Dame Alice Owen's School Sixth Form Entry Requirements

Dame Alice Owen's School is a partially selective 11-18 academy in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, whose sixth form admits 30 external students. Its determined admissions arrangements set a single threshold for entry to Year 12: five grade 6s at GCSE, with a minimum grade 5 in both English Language and Mathematics, plus the requirements of each A level applied for. There is no 16+ entrance test, no interview and no priority area.

That last sentence is the one most families arrive needing. The school is well known locally for selecting at 11 by written examination and by musical aptitude, and for restricting both routes to a defined list of parishes and postcodes. None of that machinery appears anywhere in the sixth form section of the same document. What follows sets out what the school does publish, where its own documents disagree with each other, and what a Year 11 student outside the school is actually being judged on.

What Dame Alice Owen's requires for external sixth form entry

The governing rule sits in the school's determined admissions arrangements, the statutory document its governors adopt each year. The 2027-28 arrangements, determined on 6 February 2026, state it in one sentence: "To be considered for a place in the Sixth Form at the date of application, students must be predicted to meet the entry requirements to the school: five grade 6s at GCSE and a minimum of a grade 5 in both English Language and Mathematics, and for the A level courses for which they are applying."

Three things follow from the wording. The bar is a count rather than a points score: five subjects at grade 6 or better, with no total to reach and no weighting between subjects. English Language and Mathematics carry a separate floor of grade 5, which is lower than the grade 6 counted elsewhere, so a student can meet the requirement with grade 5 in both core subjects provided five other grades reach 6. And the offer is made against predicted grades, because applications close in December, months before anyone sits a paper.

The published admission number for the sixth form is 30 external students. That figure has been identical across both currently published cycles: the 2026-27 arrangements and the 2027-28 arrangements use the same sentence. The school makes no statement anywhere in either document that it will admit above that number at 16+; the only clause about exceeding a published admission number concerns the locally agreed Fair Access Protocol and multiple-birth siblings at Year 7.

Internal candidates are handled separately and generously. "Students in Dame Alice Owen's School's Year 11 cohort, in the year of expected transfer to sixth form, have their progress into the Sixth Form assured, providing they achieve the minimum entrance requirements." The 30 places are therefore additional to the internal cohort, not a pool the two groups compete over.

Why none of the 11+ selection applies at 16+

Dame Alice Owen's is one of a small group of English schools permitted to keep partial selection, and its Year 7 arrangements are unusually elaborate. The published admission number at 11 is 200. Of those places, "up to 65 children" are selected by academic ability through the Governors' Entrance Examination, and "not more than 10 places" go to children demonstrating musical aptitude. Both routes are gated by geography: places under those two criteria go only to children whose permanent home address falls inside one of the school's Local Priority Areas, or who are educated in the London Borough of Islington.

The examination itself has a hard cut. Part One is a verbal reasoning paper; children ranked below position 325 are not invited back for the English and Mathematics papers that make up Part Two. The musical route has its own floor: fewer than 50 marks in the first, aural-based written test ends the application there. The remaining places at 11 are allocated on looked-after status, on being one of the twenty-two children living closest to the school, on siblings, on staff children and finally on proximity, with at least 20 Year 7 places reserved overall for Islington.

Not one element of that survives into Year 12. The sixth form section of the same document contains no test, no aptitude assessment, no interview, no Local Priority Area, no Islington reservation and no rank order. The table below sets the two routes against each other, and the contrast is the reason this page exists.

Source: Dame Alice Owen's School, Determined Admissions Arrangements 2027-28.

One consequence is worth stating plainly, because two of the pages ranking for this search get it wrong. A tutoring guide currently in the top ten states that "Entry to the Sixth Form is made through the standard local authority procedure, and there are no special routes or assessment options." The second half is right and the first half is not. The school's own arrangements say applications "should be made by completing an application form which will be available on the sixth form admissions page on the school website". Hertfordshire County Council does not coordinate post-16 admissions to this school, and a family waiting for a local authority process will miss the December deadline.

What actually decides an external place: your three subjects

If more qualified external applicants apply than there are places, the arrangements list two oversubscription criteria and only two. The first is looked-after and previously looked-after children. The second is "availability in the subject combination required by the applicant".

Read that carefully, because it is not what most readers assume. Once a student clears the five grade 6s, the school is not sorting the remaining applicants by predicted grades. It is sorting them by whether it can timetable the three A levels they have asked for. The school says as much itself: on its sixth form transition site, the section addressed to applicants from other schools carries a video described as "Ms McClean, Head of Sixth Form, explains that we don't make offers based on who is predicted to get the highest grades."

Only after those two criteria are exhausted does distance appear, and then only as a tie-break: "the place will be offered to the child whose permanent home address is closest to the school by straight line measurement", with random allocation if two homes are equidistant. There is an oddity here that a parent may want to weigh. Answering a Freedom of Information request on 18 October 2023, the school's data protection officer wrote: "Unfortunately we do not hold data recording the distance our external 6th form entrants live from the school. We do, however, hold postcodes." The criterion is on paper; the school does not appear to hold the measurement it would rest on, which suggests it has rarely if ever had to reach that far down the list.

The practical advice that follows is unglamorous and specific. A student applying for a common, heavily populated combination is competing for a seat in classes that internal candidates have already filled. A student applying for a combination the school runs but under-fills has a materially easier route in. The school teaches 25 A levels and expects students to take three of them, with four permitted only for those adding Further Maths to Maths. The school also confirmed under FOI on 14 September 2025 that it holds and will release the subject combinations applied for and offered, split by internal and external applicant, which is the single most useful document a serious applicant could request.

Where the school's own documents do not line up

Three discrepancies are worth knowing about before you rely on anything published about this school, including the school's own pages.

The first concerns the per-subject requirements. The admissions policy makes the offer conditional not only on the five grade 6s but on the requirements "for the A level courses for which they are applying (stated in the Guide to Sixth Form Course on our website)". The Guide to Courses, hosted on the school's own transition site, opens with "Start with the minimum course requirements here." Following that link on 16 August 2026 opens a Google Slides deck titled "A level Art- FINAL OUTCOMES", 99 slides of student artwork with no entry requirement on any of them. The condition is real and binding; the document defining it is not currently reachable from the page that cites it. Ask the sixth form office directly for the subject requirements rather than assuming five grade 6s is the whole test.

The second is a mismatch with the Department for Education. The DfE's Get Information About Schools register, which is the statutory record, lists Dame Alice Owen's School under URN 136554 with an admissions policy of "Non-selective". The school's own determined arrangements select up to 65 of 200 places by written examination and up to 10 by musical aptitude. Both statements are defensible — the school is not a grammar school and does select the majority of its intake on non-academic criteria — but a family reading the register alone would have no idea an entrance examination exists. The same register records 1,467 pupils on roll against a stated capacity of 1,416.

The third is reassuring rather than troubling. The 2026-27 and 2027-28 arrangements say the same thing about the sixth form, word for word: the same admission number of 30, the same five grade 6s, the same 15 December deadline, the same two oversubscription criteria. Where school documents often drift between cycles, these do not. The only visible change is cosmetic, with the 2026-27 text naming a Sixth Form Open Afternoon "in November" and the 2027-28 text widening that to "in the autumn term".

Does entering in Year 12 help a younger sibling at 11+?

No, and the arrangements say so explicitly. The Year 7 sibling criterion reads: "Children who have a sibling attending the school at the date of application, excluding siblings who first entered the school in the Sixth Form (Y12 and Y13)." A family whose elder child joins at 16 gains nothing at all for a younger child applying at 11.

This matters more here than at most schools, because sibling priority at Dame Alice Owen's sits above both selective criteria in the ranking, and because siblings are told in the same document that they "are not eligible to take our tests as they will always be allocated places before the music and academic test criteria". A sibling link is, in effect, the most valuable thing a family can hold at this school — and sixth form entry is the one route that does not create one. Families weighing a 16+ move for an older child alongside an 11+ application for a younger one should treat the two as entirely separate campaigns. Our Dame Alice Owen's 11+ preparation guide covers the Year 7 side in detail.

When to apply, and what happens to a conditional offer

The application window opens at the Sixth Form Open Afternoon in the autumn term and closes at 5pm on 15 December — 15 December 2026 for September 2027 entry, which is the next cycle open to applicants. The school's sixth form admissions page confirms that entry for September 2026 is closed, so the September 2026 cycle is a matter of record rather than a live route.

Source: Dame Alice Owen's School determined arrangements 2027-28; AQA results days.

Offers are conditional, and the arrangements are blunt about what happens if a condition is missed: "Failure to achieve the entry requirements will result in the withdrawal of any offer of a place." A second sentence adds a risk that is easy to overlook — the course itself is not guaranteed. "There is no guarantee that the school will be able to offer students their preferred course choices and the school reserves the right to withdraw a course on offer if, for example, it is not financially viable to run it."

If a place is refused, or a conditional offer falls away, there is a statutory appeal. The arrangements confirm that parents may appeal "against any decision made by, or on behalf of, the Governors not to admit their child to the School or to allow a student in Year 11 to proceed into Year 12", and that appeals go to a panel of three independent members whose decision binds the governors. The inclusion of internal Year 11 students in that sentence is notable: progression is assured on the grades, and refusing it is an appealable admission decision, not a pastoral one.

Is five grade 6s a realistic bar at this school?

A threshold means little without knowing the cohort it was written for. The school publishes its own results, and they give a usable sense of scale. In 2025, 95% of its Year 11 students secured five or more grades 9-4 including English and Maths, and 87% reached a strong pass, grade 5 or above, in both English and Maths. Across all entries, 72% were awarded grade 9, 8 or 7.

Set the entry rule against those figures and it reads as a genuine filter rather than a formality. Five grades at 6 or above is comfortably beyond "five 9-4s", which 95% of the school's own leavers clear, and it sits closer to the 72% of entries at grade 7 and above. A student whose grades cluster at 5 and 6 will meet the letter of the rule only if five subjects land at 6, and will then be sitting A levels alongside a cohort that mostly did better than that.

The A level side explains why the school sets the bar there. In 2025, 89% of all A level grades were awarded A* to B and the average point score reached 47.95 per entry, with the school reporting an average grade of A-. Half the cohort achieved AAB or higher including at least two facilitating subjects. Ofsted judged the school outstanding in all areas at its December 2023 inspection. A student arriving from another school in Year 12 is joining that group two years into its habits, with three subjects and no AS examinations to provide an early checkpoint.

That absence of a checkpoint is the practical argument for getting the GCSE grades higher than the minimum rather than exactly at it. If you are working towards the threshold, our GCSE tuition pages cover the subject-by-subject work, and A level tuition covers the step up once a place is held. Families comparing north London and Hertfordshire options may also want Haberdashers' Boys' sixth form entry, in Elstree, which sits inside Dame Alice Owen's own Local Priority Area, and the wider 16+ and sixth form entry hub.

The full statutory document is worth reading before you apply: the school publishes it as Determined Admissions Arrangements 2027-28 (PDF), and the sixth form section runs to a single page near the end.

Frequently asked questions about Dame Alice Owen's 16+ entry