Bourne Grammar School Sixth Form Entry Requirements

Bourne Grammar School Sixth Form is the Year 12 and Year 13 provision of a co-educational selective academy in Bourne, Lincolnshire, which admits on GCSE grades alone. Qualifying takes six GCSEs at grades 9–4, including grade 4 in Mathematics and in English Language or English Literature. Each of its 25 A-Levels then carries its own grade requirement. Lincolnshire County Council's statutory record sets the Year 12 published admission number at 50 places for external applicants.

Two Gates, Not One: Why the Six-GCSE Rule Is the Easy Part

Almost everything published about entry to this sixth form stops at one sentence. The school's own 2026 Entry Criteria page puts it plainly: “All students require a minimum of 6 GCSE passes (grade 9-4) including a minimum of grade 4 in and Mathematics, and either English Language or English Literature.” The prospectus breaks the same rule into its parts — grade 4 or better in GCSE Mathematics, grade 4 or better in English Language or English Literature, and a minimum of four further 9–4 grades (or BTEC equivalent) in any other subjects.

Read on its own, that is a modest bar. A candidate with six grade 4s clears it. What it does not do is give anyone a timetable.

The second gate is the one that decides what a student actually studies, and it sits in a separate document. Bourne publishes a subject-specific grade requirement for every A-Level it runs, and several of those requirements are far above the qualifying floor. Further Mathematics asks for grade 9 in GCSE Mathematics, or grade 8 if the student takes a fourth subject alongside it. Chemistry and Physics each ask for grade 7 in Mathematics plus grade 7–7 in Combined Science Trilogy or grade 7 in the separate science. A student who meets the overarching standard with six grade 4s and applies for Chemistry, Physics and Further Mathematics qualifies for the sixth form and for none of the three courses.

That gap between qualifying and being taught is the single most useful thing to understand about admission here, and it is why the table in the next section matters more than the headline rule.

The Grade Bourne Asks For in Each of Its 25 A-Levels

The table below is the subject-specific criteria published in Bourne Grammar School's 2026 Sixth Form Entry Criteria document, version October 2025, and repeated in the 2026 Sixth Form Prospectus. It is reproduced here in full because the school distributes it only as a PDF, and because no page ranking for this search puts it in front of a reader.

Three patterns are worth drawing out of that list, because they change what a Year 11 student should be aiming at.

First, Mathematics is load-bearing well outside the mathematics department. Grade 7 in GCSE Mathematics is the gate for A-Level Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics and Economics; grade 6 is the gate for Biology, and grade 5 for Design Engineering. A student who slips from grade 7 to grade 6 in one GCSE loses access to four A-Levels at once.

Second, Biology is the only science on the table that will accept a Statistics grade in place of Mathematics, at grade 7. Bourne teaches GCSE Statistics, so that is a real alternative route rather than a technicality.

Third, the science requirement is written twice over, once for Combined Science Trilogy and once for Triple Award. A Combined Science candidate needs the double grade — 7–7 for Chemistry, Physics and Biology, 6–6 for Psychology and PE — while a Triple Award candidate is judged on the single relevant GCSE. Neither route is barred, but the arithmetic is different, and a student choosing GCSE options in Year 9 is already choosing which of those two tests they will sit at 16.

The subjects with the lowest bar are Media Studies, Sociology and Psychology, each at grade 5 in English Language or Literature. Law asks only for grade 6 in English. That figure is worth holding onto until the results section below, where it reappears in a less flattering light.

Exam boards vary by subject and the prospectus lists them: OCR for Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics and Further Mathematics; AQA for Physics, Computer Science and both English A-Levels; Edexcel for Business, Economics, Fine Art and Politics; and WJEC Eduqas for Religious Studies. If a student is comparing Bourne with another sixth form, the specification, not just the subject name, is what a tutor works from.

No Test, No Interview, No Predicted Grades

Selective sixth forms differ sharply in how they assess applicants. Some run an entrance paper, some interview, some make offers conditional on a school reference. Bourne does none of it, and says so in writing. The 2026 Sixth Form Prospectus states: “We do not interview students and do not ask for predicted GCSE grades prior to offering a Sixth Form place.”

That single sentence has three consequences.

An applicant's Year 11 report, mock results and personal statement carry no formal weight in the decision. There is no round where a student can talk their way in or out. And the offer letter issued in May is, in practice, a statement of intent rather than a place: the place is settled on GCSE results day, when the grades on the certificate are matched against the table above.

This is genuinely unusual at Bourne, because the same school tests every other point of entry. Its own admissions page is explicit: “All admissions in Years 7-11 to Bourne Grammar School are subject to an Admissions Test. For entry into Year 7, this is the 11+ Admissions Test. Students wishing to join the School in Years 8-11 are subject to an alternative age appropriate admissions test.” A family who has been through the Lincolnshire 11+ arrives at 16+ expecting another paper. There isn't one. For a student who tests poorly but works consistently, sixth form entry is the friendlier of the two doors into this school.

Fifty External Places, and Why That Number Is a Floor

Published admission numbers are routinely read as caps. Bourne's admissions policy defines its Year 12 number the other way round, in a single parenthesis: “The PAN for Year 12 is 50 places (PAN is the minimum number of places available for external applicants).” Lincolnshire County Council's statutory school record repeats the figure and the wording, listing the sixth form published admission number as 50.

Two things follow. Fifty is the number the school is obliged to offer external applicants who meet the criteria, not the number above which it stops. And internal Year 11 students do not consume it — they sit in the oversubscription order separately, as the next section sets out.

Scale matters for reading that figure honestly. Lincolnshire's record puts 501 students on roll aged 16 to 18 against 1,214 aged 11 to 16, and the prospectus reports 265 students in Year 13 during 2024/25. A sixth form of that size with an external floor of 50 is a school where most of the cohort came up through the lower school, but where the external route is a deliberate, sizeable channel rather than a token one.

The contrast with other Lincolnshire selective sixth forms is stark. Our guide to Caistor Grammar School's sixth form covers a school whose equivalent planned number for new external Year 12 entry is 6. Same county, same selective system, an order of magnitude apart. If a family is weighing Lincolnshire options, that difference should be near the top of the list.

When Places Run Short, Grades Decide — Geography Barely Counts

Lincolnshire operates a county-wide selective system, and the rules that govern Year 7 entry are widely discussed locally. They do not carry over to Year 12, and assuming they do will lead a family to the wrong conclusion about their chances.

Here are the two orderings side by side.

The Year 12 column has no sibling criterion, no staff criterion and no Pupil Premium band. Those levers simply do not exist at 16+. What replaces them is academic: after looked after children and the school's own Year 11 cohort, places are ranked on the grade achieved in the relevant subject, then on average GCSE points across every subject taken. Distance appears once, at the bottom, and only to separate two applicants who are otherwise identical.

There is no catchment area for sixth form entry. A student living forty miles away with grade 8s is ahead of a student living in Bourne with grade 6s. That is the reverse of how Year 7 places behave, where the school has consulted on adding a band of 24 places for the highest-scoring applicants living within a 15-mile radius — a proposal in its 2027 admissions consultation with no sixth form counterpart at all.

For context on the 11+ side of that comparison, see our Bourne Grammar School 11+ guide and the wider Lincolnshire grammar school admissions overview.

The September 2026 Cycle in Dates, and the Deadline That Settles the Place

The dates below are the most recently published cycle rather than a live application route. The school's admissions page states plainly: “Our online application process for September 2026 has now closed.”

The enrolment cut-off deserves its own sentence. The prospectus states that GCSE results are issued on Thursday 20 August 2026 and that “All Sixth Form applicants must confirm their A-Level subject choices and complete their enrolment by 15:00 on the same day.” It adds, drily, that it is advisable not to be away on holiday on GCSE results day.

That window is a few hours long. It is when a student who missed a subject threshold has to choose a different A-Level, and when a student who exceeded expectations can ask to change one. Both conversations go better if the alternatives have already been thought through against the table above, rather than in a corridor at 11am.

Applications themselves are made through an external portal, SixthForm.net, which the prospectus names but the school's own web pages do not. Families who searched the school website for an application link and found none were not missing anything obvious.

One further note on sourcing. The school's 2026 Entry Criteria page carries a line reading “Our full admissions policy for September 2026 can be viewed here”, and that link returns a 404 error page. The figures above are taken instead from the admissions policy published for the 2027 intake and from Lincolnshire County Council's statutory record, both of which state the Year 12 admission number identically. Anyone relying on the school's own link alone will find nothing there.

What the Subject Bar Is Protecting: Bourne's 2025 A-Level Results

An entry requirement is only meaningful next to the outcome it is meant to protect. Bourne publishes a full subject-by-subject results table in its prospectus, and reading it against the entry table is instructive — not always in the school's favour.

Mathematics is the largest subject in the school at 102 entries, and two-thirds of those entries reached A* to B. Chemistry, sitting behind the same grade 7 Mathematics requirement, reached 74.4%. Spanish, a small entry of 20, reached 95.0%.

Law is the outlier and the honest reading is uncomfortable. It took 54 entries in 2025, more than Chemistry, on an entry bar of grade 6 in English — the same bar as Politics and one grade above Sociology. Only 25.9% of those entries reached A* to B, and half reached A* to C. A subject with a high intake and a comparatively low entry requirement produced the school's weakest grade profile. A student choosing Law at Bourne because it looked accessible should know that.

Class sizes are modest across the offer: the prospectus reports that the average subject in 2025 had 15 students. Each A-Level is taught in nine hour-long lessons over a two-week cycle, with ten periods of supervised study in the Sixth Form Centre alongside. Students take three A-Levels, or four by agreement with the Head of Sixth Form. If Further Mathematics is one of them and the student entered on grade 8 rather than grade 9, the fourth subject is compulsory, not optional — a detail buried in a single line of the criteria table. Our A-Level Further Maths guide covers what that fourth-subject workload looks like in practice.

The Extended Project Qualification is offered alongside and is worth up to 28 UCAS points. Bourne reports 100% A* to B in its most recent EPQ cohort, with 54% of all EPQ grades at A*. For students aiming at selective universities that make alternative offers on the strength of an EPQ, that is a stronger signal than most of the A-Level columns.

Where Bourne's 2025 Leavers Went

The prospectus publishes a fuller destinations breakdown than most schools attempt. In 2024/25 there were 265 students in Year 13. Of those, 219 — 83% — applied to university, and 197 accepted a place.

Within that group, 151 students secured a first-choice place and 30 a second choice. A total of 105 gained a place at a Russell Group university, 9 secured Oxbridge offers and 11 secured places to read Medicine or Dentistry. Outside the university route, 20 students started work or apprenticeships, 27 took gap years and 4 joined the Armed Forces.

Read alongside the results table, that gives a reasonably clear picture of the school's centre of gravity: a large sixth form sending roughly half its university applicants to Russell Group institutions, with a small but consistent Oxbridge and medicine stream. A student targeting the latter should read the entry table as a floor and not a target — the grade 7 Mathematics requirement for Physics is the school's admission bar, not the standard a competitive Physics or Engineering application will need.

Cost: the 16 to 19 Bursary and the £45,000 Line

Bourne's intake is rural and travel costs are a real consideration for families across south Lincolnshire and the Rutland and Cambridgeshire borders. The school runs the government's 16 to 19 Bursary Fund and publishes its own policy setting out how it allocates it.

There are two routes. Students in the defined vulnerable groups — in care, care leavers, and those in receipt of certain benefits — may receive a bursary of up to £1,200 a year. The policy is careful to add that students will not be automatically awarded that amount; the Sixth Form Bursary Fund Committee verifies each case before claiming funding.

The discretionary route is the one most families will look at, and Bourne publishes an explicit threshold: students may be eligible where gross annual household income is £45,000 or below, excluding Child Benefit. Discretionary awards are directed at actual participation costs — transport, equipment, trips — rather than paid as a flat sum. Applications open online in September and the committee meets that month to consider them.

The full policy is published on the school's own Sixth Form Bursary Fund page, which also carries the current application instructions. For a broader view of how selective sixth forms compare on entry mechanics, our 16+ entry hub collects the equivalent tables for other schools.

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