Churston Ferrers Grammar School Sixth Form 2026

Churston Ferrers Grammar School is a co-educational selective academy in Brixham, Torbay (URN 136388) whose sixth form admits external students on GCSE grades alone. Its September 2026 Sixth Form Information Booklet guarantees a Year 12 place to applicants with a GCSE grade 6 in at least five subjects and a grade 5 or better in English Language and Maths, and puts the external admissions number at approximately 50. No test, no interview, no catchment area.

The grade floor, and the two numbers Churston prints for it

Churston publishes no standalone sixth form admissions policy. The policy sits inside the Sixth Form Information Booklet for September 2026, on the school's Policies & Resources page, where the section headed ACADEMIC ENTRY CRITERIA reads: "To guarantee entry students must have a GCSE grade 6 in at least 5 subjects in total, with a grade 5 or better in English Language and Maths."

Two phrases in that sentence carry weight. "To guarantee entry" makes the threshold a floor for certainty rather than a bar for consideration. NOTE 2 of the same policy says that students who do not achieve the requirements "may be accepted, if it is felt that they have the ability and aptitude for Sixth Form study or based on other good educational reasons such as SEN needs". A near miss at Churston is a discretionary decision, not an automatic refusal, and that is worth knowing before a candidate rules themselves out on results day.

"In at least 5 subjects in total" is the part that has been left inconsistent. Three lines further down the same page, NOTE 1 says that two short-course GCSEs will be counted as one of "the 6 full course GCSE grades required". Six, not five.

The residue is easy to date. The sixth form policy Torbay Council still serves on its own website, adopted by the Full Governing Body on 28 November 2017 for admission in September 2019, required "a GCSE grade 5 or above in Mathematics and English plus an additional 4 GCSE subjects at grade 6 or above" — six subjects in total, four of them at grade 6. When the criterion was rewritten, the footnote under it was not.

Source: Churston Ferrers Grammar School Sixth Form Information Booklet September 2026; Churston Ferrers Grammar School Admissions Policy — Sixth Form, hosted at torbay.gov.uk.

Which one governs is not really in doubt: the criterion is the rule, and NOTE 1 exists to explain how short courses are counted, so its arithmetic is incidental. Prepare to five subjects at grade 6 with English Language and Maths at grade 5 or better. If the sixth subject is the difference between an offer and a refusal for a particular candidate, ask the Sixth Form team in writing which count they are applying, and keep the reply.

Where subject grades bind harder than the overall threshold

Clearing five grade 6s admits a student to the school. It does not admit them to a subject. Churston's booklet is explicit that "Students are admitted to the School but subject choices cannot be guaranteed", and its A Level Subject Entry Requirements table sets grades well above the general floor for mathematics and the sciences.

Source: A Level Subject Entry Requirements, Churston Ferrers Grammar School Sixth Form Information Booklet September 2026.

Read that table against the general threshold and the shape of the problem changes. A candidate with grade 6 in five subjects and grade 5 in English and Maths clears the school's floor comfortably and still fails the entry grade for Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics, all three of which want a 7 in GCSE Maths. For a student aiming at engineering or medicine, GCSE Mathematics is the single grade that decides whether the A Level combination is available at all.

The school does not treat that as a refusal. Its criterion 2 says students meeting the overall entry criteria but not some subject entry criteria "will be considered for alternative subjects", and the table's own footnote adds that subject entry without the minimum grade requirements will be considered case by case. An applicant is far more likely to be offered a place on a different combination than turned away.

Every Year 12 student at Churston takes three A Levels plus a fourth academic option — the Extended Project Qualification, Core Maths, AS Further Maths or a fourth A Level — chosen from 26 A Level subjects. A fourth full A Level is allowed only where the Attainment 8 score and early teacher feedback support it. Maximum teaching group size is 30, and subjects with very small numbers may not run at all.

There is no catchment at 16+, and that is a change from Year 7

This is the fact that decides most external applications, and no other page in the search results states it. Churston's sixth form oversubscription policy allocates places in three steps, and none of them is geographic:

1. Children in care, and children who were in care and ceased to be so through adoption, a child arrangements order or a special guardianship order.
2. Students who applied by the stated February deadline, and after that by the earliest date of receipt of application.
3. The highest Attainment 8 score.

No residence test. No designated area. No feeder-school priority. Compare the school's Year 7 policy, where geography appears twice. Category C of the Year 7 criteria gives priority to children on the roll of one of 15 named Torbay primary schools in what the school calls its Priority Admission School Group, and Category D breaks ties between equally ranked candidates by "the straight line distance between the school and the child's home address". Year 7 entry is also gated by a test: the qualifying score is set by the score of the 180th ranked child, against a planned admission number of 150 places.

Source: Churston Ferrers Grammar School Admissions Policy for Admission to Year 7 in September 2026; Sixth Form Information Booklet September 2026.

The practical consequence is that a Year 11 in Dartmouth, Totnes or Newton Abbot is ranked at 16+ on exactly the same two things as a Year 11 in Brixham: whether they applied by the deadline, and their Attainment 8 score. The booklet describes the sixth form as serving "the coastal towns of Brixham, Paignton, Kingswear and Dartmouth, with many of our students travelling from Torquay, Newton Abbot and Totnes" — a description of where students come from, not a boundary that decides who gets in.

One point of precision, because the address misleads. Churston's postal address is Brixham, Devon, but its admissions authority is Torbay, not Devon County Council. The Department for Education register lists Churston Ferrers Grammar School Academy at URN 136388 with local authority Torbay (880), status Open, admissions policy Selective, gender of entry Mixed and an age range of 11 to 18. Two further open selective state secondaries sit in the same local authority on the same register: Torquay Boys' Grammar School (URN 136321, gender of entry Boys) and Torquay Girls' Grammar School (URN 136506, gender of entry Girls). Churston is the co-educational one of the three, at 11 and at 16 alike, so applying at sixth form here is not a way around a single-sex intake — it is the same school taking the same students by a different measure. Families weighing a different south-western option can compare Colyton Grammar School sixth form entry, which sits in the Devon local authority and uses a points rule rather than a subject count.

How many external Year 12 places actually exist

Three numbers are in circulation for this one question, two of them in school documents.

Source: Churston Ferrers Grammar School Sixth Form Information Booklet September 2026; Admissions Policy — Sixth Form, torbay.gov.uk.

The current figure of approximately 50 is the one to plan against, and the phrasing around it matters as much as the number. The booklet says the external number "may vary depending on the number of internal applicants bearing in mind the total planned admission number", and sets that planned admission number at 150 per year while adding "please note this is for guidance only". Churston is therefore not committing to a hard external cap. It is committing to a target for the year group as a whole and filling the balance from outside.

Set the numbers side by side and the competition looks less forbidding than the phrase "selective grammar school" suggests. The sixth form holds roughly 300 students in total. Around 50 external places are advertised; between 30 and 40 external students actually arrive. That gap is the honest answer to how oversubscribed 16+ entry is: in a typical year the school appears to have room, and the binding constraint is more often the grade for a specific A Level than the number of seats.

The deadline the booklet states twice, differently

The document that governs the September 2026 intake gives two application deadlines, roughly one page apart.

Its APPLICATION/TRANSFER section reads: "external applicants need to submit a completed application form by 13th February 2026. Applicants submitting forms after this date may be disadvantaged in the allocation to a subject group." Its Over-subscription Policy for Sixth Form Entry, and again its Over-subscription Policy for Subject Entry, instead reward "students who applied by the deadline of 10th February".

They cannot both be the operative date. The instruction to applicants says 13 February; the rules that actually rank applicants say 10 February. Since the tie-breaker decides a contested place and a contested subject group, an application submitted on 12 February would satisfy the instruction and fall outside the criterion. The safe reading is to treat 10 February as the deadline and 13 February as the last acceptable date.

Two further points on timing. First, missing the deadline is not fatal: the policy language is that late applicants "may be disadvantaged in the allocation to a subject group", not that they are refused, and the school's own online form still stated that applications for September 2026 were welcome when it was checked on 16 August 2026. Second, the September 2026 cycle described throughout this page is the latest one Churston has published. Its 13 February 2026 deadline has passed, and no sixth form admissions policy for September 2027 had been published on the school's Policies & Resources page as at 16 August 2026. Anyone planning for 2027 entry should expect the same structure and a deadline in the same week of February, and should watch for the new booklet in the autumn rather than assume these dates roll forward.

No test, no interview: what Churston ranks on instead

Selective schools are often assumed to assess at 16+. Churston does not. Its sixth form page states that "Entrance into our Sixth Form is based on GCSE results, and we make conditional offers ahead of results day so you know where you stand early". There is no written paper, no subject assessment and no formal interview in any published document. Open events exist and the school encourages them, but its admissions policy is explicit that visits "are not a compulsory part of the admissions process, and will not affect decisions on whether a place can be offered".

What does the ranking, when ranking is needed, is Attainment 8 — the Department for Education measure of a pupil's performance across eight GCSE subjects. It appears twice in Churston's sixth form policy: as the third and final oversubscription tie-break for external places, and as the test of whether a student may take a fourth full A Level rather than the standard three plus an enrichment option. A candidate who wants to be competitive at Churston is therefore better served by a broad, strong set of eight GCSEs than by three outstanding grades and a thin tail.

The application form itself asks one question worth preparing for: whether Churston Ferrers Grammar School is the applicant's most likely first choice, and if not, where that first choice is. Applicants must also be under 19 at the start of the course, have the right of abode in the UK and qualify for UK government funding for the full A Level course, which is why the school warns that a repeat of Year 12 or a Year 14 is not guaranteed. Our general guide to grammar school sixth form entry requirements sets out how these mechanisms differ between schools.

20 August 2026: confirming a place, and losing one

AQA releases June 2026 GCSE results on 20 August 2026, with results slips available to students from 8.00am. That is the day a conditional offer at Churston becomes real, and there are two distinct ways to lose one.

The first is by grades. The second, less obvious, is by silence: the booklet states that "It is essential that students confirm on GCSE results day that they intend to take up their place in the Sixth Form, otherwise the offer of a place may be withdrawn." The school's sixth form page says this confirmation is usually done in person, and otherwise by email. A family away on results day should arrange the confirmation route in advance rather than assume the offer holds.

Source: Churston Ferrers Grammar School Sixth Form Information Booklet September 2026; AQA results days.

A candidate who misses the criteria on the day has two routes rather than one. The discretionary route is NOTE 2 of the policy, under which the school may accept a student it judges to have the ability and aptitude for sixth form study, or on other good educational grounds such as SEN needs. The formal route is an appeal, sent in writing to the Academy Trust Secretary at the school within 20 school working days of the refusal and heard by an Independent Appeals Panel whose decision binds the Trustees. Parents and students may appeal jointly or separately, and separate appeals are heard together.

The school also considers late entry, including direct entry into Year 13, case by case, weighing the compatibility of courses already being studied with the intended programme and the student's ability to cope with a late start. If results fall short across the board, the wider question of what a withdrawn or missed sixth form place means is covered in our guides on what to do when a sixth form withdraws a place after GCSE results and on GCSE results day options.

Preparing for Churston at 11 or at 16

The two entry points reward different work. At 11+, the school runs an externally set GL test in English and Maths and a rank order in which the 180th score sets the qualifying mark; preparation is about a single assessment on a single day, and our Churston Ferrers 11+ guide covers it. At 16+, there is nothing to sit. The work is spread across two years of GCSE courses, and it is targeted: the five grade 6s that clear the general floor, the grade 5s in English Language and Maths that are non-negotiable, and above all the specific subject grade that opens the A Level a student actually wants.

For most applicants the decisive grade is GCSE Mathematics. Grade 7 opens A Level Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics; grade 8 opens Further Mathematics; grade 6 is enough for Biology, Computer Science and Economics. Sixth form students at Churston also contribute at least 10 hours of active citizenship, so the school is looking for candidates who will take part rather than simply pass.

Reviewed against Churston Ferrers Grammar School's Sixth Form Information Booklet September 2026, its Admissions Policy for Admission to Year 7 in September 2026, the Admissions Policy — Sixth Form hosted at torbay.gov.uk, the Department for Education's Get Information about Schools register and AQA's published results days, on 16 August 2026. Where the documents disagree, both readings are printed above. Always confirm live dates and figures with the school before applying.

Frequently asked questions about Churston Ferrers sixth form entry