Lancaster Girls' Grammar School Sixth Form Entry

Lancaster Girls' Grammar School is a selective, girls-only state grammar in Lancaster that admits external candidates into Year 12 alongside its own Year 11 leavers, against a Planned Admission Number of 95. There is no sixth-form entrance exam: applicants from other schools must instead meet the Minimum Academic Entry Criteria — at least five GCSEs at grade 6 and grade 4 in English and Maths — plus the specific grade set for each A-level subject they choose.

A girls-only sixth form — and a separate school from Lancaster Royal

LGGS's own Determined Admissions Policy for entry in September 2027 describes the school as "a designated grammar secondary school for girls only with a sixth form for girls only." Ofsted's school-details table, published after inspecting the school, records the same thing under a different heading: "Gender of pupils in sixth-form provision — Girls." Both documents agree, and neither is ambiguous. A family weighing up LGGS for a daughter currently at a mixed or boys' school should treat this as settled, not as something to double-check on results day.

This is worth stating plainly because Lancaster has two large, similarly named grammar schools sitting across the city from one another, and confusing them is easy. Lancaster Royal Grammar School is a separate, boys' school with a boarding option and its own 13+ entry route — a different institution, a different sex of pupil, and a different admissions system entirely. If a search for "Lancaster grammar school sixth form" has turned up results for both, the one on this page is Lancaster Girls' Grammar School, on Regent Street, admitting girls only at every stage including Year 12.

The school's Year 12 Planned Admission Number is 95. That figure covers the total intake, filled first by LGGS's own Year 11 pupils who meet the entry criteria — the policy places no cap on how many internal students can stay on — with any remaining places going to external applicants. Because the exact number of internal leavers is not known until GCSE results day, the school can and does offer places to external applicants above the published 95 once that figure firms up, which is one reason a strong, well-evidenced application matters more than trying to guess how "full" the year is likely to be in advance.

We start every LGGS Sixth Form enquiry by confirming this basic picture with a family — girls-only, external entry genuinely open, PAN 95 — before anything else, because building a preparation plan around the wrong assumption wastes a January application window that does not come round again until the following year.

The exact GCSE bar LGGS sets, subject by subject

Every external applicant and internal Year 11 leaver must meet the same Minimum Academic Entry Criteria: a minimum of five GCSEs at grade 6 or above, and a minimum of grade 4 in both English Language and Mathematics. That is the floor for admission to the sixth form at all. It is not, however, the floor for any individual A-level course — each subject sets its own essential and preferred GCSE grade, and a student can clear the general floor comfortably while still falling short of what a specific course demands.

The school publishes a full subject-by-subject table. The pattern is consistent: an "essential" grade that is the practical minimum for a place on the course, and a "preferred" grade the school uses when a subject is oversubscribed within a student's own option block.

Source: LGGS "Subject Requirements for A level Study" document, published by the school. Full requirements cover all subjects the school offers, including Art, Geography, Music, PE, Politics, Product Design, RS and Theatre Studies.

One additional rule sits above all of this: a student who wants to take four A-levels rather than the usual three needs at least four GCSE subjects at grade 8 or above, on top of clearing the Minimum Academic Entry Criteria and the individual subject requirements for every course chosen. Because that is a high bar across several subjects simultaneously, it is normally the deciding factor in whether four A-levels are realistic at all — a student can be comfortably strong enough for three demanding subjects and still not meet the four-A-level threshold.

Our A-level tuition for LGGS applicants is built around this table rather than around generic exam technique. Where a student is tracking a grade 6 in a subject that needs a preferred 7 — Chemistry and Physics are the two we see most often — we work backwards from the exact mark boundary that separates the two grades on the relevant exam board's most recent series, rather than teaching the whole specification evenly.

Why hitting the threshold matters more than maximising every grade

Here is the fact that changes how a family should actually spend their GCSE-year effort, and it is not one either school website states plainly. LGGS's own Determined Admissions Policy says, in its exact words, that "external applicants achieving higher grades will not receive higher priority and places will not be allocated by reference to grades from highest to lowest." Where the sixth form is oversubscribed after its usual priority order — looked-after children, then Pupil Premium applicants and children of staff in a set sequence — any places left are allocated purely by straight-line distance between an applicant's home address and the school.

In practice, that means a girl predicted a grade 9 in Chemistry gains no admissions advantage over a girl predicted the essential grade 6, provided both clear the subject's stated requirement. What she gains from the 9 is real — it matters for the course itself, for future university applications, for confidence going into Year 12 — but it does not move her up LGGS's own list. The number that does matter is whichever single grade, in whichever single subject, is closest to falling short of the essential or preferred threshold for the course she wants.

This is why we do not run a single, undifferentiated "GCSE boost" programme for LGGS applicants. We assess predicted grades against the specific subject table above, subject by subject, and put tuition time where a student is genuinely at risk of missing a named threshold — often one subject, sometimes two — rather than spreading effort evenly across a GCSE timetable where most subjects are already comfortably clear.

The application and offer timeline, and where support fits

For entry in September 2027, the school's determined dates are exact and worth working back from, not estimating. The Admission Committee determined this cycle's arrangements on 22 January 2026, and the key applicant-facing dates that follow are:

Source: LGGS Determined Admissions Policy 2027/2028, published by the school.

We map our own support onto these five points rather than running preparation on a generic autumn-to-summer calendar. Before the 27 January deadline, that means confirming predicted grades against the subject table above and flagging any subject where the prediction sits below the requirement while there is still time to act. Between the conditional offer and GCSE results day, it means keeping the named at-risk subject or subjects under continued, targeted tuition rather than easing off once an offer letter arrives — the offer is conditional precisely because nothing is confirmed until results day.

What Year 12 at LGGS actually leads to

The school's own published destinations data for its 2025 Year 13 cohort shows at least 62 different degree courses taken up across 39 institutions, led by 21 students going on to Lancaster University itself. Thirteen students from that cohort went on to study Medicine, and three secured Oxbridge places between them — one at Oxford, two at Cambridge. Ofsted's most recent inspection of the school graded its sixth-form provision "Outstanding," a separate and higher judgement than the school's overall "Good" rating, and noted that "students in the sixth form achieve exceptionally well."

That combination — a genuinely academic sixth form with a meaningful Medicine and Oxbridge pipeline, sitting inside a school that is otherwise judged Good rather than Outstanding overall — is a specific and useful thing for a family to know before committing a January application to it. Given how many LGGS leavers go on to Medicine specifically, we point students who are already considering that route toward our Medicine application preparation, and those with Oxbridge ambitions toward our Oxbridge admissions preparation, from the point they join Year 12 rather than waiting until Year 13 UCAS deadlines are close.

Families weighing up LGGS against Year 7 entry to the same school, rather than external Year 12 entry, are answering a different question — the 11+ test format, the City of Lancaster priority area and the Year 7 oversubscription criteria are covered in full in our separate Lancaster Girls' Grammar School 11+ guide, and none of that detail is repeated here because it does not apply to a Year 12 application.

Our own track record

91% of our students achieve their desired grades, and that figure holds across the subject-specific, threshold-focused tuition we run for grammar and independent school sixth-form applicants, not just as a headline average. We are rated 4.8 out of 5 from 57 reviews on Trustpilot, read 21 August 2026 — independent verification that families can check for themselves rather than take on trust from a tutoring company's own marketing copy.

Frequently asked questions

Read the school's own account of the process on its Applying to our Sixth Form page, or the full published Sixth Form Destinations data.