Standard for External Candidates

Lincolnshire County Council's admissions record is explicit: "All internal and external applicants must achieve grades 4-9 in at least five GCSE subjects including English or Maths GCSE," and "this subject entry criteria will be applied on results day." Boston High School's own Course Directory page states the identical standard independently: "5 GCSEs grades 4-9, including Mathematics OR English Language." Both sources agree, and both describe a decision made against actual results rather than predicted grades or an earlier assessment.

That five-GCSE floor is only the entry gate. Every individual A-level, CTEC or Level 3 subject that Boston High offers then sets its own additional requirement, published each academic year in the school's Subject Entry Requirements document. The table below reproduces all 23 subjects and their 2026-27 thresholds in full.

The spread is wide. Mathematics itself asks for grade 6 in GCSE Maths, but Further Mathematics asks for grade 7 -- a full grade higher, and the single highest bar on the list. The three sciences, Biology, Chemistry and Physics, each require grade 6/66 in Combined Science or the separate science alongside "clear and consistent evidence of high-level mathematical ability," which is a judgement the school makes on top of the numeric grade, not a substitute for it. French and Spanish both require grade 5 on the higher-tier paper specifically, not the foundation tier. Most humanities and social-science subjects -- History, Geography, Sociology, Religious Studies, Media Studies, Government and Politics -- ask only for the standard grade 4 in English Language, on top of the general five-GCSE floor already described above.

How Boston High School Decides -- No Test, No Interview

Nothing published by Boston High School or Lincolnshire County Council describes an entrance test or an interview for Sixth Form entry. The decision runs entirely on GCSE results, checked against the subject table above on results day itself. This is a genuine difference from Year 7 entry at Boston High, which does involve the Lincolnshire Consortium's own selection test; sixth form entry at 16+ does not carry an equivalent assessment.

The school also confirms it now runs "a two-year linear A-Level course," so students are expected to transition automatically from Year 12 to Year 13 rather than reapply or resit an internal gate partway through. If external applications exceed the 30-place minimum in a given year, Lincolnshire County Council's published Sixth Form oversubscription order applies: looked-after and previously looked-after children first, then children registered for Pupil Premium, then siblings of pupils already on roll, and finally straight-line distance from home to school. There is no lottery tie-break listed for sixth form oversubscription, unlike the Year 7 process, and no separate criterion based on GCSE points score -- a claim one independent grammar-school directory makes about Boston High but which the council's own published record does not support.

Applying for Boston High School's Sixth Form: What Is Actually Live Right Now

As of 21 August 2026, the school's own Apply page stated that applications for September 2026 entry were "now open," with a submission deadline of 31 January 2026. Both of those figures describe a cycle that had already closed by the date of that check: GCSE results day for the same academic year fell on Thursday 20 August 2026, meaning the 2026 entry round was effectively complete before the page's "now open" wording was retrieved. Separately, the school's Sixth Form Entry landing page -- a different page in the same admissions section -- still displayed an older notice reading "Applications to join our successful Sixth Form for September 2026, will open after our Open Evening event on Thursday, 6th November," referring to an open evening that had already taken place on 6 November 2025, from 5pm to 7pm.

In short, the two most relevant pages on the school's own site currently disagree with each other about where the September 2026 cycle stood, and neither had yet published dates for September 2027 entry at the time of research. Families should not treat either date on the school's site as current without checking directly. Boston High School's Admissions Officer, Miss Kerry Ellis, can be reached on 01205 310505 or at kerry.ellis@bostonhighschool.co.uk to confirm the live application window for the year a candidate is actually applying in.

For context on the school more broadly, including its history, Ofsted rating and Year 7 admissions process, see our separate Boston High School 11+ page and our Boston High School 11+ guide, neither of which covers the sixth form grade table above.

How Leading Tuition Prepares External Candidates for Boston High School's Sixth Form

The subject table above is the whole gate for a 16+ applicant to Boston High School: there is no test to coach for and no interview to rehearse, so the only thing that decides an offer is whether a candidate's actual GCSE grades clear the relevant row. Our sixth form preparation programme is built around that fact directly. Rather than generic GCSE tuition, we map each student's target A-level choices against the exact thresholds in the table -- grade 6 in Maths for Maths itself, grade 7 if Further Maths is on the list, grade 6/66 and demonstrated mathematical ability for any of the three sciences, grade 5 on the higher paper for French or Spanish -- and build a Year 10 and Year 11 programme around closing the specific gaps that stand between a student and that grade, subject by subject.

One-to-one sessions run through the two years leading up to results day, with regular mock assessments tracked against the actual published thresholds rather than a generic target grade, so a family knows in the spring of Year 11 exactly where they stand against Boston High's own bar for each subject, not just the five-GCSE floor everyone clears. Where a student is tracking close to a borderline -- a predicted 5 against a required 6, for instance -- that is precisely the gap our tutors are briefed to close before results day, because the school's decision is made against the number achieved, not the number predicted.

91% of our students achieve their desired grades. That figure matters more at 16+ entry than almost anywhere else in our work, because a Boston High School sixth form offer is decided entirely by results-day GCSE grades against the published table above -- there is no interview performance or personal statement to soften a missed grade. On Trustpilot we are rated 4.8 out of 5 from 57 reviews, read 21 August 2026. Reviews from parents and students we have worked with are below, unedited.

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