Devonport High School for Girls Sixth Form Entry

Devonport High School for Girls (DHSG) is a selective grammar school in Plymouth whose co-educational sixth form admits external candidates to 40 Year 12 places outside its own Year 11. Entry requires an average grade of 6 across a candidate's GCSEs, a minimum grade 5 in English and Mathematics, and every applicant is interviewed. Applications for September 2027 entry close on 18 December 2026.

Everything below is drawn directly from DHSG's own Year 12 admission arrangements, its Apply page and its Sixth Form Curriculum page — and, where the comparison matters, from the equivalent policy at Devonport High School for Boys, a separate school across the city with its own entry route and no interview at all. For the school's 11+ process into Year 7, see our DHSG 11+ service page and our DHSG 11+ guide; neither is repeated here.

Is Devonport High School for Girls' Sixth Form Open to External Applicants?

Yes. DHSG's own admissions page is headed “Apply to Join Our Co-Educational Sixth Form,” and the school runs a distinct External Applicants enrolment process alongside its process for its own Year 11 students, confirming that the sixth form takes candidates who did not attend DHSG for GCSEs. The published admission number for those external students — excluding anyone transferring up from DHSG's own Year 11 — is 40, set out identically in both the Admission Arrangements 2026/2027 and Admission Arrangements 2027/2028 documents.

That stability is worth noting on its own. Devonport High School for Boys, the separate boys' grammar school across the city, sets its equivalent external number at 20 but describes it explicitly as “the minimum number of external students... that will be admitted,” leaving the true ceiling unstated. DHSG's own documents make no such qualification: 40 is simply the number, repeated without change across two consecutive published cycles. For a family working out whether a place is realistic, a number that has held steady is a more useful planning figure than one framed as a floor.

Because the two schools share a city, a postcode area and much of their name, it is worth being explicit: DHSG and DHSB are separate institutions, each with its own Board of Trustees and its own Year 12 admission policy. They are not the same sixth form under two names, and a place at one carries no bearing on eligibility at the other. The one point of contact between them is a shared consortium arrangement for A-level subjects, covered further down this page.

What GCSE Grades Does DHSG Actually Require?

The headline figure is an average grade of 6 or higher across a candidate's GCSEs, with a floor of grade 5 in both English and Mathematics. On top of that average, DHSG sets a subject-specific floor: at least a grade 6 in the GCSE subject a student wants to continue at A level. A grade 5 average student who wants to study a subject they only reached grade 5 in at GCSE does not automatically qualify for that course, even if their overall average clears 6.

Three subjects carry a requirement beyond the standard grade 6 floor, because DHSG has judged that success in them depends on skills a single GCSE grade does not fully capture:

The Psychology and Business floors both stack an English requirement on top of a numerate one, which catches out students who are strong in one domain but not the other — a candidate with grade 7 Maths and grade 5 English does not clear the Business floor despite comfortably clearing the numerate half of it. Working out whether a specific GCSE profile clears every relevant floor, not just the headline average, is exactly the kind of arithmetic our tutors go through with a family before an application goes in.

The Interview Most Plymouth Sixth Forms Don't Ask For

DHSG's Apply page states plainly: “All applicants will be interviewed and are encouraged to tour DHSG during a normal school day.” This is not a formality. It is a compulsory part of the admissions process for every external candidate, run alongside the academic requirement rather than instead of it.

The contrast with Devonport High School for Boys is direct and worth stating plainly, because a family comparing the two schools' processes side by side could otherwise assume they work the same way. DHSB's own Year 12 admission policy documents for both the 2026/2027 and 2027/2028 academic years mention no test, interview or reference at all: admission there runs on an application form and GCSE results alone. DHSG's interview requirement is therefore a genuine point of difference between two schools in the same city that families often shortlist together, and it is the one part of DHSG's process a purely academic preparation plan will not cover.

An admissions interview at this stage typically probes why a student has chosen their specific subject combination, what they have read or done beyond the GCSE syllabus in their strongest subjects, and how they plan to manage independent study at A level. None of that is complicated to prepare for, but it is easy to under-prepare for precisely because DHSG does not publish a format or a list of sample questions anywhere on its site.

How the 40 External Places Are Actually Allocated

DHSG's Admission Arrangements set out what happens if the number of eligible external applicants for a course exceeds the places available. The order is short and worth reading in full, because it does not include the criterion several other selective sixth forms rely on:

Nowhere in that order does DHSG rank remaining candidates by their GCSE score. That is a genuine difference from Devonport High School for Boys, whose own published order ranks unplaced applicants by “those achieving the highest score from their best eight GCSEs” as its sixth of seven criteria. At DHSG, once a candidate clears the entry requirement and the interview, further ranking within the same oversubscription category falls to a straight-line distance tie-break rather than to who scored highest. DHSG's Admission Arrangements state its catchment area as “No” outright, so distance only ever settles a tie inside one of the four categories above — it plays no part before that.

Applications for September 2027 entry must be made by 18 December 2026. Notification is normally made by the end of term 4 (Easter) of the admission year, and DHSG still accepts late applications up to the end of the first week of Year 12 in September 2027. The equivalent deadline for the 2026/2027 cycle was 19 December 2025, so families planning ahead should expect a mid-December date each year rather than assume 18 December repeats exactly.

The A Levels, the Consortium, and the Bursary

DHSG's sixth form curriculum, which the school brands the Scholars Baccalaureate, offers 20 A-level subjects alongside the Extended Project Qualification, employability work through the Unifrog platform, and either work experience or an enrichment subject. Where a student's chosen combination of subjects clashes with another option block, DHSG's own Sixth Form Curriculum page states that “additional courses” are available “through a consortium of schools” — the same cross-school arrangement Devonport High School for Boys describes on its side as a founding member of a local partnership that negotiates places between schools each September once timetables are set. A subject unavailable at DHSG itself is not necessarily unavailable to a DHSG sixth former; it depends on that September negotiation, which is settled after enrolment rather than guaranteed at application.

A Post-16 Bursary is available to students who fall into one of three categories: Looked After, otherwise disadvantaged, or from a household under a combined family income threshold. It is paid monthly, and DHSG links continued payment to maintaining strong attendance. Families for whom the bursary is relevant should raise it directly with the school as part of the application, since eligibility and amount are assessed case by case rather than published as a fixed table.

How We Prepare a DHSG Sixth Form Application

Everything above is the gate. What follows is what we do to get a candidate through it, and it starts earlier than most families expect — realistically, from the start of Year 11, because the grade-6 average and the subject-specific floors are set by GCSE results that are fixed well before the 18 December application deadline.

Our tutors working with DHSG-track students draw on the same subject specialists who cover our wider GCSE tuition programme, matched to the specific A-level combination a student is applying for at DHSG rather than a generic sixth-form entry package. Across our GCSE and sixth-form entry work more broadly, 91% of our students achieve their desired grades — the figure that underpins whether a DHSG application is realistic in the first place, since every requirement on this page is a grade requirement before it is anything else. Parents preparing for results day itself can also use our GCSE resources for parents alongside a DHSG-specific programme.

We read DHSG's own Admission Arrangements and Apply page as part of building this page, rather than relying on a summary of them, because the school changes small but consequential details between cycles — the application deadline alone moved by a day between the two most recently published years. A DHSG application built on last year's date, or on a generic Plymouth grammar school sixth form guide that does not distinguish DHSG's interview and its lack of a GCSE-score ranking criterion from the schools around it, risks missing exactly the details that matter most.

Frequently Asked Questions