External Year 12 places, the subject-by-subject GCSE grade table, and exactly where NHGS's September 2027 admissions cycle stands, checked 22 August 2026.
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The North Halifax Grammar School (NHGS) is a co-educational selective grammar in Illingworth, Halifax, that admits external candidates directly into Year 12 alongside its own Year 11 leavers. Its sixth form carries a published admission number of 185 for Year 12, with at least 50 of those places reserved for students transferring in from another school, and every applicant is judged against the same GCSE grade thresholds regardless of where they sat their GCSEs.
Yes. NHGS's own Sixth Form Admissions Policy states that "all students in Year 11 at North Halifax Grammar School (NHGS) will have independent career guidance and a place in the Sixth Form will be guaranteed to all those who meet the entry requirements," and adds directly beneath it: "we also accept applications from students wishing to transfer to NHGS from other schools. In all cases the same academic admissions criteria will apply." There is no separate, lower bar for an external candidate; the test is identical whichever school she or he currently attends.
The overall Year 12 published admission number (PAN) is 185. Within that total, the policy sets a floor rather than a fixed quota for external candidates: "the PAN for external applicants into the Sixth Form will be determined by the number of Year 11 students staying on in Year 12 but will not normally be less than 50." In practice this means the external allocation grows in a year when fewer of NHGS's own Year 11 students continue internally, and the Headteacher can exceed the overall PAN altogether where an external applicant meets the entry requirements and their chosen courses still have space, subject to a right of appeal for anyone then refused.
Worth noting for a family comparing the two entry points at this school: the Year 12 PAN of 185 is a different figure from the Year 7 PAN of 180, and the two numbers should not be read as the same intake carried forward — natural attrition between Year 7 and Year 11, plus the external Year 12 route, mean the sixth form's overall size is not simply "180 minus leavers."
NHGS's live Entry Requirements page, headed "Sixth Form Entry Requirements for Intake From 2026" at the time of writing, sets a general floor and then layers subject-specific bars on top of it for ten separate A-level subjects. No competing page in the search results for this school states the full table in one place; the school's own site splits it across running prose rather than a single reference table.
| Subject or route | GCSE requirement |
|---|---|
| General entry (all students) | 5 GCSEs at Grade 6 or above, including English and Maths at Grade 5 or above |
| Mathematics A-level | Grade 7 in GCSE Mathematics |
| Further Mathematics A-level | Grade 8 in GCSE Mathematics |
| Physics or Chemistry A-level | Grade 7 in the subject (or two Grade 7s in combined Science) plus Grade 6 in GCSE Mathematics |
| Biology A-level | Grade 6 in GCSE Biology (or two Grade 6s in combined Science) |
| Computer Science A-level | Grade 6 in GCSE Mathematics |
| Music A-level | Grade 7 in GCSE Music |
| French or Spanish A-level | Grade 7 in the chosen language |
| Physical Education A-level | A sport played at club or county level or above |
| Four A-level courses (any combination) | An average GCSE grade of 7 across all subjects |
Two of these bars are easy to misread. The Physics/Chemistry route accepts either a Grade 7 in the specific science or two Grade 7s across combined Science, so a student without separate sciences is not automatically excluded. And the "four A-levels" rule is an average across a student's whole GCSE record, not a fourth subject-specific threshold layered on top of the other nine — a student averaging Grade 7 overall can take four A-levels even if one individual subject sits below that average, provided that subject's own specific bar (where one exists) is still met.
Where a course or the overall PAN is oversubscribed, North Halifax Grammar School's policy applies a fixed three-tier order, and it matters directly to an external applicant because of where that tier sits. First: children who are looked after, or who were previously looked after and then adopted or placed under a residence or special guardianship order. Second: "Year 11 students currently on roll within the school." Only third does the policy reach "any remaining places," which "will be allocated to those students in order of performance predicted at GCSE and to students whose preferred courses tie in with spaces."
The practical reading is direct: every one of NHGS's own Year 11 students who meets the entry requirements is placed ahead of every external applicant in the ranking, before predicted-grade comparison ever comes into it. An external candidate only competes on predicted performance once the internal cohort's places are settled — which is also why the external PAN floor of 50, described above, functions as the meaningful number for a family outside the school rather than the headline 185.
As of 22 August 2026, NHGS's own Sixth Form Admissions page states plainly: "the application form for the 2026 intake is now closed." No timeline for September 2027 entry has been published anywhere on the school's site, and its Entry Requirements page is still headed for "Intake From 2026" rather than 2027. A family searching this term today should treat any full date-by-date table as a description of the completed 2026 cycle, not a live one.
That completed 2026 cycle ran as follows, and is useful chiefly as a guide to the shape of the next one: the application form opened in October 2025; an Open Evening was held on 6 November 2025; early applicants who applied by 30 November 2025 were guaranteed an invitation to the January Open Morning; the final deadline was 9 January 2026; a Sixth Form Open Morning followed on 23 January 2026; applicants received an invitation to an application conversation in the week commencing 26 January 2026; a Sixth Form Admissions Evening ran on 10 February 2026; and offer letters went out in the week commencing 23 March 2026.
No separate sixth-form admissions policy has been reissued since the version dated for entry in September 2025 — the school's own Policies page lists "Admissions Policy (Sixth Form) – Entry in 2025" as the only current sixth-form document, alongside distinct Year 7 policies dated for entry in 2026 and 2027. Based on that pattern, a September 2027 window would reasonably be expected to open around October 2026 and close in early January 2027, but that is an inference from precedent, not a published date. Families should check NHGS's own Sixth Form Admissions page directly before relying on any date for the 2027 cycle, including this one.
Calderdale is unusual among English local authorities in having exactly two selective state schools rather than one or several: NHGS and The Crossley Heath School, a separate co-educational grammar also in Halifax with its own headteacher, its own admissions arrangements and its own Department for Education record. At Year 7, the two schools do not compete for the same test-takers so much as share one: NHGS's own 2026-entry admissions policy describes a joint process "for entry to Year 7," under which "the school operates a joint admissions process with The Crossley Heath School (CHS)," with papers marked and "a qualifying standard... agreed by the Halifax Grammar Schools" jointly. Each school's Year 7 PAN is 180. Calderdale's local authority then runs the coordinated admissions scheme covering both, under which parents may express up to five preferences across all maintained schools in the area.
Our separate Year 7 admissions guide for NHGS covers that joint test, the 180-place PAN and the Year 7 oversubscription order in full, and this page does not repeat it.
At sixth form, that shared arrangement ends. NHGS's own Sixth Form Admissions Policy makes no reference to Crossley Heath, a joint test or any shared process at Year 12 — the two schools run entirely separate Year 12 admissions on separate timetables. Checked directly against Crossley Heath's own site on 22 August 2026, its published cycle for September 2026 entry closed applications on 19 December 2025, roughly three weeks before NHGS's 9 January 2026 deadline for the same intake year, and included an in-person interview stage in "February/March 2026" with offers going out on 27 March 2026. NHGS's own policy contains no interview requirement at any stage — only the post-application conversation described above. A family weighing both schools for the same September should treat them as two applications with two different deadlines and two different assessment methods, not one shared Calderdale process carried through to sixth form.
This question is genuinely harder to answer than it looks, because the most commonly cited register does not actually cover it. The Department for Education's Get Information about Schools (GIAS) record for NHGS lists "Gender of entry: Mixed" — but that field describes the age-11 entry point into Year 7, and GIAS carries no separate field for the sixth form. Relying on it alone for a 16+ question is a category error, not a confirmed answer, and it is the reason this exact question has produced inconsistent conclusions across similar grammar-school sixth-form pages elsewhere.
Two independent, sixth-form-specific sources settle it instead. Ofsted's report of NHGS, following an inspection on 8 and 9 November 2023, carries its own distinct data field — "Gender of pupils in sixth-form provision: Mixed" — which is scoped to the sixth form specifically, not inherited from the Year 7 entry field. The same report separately records the sixth form as roughly a quarter of the whole school, at 339 pupils out of 1,247 on roll. The Department for Education's own school-performance data service independently tags the school "Ages 11 to 18, Mixed sex" on every one of its sixth-form results pages. NHGS's own 2026 Year 7 admissions policy also describes the school throughout as "a state supported, mixed, selective 11-18 grammar school," a whole-school description that is consistent with, though not on its own proof of, the sixth-form-specific Ofsted finding. Where a register is silent on a specific age range, the honest approach is to find a source that actually addresses that age range — here, that source is Ofsted's own inspection data, not the more commonly cited DfE entry field.
North Halifax Grammar School was inspected by Ofsted on 8 and 9 November 2023. The school's overall effectiveness was judged Good, and — separately and distinctly — its sixth-form provision was judged Outstanding, the highest of the four gradings and one grade above the school's own overall outcome. Ofsted's report describes the sixth form in its own words as "exceptional," noting that "students rise to the very academic standards that teachers have of them."
The Department for Education's Compare School and College Performance service, publishing 2025 results in April 2026, shows NHGS's Year 12 and Year 13 students achieving an average A-level result of grade B (40.33 points per entry), against C+ (34.43 points) across Calderdale's state-funded schools and colleges and B- (36.1 points) across England as a whole. The same dataset records an A-level progress score of +0.14, banded "above average" with a confidence interval running from 0.04 to 0.24 — meaning the entire plausible range for that score sits above zero, not just the central estimate. Of 168 students enrolled mainly on A-levels in 2025, 155 completed their main course, a 92.3% retention rate against 92.9% for Calderdale and 93.1% for England.
Destinations data for the 2023 leaver cohort, published in March 2026, shows 87% of NHGS's 156 leavers progressing to further education, an apprenticeship or employment within the following academic year, against 72% across Calderdale and 79% across England — well ahead of both benchmarks. The same dataset breaks the cohort down further: 68% stayed in education, 6% entered apprenticeships, 12% went into employment, 10% were not in education or employment for at least two terms, and the remaining 3% had an unrecorded destination. Alongside the results themselves, NHGS's sixth form currently offers 22 A-level courses and a Level 3 Certificate in Core Mathematics.
Preparing a Year 11 application for NHGS's sixth form? We build a subject-by-subject plan against NHGS's own published grade table — including how the four-A-level average requirement actually works — so a results-day offer is expected, not a surprise.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppNHGS sets several subject-specific bars above the general Grade 6 floor — Grade 7 for Maths, Grade 8 for Further Maths, Grade 7 for Physics, Chemistry, Music, French and Spanish — so a Year 11 student's actual subject grades matter more here than a single headline average. 91% of our students achieve their desired grades, and our preparation is built directly against the specific thresholds a student's chosen A-levels require rather than generic GCSE revision. On Trustpilot we are rated 4.8 out of 5 from 58 reviews, read 22 August 2026; reviews from families we have worked with are shown above, unedited. Families weighing Year 7 entry to NHGS rather than Year 12 should see our Year 7 admissions guide, and families comparing sixth forms across the borough can browse every school we cover on our 16+ entry hub.
No. NHGS's own Sixth Form Admissions Policy describes no interview stage for external candidates at any point in the process — applicants instead receive an invitation to an application conversation in the week commencing 26 January 2026, ahead of a Sixth Form Admissions Evening on 10 February 2026. This differs from The Crossley Heath School, the borough's other selective sixth form, whose own site describes an in-person interview for qualifying applicants in February or March.
An average GCSE grade of 7 across a student's full set of results. This sits above the general Grade 6 entry floor set for every applicant and is assessed as a whole-record average rather than a fourth subject-specific requirement, so a student can still take four A-levels with one lower individual grade, provided the overall average and any subject-specific bars — Grade 7 for Maths, Grade 8 for Further Maths, and so on — are still met in full.
Not as of 22 August 2026. The school's own admissions page states the 2026 intake form is closed, and its Entry Requirements page remains headed for "Intake From 2026" with nothing published for 2027. Based on the previous cycle's pattern, a 2027 window would reasonably be expected to open around October 2026, but families should confirm the exact date directly with NHGS rather than relying on last year's dates.
Yes. NHGS's policy explicitly accepts "applications from students wishing to transfer to NHGS from other schools," and applies the same academic admissions criteria used for its own Year 11 leavers. The external-applicant PAN is not normally less than 50 places, out of an overall Year 12 PAN of 185, though external candidates are ranked behind NHGS's own Year 11 students if the year group is oversubscribed.
Yes. Ofsted's report of its 8-9 November 2023 inspection records a sixth-form-specific field reading "Gender of pupils in sixth-form provision: Mixed," and the Department for Education's own performance-data service separately tags the school "Ages 11 to 18, Mixed sex." The commonly cited GIAS "Gender of entry" field, by contrast, describes only the age-11 intake and does not on its own confirm the sixth form.
No. Calderdale has two selective state schools: NHGS and The Crossley Heath School, a separate co-educational grammar also based in Halifax. The two schools jointly run a single Year 7 entrance test with a shared qualifying standard, but their sixth-form admissions are entirely independent, run on different deadlines and, at the other school, include an interview stage that North Halifax Grammar School's own policy does not have.
A fixed three-tier order applies: looked-after and previously looked-after children first, NHGS's own Year 11 students currently on roll second, and any remaining places allocated by predicted GCSE performance and course fit third. An external applicant is only ranked within that third tier, after every qualifying internal Year 11 student has already been placed — which is why the external-applicant PAN floor of 50 is the more realistic number to plan around than the overall 185-place total.
In 2025 results published by the Department for Education in April 2026, NHGS's average A-level result was grade B (40.33 points), against C+ (34.43 points) across Calderdale's state-funded schools and B- (36.1 points) across England. Its A-level progress score of +0.14 was banded "above average," and 87% of its 2023 leaver cohort of 156 students progressed to education, an apprenticeship or employment, against 72% locally and 79% nationally.
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