Gravesend Grammar School Sixth Form Entry Requirements 2027

Gravesend Grammar School is a selective boys' grammar school in Gravesend, Kent, whose sixth form admits girls as well as boys. Entry at 16 requires a minimum of two GCSEs at grade 5 and four at grade 6, including grade 5 in English and Maths. The school publishes 30 places for students joining Year 12 from elsewhere. The Department for Education register still records its gender of entry as Boys, with no sixth form qualifier.

Can Girls Apply to Gravesend Grammar School's Sixth Form?

Yes. The school states it in its own words on its sixth form admissions page: "Applications from students from other schools are welcomed – our Sixth Form is mixed gender and the students that join us make a great contribution during their time in the school."

That single sentence is the most consequential fact on this page, because almost nothing else about Gravesend Grammar School signals it. The school takes 210 boys into Year 7 through the Kent Procedure for Entrance to Secondary Schools. Its 11+ entry route is closed to girls entirely. And the Department for Education's Get Information About Schools register, URN 137099, records the establishment under a single line: "Gender of entry Boys". The register carries no field that distinguishes an 11+ intake from a 16+ one, so a school that is boys-only at 11 and mixed at 16 appears in the national record as simply a boys' school.

The admissions policy itself removes any doubt. Its sporting aptitude clause reads: "Both boys and girls will be considered for Rugby places, however Basketball is limited to male students and Netball to Female students." A policy that reserves Netball places for female students is not written for a school without any. The school's own sports reporting carries girls' rugby and netball fixtures through the autumn term.

For a girl in Gravesham, then, 16+ is not one route into Gravesend Grammar School. It is the only route. There is no equivalent of the Kent Test to sit and no waiting list to join at 11; the first and last opportunity is the Year 12 application, and it is decided on GCSE grades rather than an entrance exam.

The Grade Rule, and the Three Versions Gravesend Grammar Publishes

The mechanism is a grade count, not a points score. There is no total to reach and no average to clear — a candidate either holds the required spread of GCSE grades or does not. Where it gets awkward is that the school states that spread three different ways across three current documents, and the differences are not cosmetic.

The determined arrangements govern. They are the statutory document, consulted on and determined by the governing body, and published by Kent County Council; a webpage summary has no standing against them. So for September 2027 entry the English Language floor is binding, and a candidate holding grade 6 in English Literature and grade 3 in English Language does not meet the requirement, however comfortably the rest of the profile clears.

Two further details survive across all three versions and are easy to miss. Combined Science counts as two subjects towards the four grade 6s, and English Language and Literature count as two. That matters more than it sounds: a student sitting Combined Science and both Englishes reaches four of the required six qualifying subjects from three teaching blocks. And anyone wanting four A Levels rather than three has to clear a separate bar — "an average of a Level 7 from their best 8 GCSEs" — which is the only place in the whole system where Gravesend uses an average point score at all.

Where Subject Thresholds Bite Harder Than the School's Own Bar

Meeting the entry requirement admits a student to the sixth form. It does not admit them to the courses they applied for. The determined policy is explicit: "admission to the Sixth Form does not guarantee admission to a student's desired course(s)". The subject thresholds in the prospectus sit above the general rule in several places, and this is where an offer quietly becomes unusable.

Read that alongside the entry rule and a specific failure mode appears. A student can hold two grade 5s and four grade 6s, satisfy the admissions policy in full, be offered a place — and be locked out of Mathematics, Further Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry and Physics simultaneously, because every one of those needs a 7 or an 8 the general rule never asked for. For anyone aiming at engineering, medicine or economics at university, the grade 6 threshold is not the threshold that matters.

The option blocks add a second constraint that is purely structural. Further Mathematics occupies blocks A and D, counting as two of the four choices, and a student taking it must then choose from blocks B and C for the remaining two. Business and Economics sit in the same relationship: the prospectus states plainly that a student may take one or the other, not both.

30 External Places, and the One Condition That Raises the Number

The determined arrangements set the number precisely: "The Published Admission Number (PAN) for students joining the School in Year 12 for the first time at age 16+ is 30." That figure is unchanged between the 2026 and 2027 policies.

What follows it is unusual, and worth reading twice. "This figure may be exceeded, at the School's sole discretion, in the event that the number of existing students in Year 11 transferring into Year 12 is less than 194. The total number of students in Year 12 should not be more than 224."

So the external allocation is not fixed at 30 in practice. It is 30 plus whatever headroom the school's own Year 11 leaves behind, capped by a hard ceiling of 224 in the year group. If internal transfer reaches 194, there is no headroom and the number stays 30. Below that, every place the school's own Year 11 leaves unfilled is one it may offer externally, up to the ceiling of 224 — though the policy grants that as discretion, not entitlement, and the school is under no obligation to use it.

This matters for how an applicant reads the odds. External demand is not the only variable; the size and retention of Gravesend's own Year 11 is the other half of the equation, and it is not published in advance. An applicant cannot know in January how many places will exist in September. What they can know is the floor: 30 places is the number the school has committed to, and any place beyond that is discretionary.

For comparison, the school takes 210 boys into Year 7. The 16+ intake is therefore a small fraction of the year group by design — a top-up rather than a second front door of comparable size. Neighbouring Kent sixth forms structure this differently; Dartford Grammar School's sixth form, three miles west, publishes a far larger Year 12 and runs the International Baccalaureate rather than A Levels, which changes both the numbers and the kind of student the two schools suit.

How Geography Works at 16+, and Why It Is Not the 11+ Rule

Kent runs a county-wide selective system, and parents reasonably assume that a school's catchment behaves the same way at every entry point. At Gravesend Grammar School the geography does carry over — the same Borough of Gravesham tier, the same parish lists — but its position in the ranking changes, and one rule attached to it at 11 disappears at 16.

Three differences follow from that table. The sixth form list has nine tiers where Year 7 has eight, because the sporting aptitude criterion is inserted at position five. Every geographical tier is therefore pushed down one rank at 16+, and a student living outside Gravesham who has been offered a sports place outranks a student living in the town who has not. And the Pupil Premium provision that lifts eligible children to the top of each Year 7 criterion has no counterpart in the sixth form section — within each 16+ tier, applicants are ranked by straight-line distance alone.

The distance measurement itself is the same at both ages: a straight line between the National Land and Property Gazetteer address points for the home and the school, with a random tiebreak where two applicants measure identically. Living in Gravesham is not a requirement at either age; it is a tiebreaker that only matters if the school is oversubscribed at that tier. Other Kent grammars arrange this differently again — Chatham and Clarendon Grammar School and Borden Grammar School each weight the 16+ decision on a different axis.

Is There a Test at 16+? Only for a Sports Place

There is no academic entrance test and no admissions interview for the sixth form. Nothing in the determined arrangements, the prospectus or the admissions page mentions either. Eligibility is decided on GCSE grades, and ranking among eligible students is decided by the oversubscription criteria.

The exception is the sporting aptitude route, and it is a genuine assessment. "Up to 10 places for students who have demonstrated aptitude in one of the School's 3 performance sports; Rugby, Basketball or Netball. A student is only eligible to apply for sporting aptitude if they meet the academic entry requirements." Applicants must contact the head of PE by the application deadline and attend an aptitude assessment day, with performance in each element used to rank them.

Two things are worth stating plainly. The academic bar is not waived for sports candidates — the policy says so directly — so this is a tiebreaker route, not an alternative entry standard. And applying for it costs nothing: the policy confirms that an unsuccessful sports applicant "may still be considered for a place in the Sixth Form under the other admission criteria" and that applying "does not disadvantage a student or their chances".

One caution about the date. The determined arrangements for September 2027 entry still print the assessment window as "February to April 2026" — a window that has already closed, carried forward unchanged from the previous year's document. Anyone applying for a sports place should treat the printed window as an error and confirm the actual assessment date with the head of PE when applying.

The Dates Gravesend Grammar Runs To

Gravesend Grammar School does something that a family joining from another school needs to know in advance: it enrols its own students and external students on different days.

The split enrolment day is the practical point. An external student collecting GCSE results elsewhere on 20 August 2026 — the date AQA publishes for the June 2026 GCSE series — signs up at Gravesend the following day, which gives roughly 24 hours to compare a set of grades against the subject thresholds above and decide what to enrol in. That is a short window in which to discover that a grade 6 in Maths closes off A Level Mathematics.

The subject change deadline of 23 September 2026 is the safety valve, and it is a month later. A student who enrols in something unsuitable on results day has until then to move, subject to places being available; the policy ranks competing change requests by the same oversubscription criteria used for admission.

The cycle that has already run is instructive about how the school communicates. Applications for September 2026 entry opened on 16 January 2026 and closed on Friday 13 February 2026 — but the school's announcement page gave the closing time as 16:00, while the prospectus for the same cycle said midnight. That is a discrepancy of eight hours on a hard deadline, published simultaneously by the same school. For the September 2027 cycle, the admissions page gives 22 January to 12 February 2027 and does not state a time at all, while the download link on the same page still reads "will open on 16th January 2026". Confirm the closing time with the sixth form admissions team rather than relying on either published figure.

What the Last Published Results Say About the Bar

Grade thresholds only mean something against the proportion of students who reach them. Gravesend Grammar School publishes subject-level GCSE data, and read against the subject requirements it gives a usable estimate of how selective those requirements actually are.

In the 2025 GCSE series the school reported that "60% of all grades in Mathematics were awarded at the top 7-9 band, and 54% of those in English. Computer Science (69% 7+) and Physics (68% 7+) were also notably high performing subjects." Across all subjects, 44% of grades were at 7-9 and 24% at 8-9, with an Attainment 8 score of 6.5.

Here is the working. A Level Mathematics needs a grade 7. If roughly 60% of Maths grades in an already selective boys' grammar cohort reach 7-9, then around two in five of that cohort do not qualify for A Level Maths at their own school. Further Mathematics needs a grade 8, and only 24% of all grades across all subjects reached 8-9 — so the Further Maths gate is materially narrower again. An external applicant from a non-selective school faces the same absolute thresholds against a different grade distribution, which is the honest reason the sciences and mathematics are the hardest courses to walk into from outside.

On A Level outcomes, the most recent series the school has published is 2025: "33.1% A*-A 63.5% A*-B 83.8% A*-C 94.4% A*-D 98.8% A*-E", described by the school as its best in over ten years. As at 16 August 2026, results for the August 2026 series had not been published on the school's website, so the 2025 figures remain the record. On destinations, the school reports that of the students it tracked from 2023, 75% went to university, of whom 30% went to Russell Group institutions, with 10% taking a gap year and 7% entering higher apprenticeships.

The sixth form itself is housed in a purpose-built centre opened in November 2022, with 16 classrooms, two study floors and a separate cafe. The school as a whole is recorded on the DfE register with 1,495 pupils against a listed capacity of 1,032 — a gap that reflects how far the roll has grown past the figure held in the register rather than a genuine overcrowding measure, but worth knowing if a prospectus photograph suggests a small school.

Frequently Asked Questions

Reviewed against Gravesend Grammar School's sixth form admissions page, its Sixth Form Prospectus 2026, and the Kent County Council determined admission arrangements for September 2027, on 16 August 2026. Where the documents conflict, the determined arrangements govern.