Crossley Heath School Sixth Form (16+) Entry

Crossley Heath School's sixth form is not a grades-only route. GCSE results get a candidate invited into the school's admissions process, but a compulsory in-person interview in February or March actually decides the outcome — the only human interview gate at 16+ anywhere in this comparison set. Entry runs entirely separately from Crossley Heath's well-known joint 11+ entrance exam with North Halifax Grammar School, through the school's own Applicaa portal, its own published subject-by-subject GCSE table covering all 22 A-Level subjects, and its own 150-place sixth form. This guide sets out that full grade table verbatim, explains what the school's own confusing “grade 77 in Combined Science” wording actually means, gives the most recently published application and interview timetable, and says plainly what Crossley Heath does not publish — nothing here is guessed to fill a gap.

Grades Get You Invited — the Interview Decides

Crossley Heath's Admission Requirements page is entirely about GCSE grades: a general threshold by number of A-Levels, then a subject-by-subject table underneath it. Nowhere on that page, or anywhere else on the school's sixth-form site, is there any mention of a written entrance test for 16+ candidates. Read in isolation, that could suggest entry is grades-only, the same as several other schools' sixth forms. It is not.

The school's separate Applications page lays out the process in three explicit stages, and the middle one is the part a grades-only reading misses: “Applications Close: Friday 19th December 2025. Interviews: Students who meet our entry requirements will be invited to an in-person interview in February/March 2026. Offers: Friday 27th March 2026.” Meeting the published GCSE thresholds does not itself secure a place — it secures an invitation to interview. The interview is the actual decision point, and Crossley Heath's own page describes only the bare mechanics of when it happens and who triggers it: nothing is published about what the interview covers, how long it runs, or what the school is assessing beyond the entry requirements already met. This page does not speculate beyond that; anything more specific would be a guess dressed up as a fact.

The second thing worth settling before anything else on this page makes sense is what the interview is not a substitute for: Crossley Heath's well-known joint 11+ entrance exam with North Halifax Grammar School. Calderdale Council's own admissions pages state, under a heading titled “Grammar schools” on a page called “In-year transfers”: “Transfer to The Crossley Heath School or The North Halifax Grammar School will include an exam.” That statement's own scope is transfer admissions — Year 7 entry and in-year moves between schools — not sixth-form entry. Crossley Heath's own sixth-form pages (Why Apply, Admission Requirements, Applications) describe a complete, self-contained process through the school's own portal, and none of them mentions North Halifax Grammar School anywhere. That is the strongest statement available from what both bodies actually publish: an observation about what is, and is not, written down, not a claim quoted from either source directly asserting the two are separate.

Crossley Heath is also a member school of the Northern Grammar Schools Alliance, a network spanning Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cumbria. The school's own page on the alliance is explicit that it “is not a new school structure or change in the status of any of those schools” but “a collaborative network of schools that serve a wide geographical area” sharing best practice — useful context for understanding the school's regional relationships, but not an admissions arrangement of any kind, at 16+ or otherwise.

What GCSE Grades Do You Need for 3 A-Levels vs 4 A-Levels?

Before the subject-specific detail, Crossley Heath sets a general bar that depends on how many A-Levels a candidate wants to take. The two conditions are not additive extras on top of each other — the four-A-Level bar simply replaces the three-A-Level one, with a higher average grade requirement added.

Both conditions sit on top of — not instead of — the subject-specific requirements below, which apply to each individual A-Level a candidate wants to study. A candidate meeting the general three-A-Level bar but wanting to study Mathematics, for instance, still needs the grade 7 that subject specifically requires, regardless of what their overall average looks like.

The Full Subject-by-Subject GCSE Requirement Table

This is the single most useful thing Crossley Heath publishes for a prospective sixth former, and the thing no third-party guide assembles in one place: a specific GCSE grade requirement for every one of the school's 22 A-Level subjects, sourced verbatim from the school's own Admission Requirements page.

Two patterns stand out. First, Mathematics itself carries the highest bar of any single subject — a grade 7 to start it, rising to grade 8 for Further Mathematics — well above the general grade 5 Maths threshold that governs entry to the sixth form as a whole. Second, most science and technical subjects (Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Design Technology, Physics) require a supporting Mathematics grade on top of their own subject grade, while most humanities and social science subjects (Business Studies, Politics, Psychology) instead pair an English and a Maths grade together. Religious Studies and Sociology are the only two subjects on the table that ask for nothing beyond a single grade 5, in Religious Studies or English respectively.

One further condition applies to three creative and practical subjects specifically: “For our A-Level PE, Art or Music, where a student has not studied for a Level 2 Qualification, suitability for the A-Level subject may be evidenced in other ways. Admission to the course will be at the discretion of the Head of Sixth Form and the relevant Department Leader.” In practice, this gives Crossley Heath a route to admit a candidate to those three subjects without the underlying GCSE, judged individually rather than against a fixed grade.

What Does “Grade 77 in Combined Science” Actually Mean?

The grade table above contains one notation that genuinely confuses parents, and Crossley Heath's own wording makes it slightly worse rather than better. Combined Science — also called Double Science, or Double Award Science — is a single GCSE course that counts as two GCSEs and is awarded two grades side by side, not one. A student who took Combined Science instead of the three separate sciences might see a result written as “7-7” or “5-5” on their results slip, and Crossley Heath's own table reads that as equivalent to a straight single-subject grade at the lower of the two digits: “77” in Double Science satisfies the same requirement as a straight grade 7 in the single science.

The genuine inconsistency, worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over, is that Crossley Heath's own table does not use one consistent term for this qualification. On the Biology, Chemistry and Physics rows, the school writes “grade 77 in Double Science”. On the Physical Education row, covering exactly the same underlying GCSE, it switches to “55 in Combined Science”. Both phrases describe the identical qualification — Double Science and Combined Science are the same GCSE course under two different names — but a parent reading the table top to bottom could reasonably wonder whether they are different things. They are not: this is a genuine inconsistency in the school's own published wording, not something this page has introduced to make a point.

Practically, a candidate holding a Combined Science result should read it against whichever row's science-linked requirement applies to their chosen A-Level: two matching digits at or above the required grade — 77 for the Biology, Chemistry and Physics rows, 55 for the Physical Education row — meets the bar in exactly the same way a single science GCSE at that grade would.

How and When to Apply: the Most Recently Published Cycle

Every date Crossley Heath has published belongs to the September 2026 intake — a cycle that starts within weeks of this research being carried out in August 2026. None of the dates below are a live deadline a family can still act on; they are presented here as the most recently published cycle, so a family researching ahead can infer the rough rhythm of the next one, and know plainly what has not yet been announced.

Applications were made through the school's own Applicaa portal, at crossleyheath.applicaa.com/sixthformapply, with the school's own news post confirming: “Apply here: https://crossleyheath.applicaa.com/sixthformapply. Deadline to apply: Friday 19 December 2025.” Admissions queries for the sixth form go to Mrs Pennington, the school's Sixth Form Development Manager, at v.pennington@crossleyheath.org.uk, or the school's general line on 01422 360272.

As of this research, Crossley Heath's own sixth-form news feed had not published open evening or application dates for the following cycle: its most recent post was dated 12 January 2026, with nothing published since. That is an honest observation about what is currently visible on the school's own site, not proof that nothing will appear before the next cycle opens — families researching ahead of the following September should check the school's own Applications page directly rather than assume last year's exact dates will repeat.

Sixth Form Places, Class Sizes and School Context

Crossley Heath's own Why Apply page frames the sixth form's size as a deliberate feature rather than a limitation: “Crossley's Sixth Form offers the exclusivity of 150 places and the support of smaller class sizes (the average is 12 students).” The school does not clarify on that page, or anywhere else extractable on its site, whether 150 is a total across the whole sixth form, a per-year-group figure, or a figure specific to external applicants as distinct from Crossley Heath's own Year 11 pupils moving up — so this page presents the number exactly as the school states it, without assuming a reading the school itself has not confirmed.

The same Applications page also carries a marketing claim worth quoting in full and attributing plainly as the school's own, rather than repeating as independent fact: “The Crossley Heath School Sixth Form is the fastest improving Sixth Form in Yorkshire with respect to attainment, achieving a 10%-point increase in just twelve months; this accompanies our outstanding school attainment at GCSE level where we are the highest performing school in Yorkshire, bar one school.” Both figures — the 10-point increase and the Yorkshire ranking — are stated as the school's own claim with its own basis, and are presented here the same way: as what the school says about itself, not as an independently verified ranking.

For a fuller, independently sourced picture, GOV.UK's Get Information about Schools register shows Crossley Heath as an academy converter with a whole-school capacity of 1,160 against a roll of 1,179 pupils, under URN 139182, in the Calderdale local authority (381), with an official admissions policy recorded as “Selective”. Checking that same register establishment-by-establishment across all 13 secondary schools listed under Calderdale shows only two carrying that “Selective” status: The Crossley Heath School and The North Halifax Grammar School. A third Calderdale secondary school, branded “Trinity Academy Grammar”, is recorded “Non-selective” on the same register despite the word “Grammar” in its name, and does not have a sixth form at all — a useful reminder that a school's name is not the same as its DfE-recorded admissions policy. Calderdale, in other words, has exactly two grammar schools, not a vague “one of the few”.

Crossley Heath's own history is worth one clause of context, since this is an admissions page rather than a history page: the school was formed in 1985 through the amalgamation of Heath Grammar School, founded in 1585, and Crossley and Porter School, founded in 1887, as the school's own History page records — “1985 saw probably the biggest change when Crossley and Porter School amalgamated with Heath Grammar School to form the Crossley Heath School.”

Families researching Crossley Heath's 11+ route separately — the joint entrance exam with North Halifax Grammar School covered above — can find that process set out on our Crossley Heath School 11+ page. For A-Level subject support once a place is confirmed, our A-Level tuition programmes cover the sciences and Mathematics that carry the highest grade requirements on Crossley Heath's own table, and our university tuition pages support the step beyond sixth form for students planning ahead.

Frequently Asked Questions