Kesteven and Sleaford High School Sixth Form Entry 2027

Kesteven and Sleaford High School is a girls' selective grammar school in Sleaford, Lincolnshire, whose sixth form is co-educational and run jointly with Carre's Grammar School as the Sleaford Joint Sixth Form. External Year 12 candidates applying for September 2027 entry need at least five GCSEs at grade 5 or above, including grade 4 in Mathematics and English, against a Published Admission Number of 40 external places.

What GCSE Grades Does Kesteven and Sleaford High School Require for Year 12 Entry in 2027?

The school offers two sixth-form pathways, and each has its own baseline. For the A-level pathway, the 2027-28 Sixth Form Admissions Policy asks for five GCSEs full course at grade 5 or above, with at least grade 4 in Mathematics and grade 4 in English Language or English Literature. For the BTEC or CTEC pathway, or a mix of BTEC/CTEC and Applied A-levels, the baseline drops to the equivalent of five subjects at grade 4 or above, including English Language or Literature at grade 4 or above.

Both baselines are a floor, not a guarantee. Every subject carries its own additional requirement, and the sciences and mathematics subjects in particular sit well above the general bar. The table below reproduces the grid exactly as published in the policy.

Selected subject-specific entry requirements, 2027-28 policy

A student aiming at three sciences plus Maths, for example, needs grade 6 across all four subjects as a floor, with grade 7 recommended in at least two of them. This is worth working out early: a family assuming the general "five GCSEs at grade 5" headline is enough for a Biology and Chemistry combination will find the subject-specific bar is the one that actually decides the outcome.

Why Is the Sixth Form Co-Educational When Year 7 to 11 Is Girls-Only?

This is the question that trips up the most searches, because the school's Year 7 entry is unambiguously girls-only and most general school directories stop there. Ofsted's own inspection report settles it. The report, covering the inspection carried out on 19 and 20 November 2024, lists two separate fields in its school details table: "Gender of pupils on entry: Girls" and "Gender of pupils in sixth-form provision: Mixed". Both appear on the same page of the same document, one row apart.

The reason other sources miss this is structural, not a disagreement about fact. The Department for Education's Get Information About Schools service, and directories that draw on it, publish only a single "Gender of entry" field, scoped to the age-11 intake. It has no field for the sixth form, so a source relying on GIAS alone has nothing to report either way about age 16 to 18 — it is not wrong, it simply cannot answer the question.

Four independent sources agree on the mixed sixth form: Ofsted's report; the school's own website, which states plainly that Kesteven and Sleaford High School "welcomes applications from both girls and boys"; Carre's Grammar School's website, which uses near-identical wording about its own applicants; and Lincolnshire County Council's school directory, which records the school's gender field as "Girls with mixed sixth form". There is no contradiction to weigh here, only a gap in what one commonly used source happens to cover.

How Does the Published Admission Number and Oversubscription Work for External Candidates?

The Published Admission Number for external Year 12 applicants is 40, stated identically in the 2026-27 and 2027-28 policies and confirmed again on Lincolnshire County Council's directory record for the school. This is separate from, and much smaller than, the Year 7 Published Admission Number of 124, which covers the school's main 11-plus intake.

If the 40 places are oversubscribed, offers follow a fixed order. First priority goes to a child who is, or has been, in the care of a local authority under Section 22 of the Children Act 1989, including children who left care through adoption or a special guardianship order. Second priority goes to a child registered for Pupil Premium — meaning registered for free school meals at any point in the previous six years — who has met the entrance requirements. Third priority goes to students with a sibling already at either Carre's Grammar School or Kesteven and Sleaford High School.

Where the oversubscription criteria still cannot separate applicants for the final place, the tie-break is straight-line distance from home to school, calculated electronically to three decimal places (for example, 1.543 miles) by Lincolnshire Council's School Admissions Team, using Post Office Address Points. Only if distance still cannot distinguish between two applicants does the policy fall back to a lottery drawn by an independent person unconnected to the school or the council's Children's Services Directorate.

Did Anything Change Between the 2026-27 and 2027-28 Sixth Form Policies?

Reading the two policy documents side by side, the entry bar itself has not moved. The five-GCSE, grade-5 baseline for A-levels, the grade-4 floor for the BTEC/CTEC pathway, every subject-specific grade in the table above, the Published Admission Number of 40, and the oversubscription order are worded identically in both years. A family working from last year's guidance on grades and numbers is still working from the current picture.

What did change sits around the policy rather than inside it. The governing trust renamed itself: the 2026-27 policy was issued as "The Robert Carre Trust", approved by the Trustees on 16 June 2025, while the 2027-28 policy is issued as "Carre's Grammar School and Kesteven & Sleaford High School, Community Inclusive Trust", approved separately by each school's Local School Board on 17 and 20 November 2025. The Department for Education's own record confirms the school "transferred to the current multi-academy trust after the start of the 2025/26 academic year".

Two smaller procedural details moved as well. The 2026-27 policy told external applicants their offer letter would arrive in the Autumn Term; the 2027-28 policy moves that to the Spring Term. And where the 2026-27 policy described a Trust-wide welcome to applicants "from outside of The Robert Carre Trust", the 2027-28 wording drops that Trust-specific framing, consistent with the wider rename. None of these three changes affects who qualifies or how many places exist — they affect when a family hears back and which board signed off the policy.

What Does Sharing a Sixth Form With Carre's Grammar School Actually Mean Day to Day?

As of this check on 22 August 2026, the Sleaford Joint Sixth Form is a live, three-school collaboration: Kesteven and Sleaford High School and Carre's Grammar School, both part of the Community Inclusive Trust, together with St George's Academy. This is not a shared open evening or a loose partnership — the two Community Inclusive Trust schools issue one identical Sixth Form Admissions Policy document, and Ofsted's report confirms the arrangement directly: "The school is part of the Sleaford Joint Sixth Form, in collaboration with two other local schools. This means that some sixth-form students attend some of their lessons at the other schools in the collaboration."

In practice, a student registers at one of the three schools as their base school, and that is where pastoral support and day-to-day guidance sit. Courses, however, are pooled and timetabled across all three sites: the KSHS curriculum page describes courses as "shared between the three secondary schools in Sleaford", with each subject taught for five hours a week by a specialist teacher, plus supervised independent study for students taking three subjects. A student whose base school is Kesteven and Sleaford High School may therefore travel to Carre's Grammar School or St George's Academy for a specific A-level or vocational course that is not staffed at their own site.

Progression within the joint sixth form is not automatic either. Internal examinations toward the end of Year 12 determine whether a student proceeds onto the second year of each course, with support offered to students who are struggling and advice given on alternatives where needed. Students can also complete a Level 3 Extended Project Qualification alongside their main programme. Because this is a live arrangement checked against current sources rather than a fixed feature of every school pairing, a family should confirm the current partner schools directly with the Sixth Form Administrator before assuming a specific course is available at a specific site.

How Strong Is the Academic Record, and What Does Ofsted Say About the Sixth Form Specifically?

Ofsted's November 2024 inspection graded Kesteven and Sleaford High School Outstanding across all five separate judgement areas it now records: quality of education, behaviour and attitudes, personal development, leadership and management, and — the figure most relevant to an external Year 12 applicant — sixth-form provision, judged separately from the whole-school grades. This was a rise from the school's previous "Good" grading in 2017.

On the numbers, the school had 753 pupils on roll at the time of the November 2024 inspection, of whom 122 were in the sixth form. The school's own published performance data, drawn from Department for Education figures, records an average A-level grade of B minus and an average points score of 37.8. Retention is high: 98.2% of sixth-form students complete their main study programme. Destinations data for the 2023 leaver cohort shows 93% remained in sustained education or employment for at least two terms after finishing their studies.

How Leading Tuition Prepares External Candidates to Clear the Sleaford Joint Sixth Form Bar

The numbers above are the actual bar an external applicant has to clear, not a general guideline. A student targeting Biology, Chemistry or Physics needs grade 6 in Maths as a floor and grade 7 recommended in GCSE science; a student targeting Further Maths needs grade 7 in Maths with grade 8 strongly recommended. Our A-level tuition tutors work backwards from these published thresholds, building a Year 10 and Year 11 programme around the specific subject combination a student wants to take into Year 12, rather than a generic "aim for good GCSEs" plan.

Because an external application also relies on a reference from the applicant's current school and a case-by-case review of their subject choices, we help families prepare that conversation as deliberately as the grades themselves: what a Head of Year is likely to be asked, how the sixth form's internal Year 12 exams factor into progression to Year 13, and how to present a subject combination that spans the shared timetable across Kesteven and Sleaford High School, Carre's Grammar School and St George's Academy. On Trustpilot, Leading Tuition is rated 4.8 out of 5 from 58 reviews, and the reviews above are shown unedited.

We also work with families comparing this route against neighbouring Lincolnshire grammars, and against other sixth-form entry guides we publish for the county's selective schools. For a student considering Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School's sixth form as an alternative, the two schools' policies are genuinely different documents with different Published Admission Numbers and different grade thresholds, despite the shared "Kesteven" name and the roughly eleven miles between the towns — treating them as interchangeable is the single easiest mistake to make when researching Sleaford and Grantham grammar schools side by side. Families researching the 11-plus route into Kesteven and Sleaford High School's main school, rather than external sixth-form entry, may also find our guide to Carre's Grammar School's 11-plus admissions useful background on how the two Sleaford grammar schools' age-11 intakes compare.

Frequently Asked Questions: Kesteven and Sleaford High School Sixth Form