Cranbrook School Sixth Form Entry Requirements 2027

Cranbrook School is a state boarding grammar school in Cranbrook, Kent, where sixth form places are free to attend but boarding is charged. Entry to Year 12 requires a minimum of 35 points from a candidate's best six GCSE subjects on the 1-9 scale, plus grade 5 in Maths and in either English Language or English Literature. Roughly 30 places open to outside applicants each year: 20 day and 10 boarding.

Cranbrook Runs Two Sixth Form Admissions Policies, Not One

Almost every guide to Cranbrook School sixth form entry requirements treats the school as though it published a single set of rules. It does not. The governors determine a Day Admissions Policy and a Boarding Admissions Policy as separate documents, and each states in its opening section that it covers only its own route: the day policy says boarding entry is subject to a separate policy and procedure, and the boarding policy says the same in reverse.

The two documents agree on the academic bar and diverge on almost everything else. They set different place counts, apply different geography, and impose a different assessment. For the September 2026 round they even carried different closing dates, one day apart. A parent who reads only the document they happened to find is working from rules that may not apply to their child.

Source: Cranbrook School 2027 Day Admissions Policy and 2027 Boarding Admissions Policy, sections 2.3 and 3.

The choice is also close to irreversible. The boarding policy bars transfer between boarding and day before the end of Year 11 except for exceptional pastoral reasons or financial hardship, and a boarder moving to a day place must live inside the priority area. A family that enters the sixth form on one route should expect to stay on it.

What 35 Points From Your Best Six GCSEs Actually Demands

The formula is simple to state and easy to misread. Points are the grade numbers themselves on the reformed 1-9 scale, so a grade 6 scores six points. Only the six highest-scoring subjects count. Everything below the sixth subject is ignored, which means a wide entry of nine or ten GCSEs earns a candidate nothing extra.

Thirty-five points across six subjects is a mean of just under six. In practice the lowest ordinary passing profile is five grade 6s and a grade 5. Three grade 7s will carry two grade 5s and a grade 4 to exactly 35, and any combination reaching the total qualifies, but the arithmetic leaves very little room: a candidate one grade short anywhere in the top six falls below the line.

Two subjects then have to clear a second, separate bar. Maths must be at grade 5 or better, and so must either English Language or English Literature. A candidate can hit 35 points comfortably on sciences and humanities and still be refused on a grade 4 in Maths.

A third condition sits on top of both. Candidates must take a minimum of three A level subjects delivered by the school, alongside the Cranbrook Diploma, and must meet the specific requirements each A level course publishes for itself. Those subject requirements are set out in the sixth form prospectus rather than in the admissions policy, so meeting the school-wide bar does not guarantee entry to a particular subject.

The 2025 Change That Would Now Refuse a Candidate Cranbrook Once Admitted

The 35-point rule is recent. Until September 2025 entry, Cranbrook asked for a total of 45 GCSE points across nine or fewer subjects, or 48 points across ten or more, with grade 4 in Maths and English. The governors consulted on replacing it between 7 December 2023 and 18 January 2024 and published the determined arrangements by 15 March 2024.

The school's stated reason, in the consultation letter it lodged with Kent County Council, is unusually direct: its existing structure was "not ensuring the best outcomes for our students and Cranbrook School", because it admitted students with a mixture of grade 4 and grade 5 results.

The effect is sharper than a change of threshold suggests, because two things moved at once. The number of subjects that count fell from nine or ten to six, and the implied mean grade on those subjects rose from about five to just under six. Consider a candidate with three grade 6s, three grade 5s and three grade 4s across nine GCSEs. Their total is 45 points, which met the old rule exactly. Their best six score 33 points, which falls two short of the current threshold. A set of results that met the rule for entry up to September 2024 no longer meets the rule that has applied from September 2025 onwards.

Twenty Day Places and Ten Boarding Places, and Where They Come From

Cranbrook's Year 12 holds 162 places: 110 day and 52 boarding. Existing Year 11 students take priority, and the published admission number for outside applicants in September 2027 is approximately 30, split 20 day and 10 boarding. The school qualifies that figure, because it depends on how many of its own students carry on.

The asymmetry between the two halves is worth pausing on, because it is not simply that more day students leave. Both policies define year-group capacity in the same clause, and that clause shows the day cohort growing at 16 while boarding does not.

Source: Cranbrook School 2026 Day Admissions Policy, transfers clause, and 2026 Boarding Admissions Policy, transfers clause.

That single number does most of the explaining. Of the 20 external day places, 12 exist because the year group itself is contracted to expand from 98 to 110 at Year 12. Only the remaining eight arise from Year 11 day students leaving, which is around eight in every 98. All 10 external boarding places, by contrast, must come from departures, because boarding capacity does not move: 10 of 52 boarders do not continue into the sixth form. On the school's own published capacity, a Cranbrook boarder is roughly twice as likely as a day pupil to leave after GCSEs. That is an estimate derived from capacity rather than a figure the school publishes, and it should be read as such.

It also inverts the pattern set at 13+, where boarding is the wide door. The Year 9 admission number is 60 places, of which 52 are boarding and only eight are day. At 16+ the ratio flips: 20 day places against 10 boarding. Cranbrook is a boarding-led school at 13 and a day-led one at 16.

Three Different Numbers for the Same Question, All Published by Cranbrook

How many outsiders actually get in is a question the school answers three times, in three places, with three answers. None is wrong, but they measure different things and a parent comparing them will get confused.

Source: Cranbrook School 2027 admissions policies; Admission Policies page; Joining Sixth Form page.

Two practical points follow. The admission number of 30 is 18.5% of the 162-place year group, which is materially more generous than the "nearly 90% internal" line suggests, so a family reading only the web page may write off a realistic application. And the school issued conditional offers to between 30 and 40 day candidates against 20 day places, which means a conditional offer at Cranbrook is closer to a place on a ranked list than a place in the sixth form. It converts only if the grades arrive and the day cohort has not already filled.

Geography at 16+: A Priority Area for Day Applicants, None at All for Boarders

Kent runs a county-wide selective system, and parents reasonably assume catchment behaves at 16 as it did at 11. At Cranbrook the answer depends entirely on which door you are applying through, and one of the two answers is unusually clean.

For boarders there is no catchment of any kind. The boarding policy states that no priority area exists for boarding, and that boarders may join from within the priority area or from elsewhere in the world, provided they hold a UK or Irish passport or a Right of Abode and meet the sixth form entry criteria. Geography is simply not an admissions factor for a boarding applicant.

For day applicants a priority area does exist, defined two ways. It covers the civil parishes of Cranbrook and Sissinghurst, Goudhurst, Staplehurst, Frittenden, Benenden, Sandhurst and Hawkhurst, and separately any address within 8.5 kilometres of the school measured as a straight line, which the school renders as 5.28166 miles. Day applicants cannot apply from overseas at all.

How much that priority area bites at 16+ is less clear than the day policy makes it sound, and this is worth saying plainly rather than smoothing over. The policy's oversubscription ladder, which places priority-area residents above out-of-area candidates, is headed as applying to all year groups of entry. But the clauses written specifically for Year 12 rank candidates by predicted GCSE points, and mention distance only once, as a tie-break where actual GCSE results are equal, and only for external day candidates. The two mechanisms are not reconciled anywhere in the document. The safe reading is that predicted points drive the ranking and address decides ties; a day applicant living well outside the parishes should ask the registrar directly rather than assume either reading.

The Boarding Interview Is Real, and It Is Barred From Judging Academic Merit

Sixth form entry at a state grammar is often described as grades-only. At Cranbrook that is true for day applicants and false for boarders, and the distinction matters because the interview is not what most families expect.

Boarding candidates are invited to a Suitability for Boarding interview. In the September 2026 round these were held towards the end of January 2026, after the December closing date and before conditional offers went out. The policy defines the interview's scope narrowly, and then closes the door on the obvious worry: the interviewer may only consider whether the child would present a serious health and safety hazard to other boarders, or whether they could cope with and benefit from a boarding environment, and no account is taken of the interview in assessing a candidate's academic suitability. The school adds that the questions are those used by all state boarding schools for the same purpose.

One filter does sit in front of it. The school states that only those students with the highest predicted grades are invited for interview, once registration closes and it knows how many boarding spaces it can offer. The interview is therefore a suitability check applied to an already-ranked shortlist, not a competitive round.

There is no written test at 16+ for either route. Every admitted candidate is asked to attend a learning discussion about the subject options they have chosen, which is a curriculum conversation rather than an assessment. In-year applicants arriving mid-course are judged on achieved GCSE results plus a discussion with academic staff about subject suitability.

What Boarding Costs at 16+, and Why the Fee Carries No VAT

This is the part of Cranbrook that families misunderstand most often, and the school states it as plainly as anyone could ask. Its fees page opens by describing Cranbrook as one of the country's few state boarding schools and says the education it provides is free to day students and boarders alike; the only charges the governors levy go towards boarders' accommodation and live-in costs. Tuition is not being bought. Bed, board and pastoral care are.

Sixth form boarding is charged at a higher rate than the lower school, and the school publishes two years at once.

Source: Cranbrook School Fees & Charges page, figures published for the 2025/2026 and 2026/2027 academic years.

Sixth form boarding therefore costs £3,234 a year more than lower-school boarding in 2026/2027, or £1,078 a term. Two full years of Years 12 and 13 at the published 2026/2027 rate comes to £41,622, before any further increase. On acceptance of a boarding place a deposit of £2,000 is payable together with 50% of the first term's fees, with the balance invoiced in the preceding holidays and due by the first day of term.

The VAT question is where a state boarding school genuinely differs from an independent one, and it is worth being precise because the two are now taxed differently. Since 1 January 2025, education supplied by private schools in the UK for a charge has been standard-rated at 20%, and government guidance is explicit that board or lodging fees closely related to that education are caught as well. Boarding at an independent school is therefore taxed alongside the tuition it accompanies.

Cranbrook states on its own fees page that its boarding fees are exempt from VAT. The mechanism follows from what the charge is for: the education is state-funded and free, so there is no taxable supply of private education for the boarding charge to be closely related to. The government guidance addresses private schools and says nothing about state boarding schools either way, so the school's own statement is the direct authority here rather than anything published centrally. On the school's published figure, if the standard rate did apply to a sixth form boarding fee of £20,811 it would add £4,162 a year.

The Two-Term Notice Rule That Costs £13,874 If You Leave After Year 12

Buried at the end of the boarding policy is a clause that bites precisely the family this page serves: one that joins Cranbrook at 16 and then changes its mind. For Years 11 to 13 inclusive, two full terms' written notice must be given to the registrar to withdraw a child or move them to a day place. Failure to give it requires the parent to pay the next two terms' fees.

At the published 2026/2027 sixth form rate of £6,937 a term, that is £13,874. The equivalent rule for Years 9 and 10 is one term, so the notice period doubles at exactly the point families joining from outside are most likely to be testing whether the move has worked. A student who joins in September and leaves at Christmas without notice owes more than half a year's boarding for a term they will not use.

Two terms is also longer than the notice most independent boarding schools require, which is typically one. It is a term of the Parent Boarding Contract, not the admissions policy, so it is easy to miss when comparing headline fees against the independent sector.

Where Cranbrook's Own Documents Contradict Each Other

Reading the 2026 and 2027 policy pairs against each other and against the website turns up four conflicts. Two have since been corrected, one is live, and one is a difference of measurement rather than an error. Naming them is more useful than pretending the paperwork is clean, because a parent working from the wrong document can miss a deadline.

Source: Cranbrook School 2026 and 2027 Day and Boarding Admissions Policies; Admission Policies page.

The pattern is reassuring rather than alarming. The school found and fixed two of these between issuing the 2026 pair and the 2027 pair. The prospectus reference is the one still worth raising with the registrar before relying on subject requirements from a boarding-route document.

Is the Sixth Form Co-Educational, and Was It Always?

Yes, at every level. Cranbrook describes itself on its application criteria page as a state-funded grammar school for boys and girls catering for the top 20-25% of the academic ability range, and both current admissions policies open by saying the school admits students who will benefit from a co-educational grammar school education. The sixth form, which holds about 300 students across Years 12 and 13, is no different from the years below it in that respect.

What has changed is how the school describes its boarding places. Its 2025-entry Day Admissions Policy gave the Year 9 boarding allocation as 52 places, broken down as 34 boys and 18 girls. Both the 2026 and 2027 policies give 52 boarding places with no split at all. No equivalent split has ever been published for Year 12.

For a sixth form applicant the practical consequence is that boarding places at 16+ are not reserved by sex in any published document, and the school's own materials give no basis for assuming otherwise. What does differ by age is the route, not the gender balance: Year 7 is day-only and takes 90 students through the Kent Test, boarding opens at Year 9, and Year 12 is the only entry point where the day door is wider than the boarding one.

Applying for September 2027: Dates, Results and Appeals

Applications for September 2027 entry must reach the school by 16 December 2026, through the Cranbrook Sixth Form Application Form on the school's website rather than through Kent Choices. The normal age range is a birth date between 1 September 2010 and 31 August 2011. Once an application arrives the registrar contacts the candidate's current school for predicted GCSE grades, and it is those predictions, not achieved results, that determine the ranking.

Offers are conditional on the minimum entry requirements being achieved in the actual GCSE exams. For the summer 2026 series, GCSE results were released to students on 20 August 2026; the equivalent date in 2027 is what conditional offers for that round will turn on. Applications made after August results are considered on grades achieved and on whatever places remain.

Appeals work differently at 16+ than lower down the school. Appeals in the normal admissions round are heard within 40 school days of the deadline for lodging them, but sixth form appeals are heard within 30 school days of confirmation of exam results. The clock starts from results day rather than from a fixed calendar date, which compresses the window considerably for a family deciding after GCSE results whether to appeal. The panel is independent of the school and its decision binds both sides.

If you are weighing Cranbrook against other selective Kent sixth forms, our guides to Barton Court Grammar School sixth form entry, Borden Grammar School sixth form entry and Dartford Grammar School sixth form entry set out each school's own requirements. Families looking at Cranbrook earlier in the process should read our Cranbrook School 11+ guide, which covers Year 7 entry through the Kent Test, and our overview of the Kent grammar school system. The school's own Joining Sixth Form page carries the current criteria and both policy documents.

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