The September Guarantee When There Is No Sixth-Form Place

The September Guarantee is a duty on local authorities in England to make every 16- and 17-year-old an offer of a suitable education or training place by the end of September. The Department for Education’s statutory guidance says the offer may be conditional, and it does not have to be the course, school or college the young person applied for. In September 2025, 94.1% of young people received a suitable offer and 1.5% received no offer at all.

That gap between what people believe the Guarantee promises and what it actually promises is where most of the distress sits. Families hear “guarantee” and reasonably assume a place. What exists is an entitlement to an offer, owed by a named body, on a stated date, with a route to complain when the date passes and nothing has arrived. This page sets out each of those four things in order: what you are owed, who owes it, what counts as discharging it, and what to do on each date it is missed.

What the Statutory Guidance Says You Are Owed, in Its Own Words

The wording matters, and almost nothing published about the September Guarantee quotes it. Paragraph 28 of the Department for Education’s statutory guidance on the participation of young people in education, employment or training reads:

Every young person who reaches the age of 16 or 17 in any given academic year is entitled to an offer (including a conditional offer) of a suitable place, by the end of September, to continue in education or training the following year.

Four things are being said there at once, and each one is load-bearing.

The entitlement attaches to the young person, not to their parents and not to a school. It is framed as an entitlement of everyone reaching 16 or 17 in the academic year, with no qualification about grades, attendance, prior exclusion or immigration status written into the sentence.

The thing owed is an offer. Not a place, not an enrolment, not a timetable. An offer that is made and then withdrawn because a condition failed was still an offer when it was made, which is a real problem in practice and one we return to below.

The offer may be conditional. The parenthesis is not decorative. It means an authority can and does count a sixth form’s conditional September offer, made in March on predicted grades, as discharging the duty for that young person — even where the condition later fails.

The deadline is the end of September. Not results day, not the first day of term. Leeds City Council, in one of the clearest local statements of the duty, puts the same deadline in year-group terms: the offer “needs to be in place by the end of the September when they would enter Year 12 or Year 13”.

The guidance is issued under sections 18 and 68(4) of the Education and Skills Act 2008 and is addressed to all local authorities in England. It was last updated on 4 April 2024. It is statutory guidance, which means a local authority must have regard to it — a lower bar than “must comply”, but a real one, and the standard the Ombudsman will measure a council against if you get that far.

Which Local Authority Owes You the Offer

This is the single most common reason a family spends three weeks talking to the wrong council. Paragraph 28 continues:

Local authorities are required to lead the September Guarantee process for: 16 year olds who are educated in their area; and 17 year olds who are resident in their area.

Read those two tests side by side. For a 16-year-old — the Year 11 leaver — responsibility follows the school. For a 17-year-old — the Year 12 leaver, or the young person who dropped out of Year 12 — responsibility follows the home address. A child who commuted from one borough to a grammar school in another is therefore owed the Year 11 offer by the school’s authority and the Year 12 offer by their own.

The guidance anticipates the cross-boundary case directly. Where an authority is told about a young person being educated in its area who lives elsewhere, it “must inform the home authority as quickly as possible”. That is a duty on the council, not on you. In practice it is also the step most likely to be missed, which is why the practical advice below is to write to both authorities on the same day rather than waiting for one to hand you over to the other.

Behind the Guarantee sit two broader statutory duties worth naming in any letter you write. Under section 68 of the Education and Skills Act 2008 a local authority has a duty to encourage, enable or assist young people’s participation in education or training. Under section 15ZA of the Education Act 1996 it has a duty to secure enough suitable education and training provision “to meet the reasonable needs of all young people in their area who are over compulsory school age but under 19”. The September Guarantee is the annual, dated expression of those duties. If a council tells you there is nothing available, section 15ZA is the provision that says filling that gap is its problem, not yours.

What Counts as an Offer, and What Does Not

An offer has to be of a “suitable place”, and there is a published test for the word. Leeds City Council states it as directly as any authority does: an appropriate offer “must include working towards an accredited qualification”. Its worked example is a young person offered a job in a hairdressing salon, who “does not have an appropriate offer in relation to the September Guarantee unless this employment also includes working towards a relevant apprenticeship or other accredited qualification”.

Paid work on its own, in other words, is not an answer. Neither is a vague promise of a college place with no course named. What does count is set out in Annex 1 of the statutory guidance, which lists three primary ways a young person participates: full-time study in a school, college or with a training provider; full-time work or volunteering of 20 hours or more combined with part-time education or training leading to relevant regulated qualifications; or an apprenticeship, traineeship or supported internship.

“Full-time” also has a number attached to it. Outside school, the guidance defines full-time participation as “at least 580 hours of planned learning (both qualification and non-qualification hours) a year, this is around 19 hours per week”. That figure is useful when a college offers a thin timetable and calls it full-time.

The last two rows are the ones that cause arguments. A suitable offer is judged against the young person’s needs and prior attainment, not against their ambitions. If a child with a grade 3 in maths is offered a level 2 programme rather than the A levels they applied for, that is very likely a suitable offer and the Guarantee has been met. The right response then is not a complaint about the Guarantee but a conversation about how to get back onto a level 3 route the following year — and, where English or maths is the blocker, about what the grade 3 rule actually requires.

Year 12 Leavers Are Covered Too, on a Different Footing

Most coverage of the September Guarantee stops at Year 11. The statutory guidance does not. Paragraph 30 states that “the Year 12 September Guarantee applies to all students, but particular attention should be paid to those who are studying one year courses, often at entry level or level 1. These young people are at a greater risk of becoming NEET either part way through Year 12 or at the end of the academic year.”

So a 17-year-old finishing a one-year level 1 course in July 2026 is owed a fresh offer by the end of September 2026, from the council where they live. A 17-year-old who left a sixth form at Christmas is owed one too. This is the cohort that most often assumes the system has finished with them, and it is the cohort the guidance singles out as most at risk.

The practical difference between the two years is who to write to and what to ask for. In Year 11 the school is still involved and usually still has a record. By the end of Year 12 that link is often gone, particularly where the young person left mid-year, and the council’s own tracking record becomes the only trace of them. Asking the post-16 team what your child’s current recorded status is — participating, NEET, or not known — is a fast way to find out whether anyone is looking.

How Often the Guarantee Is Missed, and Where

The Department for Education publishes the answer every January. The September 2025 release, published on 29 January 2026, records the following for England:

Two of those rows deserve more attention than the headline. The 3.3% whose status was not recorded are not young people known to have a place; they are young people nobody could account for. Add them to the 1.5% with no offer and the 1.2% whose offer was judged inappropriate, and roughly one in seventeen 16- and 17-year-olds in England was not confirmed as holding a suitable offer at the end of September 2025. Both the “no offer” and “not recorded” shares rose by 0.3 percentage points on the year before.

The national figure is also close to useless for predicting your own experience, because the variation between councils is enormous. Of 153 local authorities, 140 made suitable offers to at least 90.0% of young people in their area and 95 made them to at least 95.0%. The published range runs from 61.3% in Leicestershire to 100% in City of London and Thurrock — and the Department flags that Leicestershire’s figure “may not reflect the actual proportion of young people receiving an offer due to technical issues affecting their returns”. Year on year, 88 authorities were stable within half a percentage point, 29 improved and 36 fell.

Treat these as management information rather than audited statistics; the Department says as much, and warns that tracking quality varies by authority, which is exactly what the “not recorded” column is measuring. The September 2026 figures are due in January 2027. What the data is genuinely good for is calibration: look up your own council’s rate before you decide how much chasing this is likely to take.

The Escalation Ladder, Date by Date

This is the part no competing page publishes. The Guarantee has a deadline, so it has a timetable, and each point on it has exactly one useful next action. The dates below are for the 2026 cycle.

Two features of that ladder are worth understanding before you start climbing it.

First, the steps are strictly sequential. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman is explicit that the organisation gets its chance first: “the first step is to complain directly to the organisation you’re unhappy with”, and it cannot look into a complaint before that happens. Going to the Ombudsman in week one wastes the week. The one exception is silence: you may go to the Ombudsman where you have complained and had no response “within a reasonable time”, which it puts at “in most cases … up to 16 weeks”. The Ombudsman is free to use, and you can complain on someone else’s behalf with their permission.

Second, the ladder has a hole in it. The Ombudsman’s education fact sheet states that “academies operate independently of local authorities, and we cannot currently look at complaints about them”, directing complainants instead to the academy’s own procedure and then to the Secretary of State for Education. Since most sixth forms in England are now academy sixth forms, that matters: a complaint about the school that withdrew a place and a complaint about the council that failed to make an offer travel down two entirely different routes. If your issue is a withdrawn conditional offer rather than an absent one, the appeal route is different again and is set out in our guide to what to do when a sixth form withdraws a place after GCSE results.

Alongside the council, England has a free national advice line. The National Careers Service can be reached on 0800 100 900, open 8am to 8pm Monday to Friday and 10am to 5pm on Saturdays and bank holidays. It cannot make an offer or compel a council to act, but it can tell a young person what routes remain open in their area, which is often the missing piece at the point families give up.

What the Local Authority Can Actually Do About It

Escalating to a team you know nothing about is unsatisfying. Here is what the post-16 team genuinely controls.

It holds the tracking record. Every council maintains a Client Caseload Information System entry for each 16- and 17-year-old, and the national figures above are compiled from those returns. Asking for your child’s recorded status is a legitimate request and often produces movement on its own, because a young person recorded as “not known” is a number the council is measured on.

It holds the sufficiency duty. Section 15ZA of the Education Act 1996 requires the authority to secure enough suitable provision for its area, and the statutory guidance tells councils to keep a strategic overview of what is available and to identify and resolve gaps — including by putting a case to the Department for Education where a gap cannot be filled by existing providers. “There is nothing left” is not a complete answer from a body that holds that duty.

It can commission or point to re-engagement provision. The guidance treats a young person on re-engagement provision as meeting their participation duty without further investigation, and leaves councils free to determine locally what counts.

It administers money in some cases. The 16 to 19 Bursary Fund pays students in vulnerable groups — broadly, young people in care, care leavers and those on certain benefits — up to £1,200, with a separate discretionary bursary decided by the education provider. Where transport cost or equipment is the real reason a place has not been taken up, that is the fund to ask about.

And here is what it cannot do. It cannot compel a school or academy to admit a particular young person to its sixth form, and it cannot set aside published entry requirements. A council that says it is unable to make a named school take your child is telling the truth. What it can be pressed on is the alternative it is offering instead, and whether that alternative is genuinely suitable.

After September: the Duty That Does Not Expire

The end of September is a deadline for the offer. It is not a cut-off for the entitlement, and this is the most useful thing on the page for anyone reading it in October or later.

The duty to participate runs to the young person’s eighteenth birthday, and the council’s duty to identify and support those who are not participating runs alongside it. Paragraph 48 of the statutory guidance is unambiguous about what should happen when someone drops out: local authorities “are expected to act on any information they receive about a young person who has dropped out; contacting them at the earliest opportunity and supporting them to find an alternative place in education, training or employment with training that leads to relevant regulated qualifications”. That sentence contains no date. A young person who walks out of a college in November is owed the same effort as one who had no offer in September.

Mid-year entry is more available than it looks from outside. Colleges run January starts on many level 1 and level 2 programmes; apprenticeship vacancies appear continuously rather than in an annual round; and the 20-hours-plus-part-time-study route can be assembled at any point in the year. A November GCSE resit series also sits inside this window, and if that is where things have landed, our guide on what to do after a failed November resit covers the next sitting and the decisions around it. Not every subject can be taken outside a school or college, and the list of subjects you cannot resit privately is worth checking before building a plan around one.

Two exemptions are worth knowing so that you do not chase a duty that has already been discharged. A young person who has “already attained level 3 qualifications of sufficient size, for example two A levels” is no longer required to participate. And a Year 11 leaver who has accepted an offer starting in September is under no obligation over the summer — the guidance states there is “no requirement for them to participate during the summer holidays”. A council that contacts you in August about a young person with a confirmed September place is checking a record, not raising a concern.

If You Are Not in England

The September Guarantee is an England duty, and so is the requirement to stay in education or training until 18. The statutory guidance says plainly that “the RPA legislation applies in England only”, then resolves the two travel cases in opposite directions: a young person who lives in England but studies in Wales or Scotland “is still under a duty to participate”, while one who lives in Wales or Scotland but studies in England “is not subject to the RPA legislation”.

School leaving ages differ across the four nations too. GOV.UK sets out that in England a young person may leave school on the last Friday in June if they turn 16 by the end of the summer holidays, and must then stay in full-time education, start an apprenticeship, or work or volunteer 20 hours or more a week while in part-time education or training. In Scotland, a young person turning 16 between 1 March and 30 September may leave after 31 May of that year. Nothing on this page describes the post-16 arrangements in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, and the escalation routes above — the post-16 team, the council complaints process, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman — are English ones.

If you want to read the duty in full, the Department for Education keeps the guidance and every year of published Guarantee data on one GOV.UK page, and the National Careers Service publishes the current results-day dates alongside the post-16 options.

Frequently Asked Questions

Leading Tuition works with families across England on GCSE and A level programmes, including students who have started the year on a course they did not choose. We are rated 4.8 out of 5 from 57 reviews on Trustpilot as at 19 August 2026, and 91% of our students achieve their desired grades. One parent wrote on Trustpilot that their daughter’s tutors “explained difficult topics clearly, helped build her confidence, and prepared her thoroughly for her exams”.