Invicta Grammar School Sixth Form Entry 2026

Invicta Grammar School is a selective girls’ grammar school in Maidstone, Kent, whose sixth form is co-educational under its own 2026/27 admission arrangements. The school offers 60 external Year 12 places within a total Year 12 capacity of 300, requires 46 points across a student’s best 8 GCSEs with Grade 5 in Mathematics and English, and enrols on GCSE results day, Thursday, 20 August 2026. Its sixth form was rated Outstanding by Ofsted on 16 April 2024.

Does Invicta Grammar School Admit External Students Into Year 12?

Invicta Grammar School’s own current admission policy answers this directly: yes. The school’s “Admissions and Sixth Form Admissions Policy” documents for both 2026/27 entry and 2027/28 entry head the relevant clause “Sixth Form Admission arrangements – Mixed in Sixth Form” and state that the Published Admission Number (PAN) for entry into Year 12 is 60 – the number of places offered each year to eligible external applicants. That external allocation sits inside a total Year 12 capacity of 300: if fewer than 240 of Invicta’s own Year 11 students transfer up into Year 12, the school admits additional external candidates until the year group reaches that figure.

Priority within Year 12 goes first to Invicta’s existing Year 11 students who meet the entry requirements and choose to transfer; the remaining places, up to the 60-place external allocation, go to applicants meeting the same entry requirements from other schools. For context, Invicta’s Year 7 entry point admits 240 girls a year through the Kent Test – covered in full, along with catchment and results, in Leading Tuition’s separate Invicta Grammar School 11+ guide. This page covers Year 12 sixth-form entry only.

A figure of 420 for Invicta’s sixth form appears in some places online, tracing back to a Kent County Council admissions-criteria PDF for the 2026/2027 cycle. That document could not be re-checked in August 2026, because Kent’s site now sits behind a Cloudflare bot-detection page that blocks automated retrieval. It is possible the 420 figure describes something other than the external PAN – both year groups combined, the whole-school sixth form, or an earlier admissions cycle – and a parent who finds it stated on Kent’s own document should treat that as the figure to reconcile, rather than assume it has been superseded. What can be stated with confidence, because it comes directly from Invicta’s own current policy documents, is the school’s own external PAN of 60 within a 300-place Year 12.

Is Invicta’s Sixth Form Girls-Only or Mixed?

Invicta admits only girls at age 11, and it would be easy to assume the same holds throughout the school. It does not. Invicta’s own 2026/27 and 2027/28 admission policies title the relevant section “Sixth Form Admission arrangements – Mixed in Sixth Form”, and the school’s UCAS-facing profile describes “a selective school in Kent for girls with a mixed Sixth Form of around 400 students”. Both statements come directly from Invicta, and both use the word “mixed” rather than any softer phrasing that could be read either way.

The confusion has an obvious source. The Department for Education’s Get Information about Schools record lists Invicta’s “Gender of entry” as “Girls”, alongside an age range of “11 to 18”. Taken alone, a reader could reasonably conclude the whole school, sixth form included, is girls-only. But GIAS records a single gender-of-entry value per school and has no separate field for a sixth form that admits differently from the age-11 intake point; the value describes how girls join at age 11, not who Invicta accepts into Year 12. Several search results and directory listings repeat this same age-11 framing without stating the sixth-form position at all, which is why the point is worth stating plainly here, in Invicta’s own words: the sixth form is mixed.

The 46-Point Threshold: How It Is Actually Calculated

Invicta’s Sixth-Form-Entry-Requirements-2026 document states the headline rule in a single sentence: “46 points across the best 8 subjects with a Grade 5 in Mathematics and English (Language or Literature)”. What it does not spell out is the arithmetic behind it, which matters because “46 points” means nothing without knowing how a GCSE grade converts to a point.

Kent grammar sixth forms typically score GCSEs on a simple 1-to-9 scale that mirrors the grade itself: a grade 9 is worth 9 points, a grade 8 is worth 8 points, and so on down to a grade 1 worth 1 point. Under that convention, a student needs an average of just over 5.7 points across their best eight GCSEs to reach 46. A student whose best eight subjects sit mostly at grade 6 or 7 clears that average comfortably; a student whose best eight sit mostly at grade 4 or 5 falls short of it. Separately from the points total, Mathematics and English (Language or Literature) must each independently reach grade 5 or above; a strong points score cannot substitute for a grade 4 in either subject.

Invicta’s 2026/27 and 2027/28 policy documents state this rule in identical wording, so nothing has changed between the two most recently published cycles. The school also confirms that no personal statement is required: offers are made on predicted grades alone, ahead of the actual results.

Subject-by-Subject A-Level Entry Requirements at Invicta

Invicta publishes subject-specific entry requirements for 28 A-level subjects in its Sixth-Form-Entry-Requirements-2026 document, reproduced in full below. Subjects marked with an asterisk can be studied without having completed the GCSE course; every other subject requires the grade shown in the specific GCSE named. Invicta’s own UCAS-facing page states the school teaches “29 subjects at Invicta” overall, one more than the 28 rows the entry-requirements document lists by name – worth flagging rather than reconciling arbitrarily, since neither document explains the gap.

* You can study these subjects without having completed the GCSE course, per Invicta's own Sixth-Form-Entry-Requirements-2026 document.

Can a Student From a Non-Selective School Realistically Get In?

Invicta’s own UCAS-facing page states that “about 75% are internal students and most new students come from local schools with approximately 45% of these being non-selective”. Read carefully, that describes two different populations. The 75% figure describes the composition of the whole sixth form – three in four of Invicta’s roughly 400 sixth-formers transferred up from Invicta’s own Year 11. The 45% figure describes a narrower group: of the new students who join Invicta’s sixth form each year, rather than the sixth form as a whole, around 45% come from non-selective schools. Neither figure is presented by Invicta, or repeated here, as a probability that any individual applicant from a non-selective school will be offered a place; they describe historical intake composition, not an admissions likelihood.

The same page adds that typically 90-95% of Invicta’s students progress to university at the end of Year 13, a figure describing outcomes for the sixth form as a whole rather than for either the internal or external cohort specifically. Taken together, the figures show that Invicta’s external Year 12 intake regularly includes non-selective-school candidates rather than being an internal-transfers-only formality, without implying anything about an individual applicant’s own chances.

What Membership of Valley Invicta Academies Trust Does and Doesn’t Get You

Invicta Grammar School sits within Valley Invicta Academies Trust, which also runs School of Science and Technology Maidstone, The Lenham School and Valley Park School as secondary academies, alongside several primary schools. Two genuine, sourced benefits flow from that trust membership. First, an Invicta sixth-former may take one subject at Valley Park School, provided they meet that subject’s own entry criteria. Second, a trust comprehensive offers 14 BTECs and 2 A-level subjects not available at Invicta itself, giving Invicta students access to a wider curriculum than the school could offer alone.

What trust membership does not do is confer any separate admissions priority at Year 12. Invicta’s own 2026/27 oversubscription criteria for Year 12 credit only “a sibling attending Invicta Grammar School at the time the child starts” – there is no equivalent clause for a sibling attending any other Valley Invicta Academies Trust school. A family with one child already at, say, Valley Park School gains no admissions advantage for a second child applying to Invicta’s sixth form; the curriculum-sharing arrangement and the admissions process are separate things, and only the first is trust-wide.

Invicta vs. Maidstone Grammar School vs. Maidstone Grammar School for Girls: Three Routes at 16

Maidstone has three selective schools, and a girl finishing Year 11 anywhere in the area can in principle apply to any of them for Year 12: Invicta Grammar School (girls-only at 11-16), Maidstone Grammar School for Girls (MGGS, also girls-only at 11-16), and Maidstone Grammar School (MGS, the area’s boys’ school). What is easy to miss is that all three run co-educational sixth forms, despite two of the three being single-sex lower down the school.

Maidstone Grammar School for Girls states this in its own admissions policy for entry in September 2026 to August 2027: “Maidstone Grammar School for Girls is a selective Grammar school. The school will admit girls into Years 7 to 11 and girls and boys into Years 12 and 13” (checked in August 2026). The same document sets its external Year 12 admission number at 50 and its own entry requirement as at least a grade 5 in English, at least a grade 5 in Mathematics and at least 6 GCSE subjects at grades 9-5 – a grade-count system, rather than the points-based system Invicta uses.

For Maidstone Grammar School, the school’s own determined admission arrangements document is hosted as an embedded publication rather than a plain web page, and its text could not be extracted for direct quotation here. Kent County Council’s own KentChoices admissions portal listing for the school – checked in August 2026 – states that “the school offers 50 places a year to external students” and that “MGS welcomes applications from both boys and girls”, with entry requiring “at least an average GCSE grade of 5.7 from eight subjects” plus grade 5 in Mathematics and one English GCSE. MGS also asks students to commit to four A-levels in Year 12, rather than the three Invicta treats as standard.

Invicta’s own position, by comparison: an external Year 12 PAN of 60, a points-based 46-from-best-8 threshold with a Grade 5 Maths/English floor, and three A-levels as the norm. None of the three schools’ entry systems match, so a family weighing Invicta against either Maidstone school should check the grades required under each school’s own current method rather than assume one school’s threshold translates to another. Families considering Maidstone Grammar School directly can read Leading Tuition’s dedicated Maidstone Grammar School sixth form entry guide for that school’s specific requirements.

Enrolment Day and What the Results Say About the Sixth Form You’re Joining

Invicta’s own Joining the Sixth Form page sets out what happens on results day: the school is open for enrolment between 12.00pm and 2.00pm on Thursday, 20 August 2026. Before arriving, students must upload their GCSE results to Applicaa; on the day itself, they need a copy of their results in whatever format their school issued, a passport or birth certificate as proof of identity, and a parent or guardian to accompany them. No personal statement is required at any stage, since offers are made on predicted grades alone ahead of results day, with places then confirmed once the actual grades are known.

Ofsted’s most recent inspection, on 16 April 2024, rated Invicta Outstanding overall and rated sixth form provision specifically as Outstanding – one of the categories Ofsted grades separately from the whole-school judgement. Invicta’s 2025/26 A-level results, released on the same 20 August 2026 enrolment day, showed 80% of all grades at A*, A or B, with 46% at A*/A and 16% at the very top grade; 11 students achieved at least three A* grades, a school record, with two of them achieving a full set of four A*s. The same year’s GCSE results for Invicta’s own Year 11 – the cohort from which most internal Year 12 transfers are drawn – showed 61% of all grades at 7, 8 or 9, with 19 students securing eight grade 9s or more.

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