Caistor Grammar School Sixth Form Entry Requirements

Caistor Grammar School's sixth form has no entrance test for the normal September Year 12 round: entry is decided purely on GCSE grades, under a general floor of a grade 4 in GCSE Mathematics and in English Language or Literature, plus four further GCSE passes at grade 5 or above, with a minimum grade 6 in each subject a student wants to study at A-level. The school's own statutory admissions record sets the Planned Admission Number for new, external Year 12 entry at 6 places — though it explicitly commits to admitting more where the combination of subjects works. There is no catchment restriction at 16+, no boarding, and — buried inside a 29-page PDF that neither of Leading Tuition's own existing Caistor Grammar pages ever opens — the exact per-subject GCSE grade required for every one of the school's A-level, BTEC and EPQ courses.

Does Caistor Grammar School's Sixth Form Require an Entrance Test?

The answer depends entirely on when you apply, and the distinction matters because it is easy to conflate with Caistor's well-known 11+ verbal reasoning test. For the normal September Year 12 round, there is no test at all. Lincolnshire County Council's statutory record of the school's admissions policy states plainly: "It is the policy of the Board of Trustees, supported by the Local Authority, that all pupils who are in Year 11 at Caistor Grammar School will be offered a place into Year 12 providing that they meet minimum requirements set out below." Those minimum requirements are GCSE grades, not an exam — and they apply identically to Caistor's own Year 11 pupils and to genuinely new, external applicants.

The general floor, as set out in the same statutory record, is: "All applicants will have at least a GCSE grade 4 in Mathematics and in either English Language or English Literature. They will also be required to have gained 4 GCSE passes at grade 9 to 5." The school's own Sixth Form Entry Booklet states the same requirement in slightly different, more specific words: "A grade 4 in GCSE Mathematics and GCSE English Language or Literature. Four GCSE passes of at least a grade 5, with a minimum of a grade 6 in each of the subjects to be studied at A-level (excluding BTEC Engineering)." Both are genuine, both apply, and together they explain why the September route is often described as "GCSE-grades-only."

The picture changes completely if you are applying outside that normal round — joining Caistor's sixth form in-year, for example partway through Year 12 or Year 13 rather than at the start of the school year. The school's own in-year admissions page describes an entirely different process: "At this point, the children will be invited to take two selection tests which will be appropriate to their current year group and the time they are hoping for their child to start at the School. Parents will be notified of the outcome of these tests within 10 school days of the second test." So the same sixth form, at the same school, uses two completely different gates depending on the calendar: GCSE grades only in September, two selection tests for anyone joining outside that window.

What GCSE Grades Do You Need? The Full Subject-by-Subject Entry Table

This is the information both of Leading Tuition's existing Caistor Grammar pages defer to "the Sixth Form Entry Booklet" without ever publishing. That booklet runs to 29 pages and sets a specific GCSE grade requirement for every single A-level, BTEC and EPQ course the school runs for September 2026 entry. The table below reproduces every one of those subject-specific bars, extracted directly from the school's own document.

Two patterns are worth noticing across that table. First, seven subjects — Geography, History, Psychology, Sociology, Religious Studies, Classical Civilisation and Computer Science — offer an alternative route in via a strong grade in English or Mathematics for students who did not take the subject itself at GCSE, which matters for anyone switching from a school with a different Year 9 options structure. Second, the two mathematics-heavy sciences, Chemistry and Physics, both require grade 6 Mathematics on top of grade 6 in the science itself, a higher combined bar than Biology's grade 5 Mathematics pairing.

How Many External Sixth Form Places Are There, Really?

Lincolnshire County Council's statutory record of Caistor Grammar School's admissions policy states the figure directly: "The planned admissions number for new entry into Year 12 is 6." Read on its own, that number looks alarmingly small for a school serving a wide rural catchment. It is also true, and it is also incomplete on its own — because the same document immediately qualifies it: "However the School will try to admit more students from other establishments providing that the combination of subjects work." Six is the guaranteed floor the school commits to filling from outside applicants, not the ceiling on how many it will actually take.

This "floor, not ceiling" pattern is not unique to Caistor. Aylesbury Grammar School's published Planned Admission Number of 17 works exactly the same way — a guaranteed minimum the school's own policy explicitly allows to be exceeded once internal Year 11 numbers are known, rather than a hard cap (see our Aylesbury Grammar School sixth form guide for how that plays out there, with the school's two web pages quoting a 17-place PAN against 30-40 students actually admitted). The mechanism is the same at Caistor: the 6-place figure exists because the school does not yet know, at the point it sets its admissions policy, how many of its own Year 11 pupils will actually stay on rather than move to a sixth-form college, another school, or an apprenticeship.

Where the 6-place figure does matter directly is in how oversubscribed courses are decided once applications are in. If a course is oversubscribed among Caistor's own transferring Year 11 pupils, priority goes by average capped GCSE point score, capped at the highest eight GCSE grades. External applicants are ranked the same way, but as a separate pool: Lincolnshire's record states specifically that "In the case of over subscription in a course, priority will be given to those external students with the highest average capped GCSE point score." With only 6 nominal places guaranteed, this is the rule that actually decides which external applicants get in once demand for a popular subject combination exceeds supply — a stronger capped GCSE average, not simply meeting the entry floor, is what wins a place when a course is full.

For context on scale: Lincolnshire County Council records Caistor Grammar's total sixth form (Year 12 and Year 13 combined) roll at 180 pupils, against a whole-school capacity of 649 and a total roll of 690 across all seven year groups. The 180-pupil sixth form, set against a 6-place guaranteed floor for new external entrants each year, gives a sense of just how much of the sixth form's intake is Caistor's own Year 11 pupils transferring up automatically, rather than students arriving from elsewhere.

Rural Catchment, Transport and Boarding: Can Your Child Actually Get There?

Caistor is a small market town in the Lincolnshire Wolds, and its local authority is Lincolnshire County Council — confirmed by the Department for Education's official register, not inferred from the LN7 postal address, which nominally sits inside the Market Rasen sorting area. Caistor's Year 7 entry runs on a hard 6.5-mile "as the crow flies" catchment boundary. That boundary does not carry over to the sixth form: Lincolnshire's statutory admissions record states plainly, "In-catchment status does not apply to Sixth Form entry." A family living well outside the 11+ catchment faces no geographic penalty at all when applying for Year 12.

That naturally raises the practical question a rural school's admissions page rarely answers: how do sixth formers actually get to school, and does Caistor offer boarding for pupils who live too far to commute daily? The Department for Education's official register is unambiguous on the second point: Caistor Grammar School has "No boarders." There is no residential option at all, at any age.

Instead, the school runs on a network of independent coach operators. Its own Sixth Form Entry Booklet lists the areas served and the specific companies covering each: "Students travel from many different areas including Scunthorpe, Brigg, Immingham, Hull, Grimsby, Cleethorpes, and Market Rasen." The named operators include Dents (serving Market Rasen, Middle Rasen, Walesby, Osgodby and Claxby), Grayson's Transport/Amvale (serving Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Immingham, Habrough, North Thoresby, Humberston, Brigg and Scunthorpe), Lincolnshire County Council's own School Transport service (serving Bigby, Grasby, Owmby, North Kelsey, South Kelsey, Moortown, Swallow, Thoresway, Rothwell, Keelby, Brocklesby and Limber), and Sherwood Bus Company (serving Barrow-on-Humber, Ulceby and Goxhill). That is a genuinely wide catchment for a day school with no catchment restriction at 16+ — families as far out as Hull, across the Humber, are named as a served area — and it is the kind of practical detail that determines whether a strong GCSE offer is actually usable, not just theoretical.

Is There a Sixth Form Bursary at Caistor Grammar?

Given that rural transport picture, the school's own sixth form navigation listing "Bursary" as a standalone item is not incidental. Caistor Grammar's bursary page explains what it actually is: "Caistor Grammar Sixth Form receives government funding each year from the DfE 16-19 Bursary Fund. The main aim of the funding is to help students to overcome any financial barriers that they may face, such as transport, meals, books and equipment, and so widen participation in post-16 studies." This is the standard national 16-19 Bursary Fund rather than a Caistor-specific scholarship, but it is administered by the school and explicitly framed around exactly the transport cost the coach network above implies.

There is also a dedicated travel-specific route. The bursary page states: "26/27 Applicants can apply for the travel bursary in advance and receive a provisional award (to be confirmed upon enrolment into the Sixth Form)." The Sixth Form Entry Booklet flags the same route from the other direction, aimed at incoming September 2026 entrants: "Travel bursaries are available for September 2026 - application forms available from the school." Current sixth formers use a separate general bursary form for ongoing support once enrolled, rather than the advance travel application aimed at new applicants.

Key Dates: The Most Recently Published Admissions Cycle

As of this page's research date in August 2026, the most recently published Caistor Grammar sixth form admissions cycle is for September 2026 entry — the intake starting in a matter of weeks. That cycle's process has already run its course: the Sixth Form Entry Booklet sets the application deadline as "Friday 27th February 2026," adding that "We will send you an update on your application by late March 2026." Both of those dates are now in the past, so this deadline should be read as a guide to the school's typical timing pattern — a late-February cutoff, roughly seven months ahead of the September start — rather than as a live, actionable date.

Neither the school's Tours and Open Evening page nor its published events calendar currently lists a Sixth Form open evening or an application deadline for September 2027 entry. Families planning a year ahead should expect Caistor to publish its next cycle's dates on the same rough timetable — historically, sixth form open evenings have run in the November-to-January window ahead of a February application deadline — and should check the school's own Sixth Form Admissions and Tours and Open Evening pages, or contact the school directly, rather than rely on this or any other page for a specific September 2027 date until the school itself confirms one.

Caistor Grammar's 2025 Sixth Form Results

Caistor Grammar's sixth form is rated Outstanding by Ofsted and sends pupils on to Russell Group and Oxbridge destinations, as our Caistor Grammar School 11+ page and 11+ guide already cover in detail. What those pages do not carry are the school's actual quantified 2025 outcomes, published in the same Sixth Form Entry Booklet that holds the grade table above. A-level results for 2025 saw "over 63% A* - B; with over 38% of grades at A* or A," and the school reports that "90% of students on the UCAS pathway secured a University place or Apprenticeship in 2025." Over 31% of students achieved grades AAB or higher in at least two facilitating subjects — the subjects, including Mathematics, the sciences, English and History, that Russell Group universities most commonly name as strong preparation for competitive courses.

The school was also named the Sunday Times Parent Power East Midlands State Secondary School of the Year, an award given in 2025. Caistor Grammar itself describes its 2025 GCSE and A-level results as placing it "one of the top three performing schools in Lincolnshire," and its sixth form specifically as "the best performing state or independent school Sixth Form for A-level outcomes within a 90 minute commute." For a rural school competing for sixth form applicants against Lincolnshire's consortium schools and against sixth-form colleges in Scunthorpe, Grimsby and Lincoln itself, that regional framing is the school's own yardstick for how it wants to be judged — and, for the first time on a Leading Tuition page, the actual numbers behind it.

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