Target Grade vs Predicted Grades: What a 2027 Sixth-Form Application Needs

A sixth-form application form almost always asks for a predicted grade, not a target grade and not a mock grade — three figures with three different authors that parents commonly treat as one number. Esher Sixth Form College’s 2027-entry form asks directly for “GCSE subjects and predicted grades,” with applications closing 29 September 2026. A target grade is generated from a pupil’s Key Stage 2 results, and a mock grade is a school’s own mark on its own paper.

Three Grades, Three Authors: Target, Mock and Predicted Compared

The confusion is understandable: all three figures are written down as a single number next to a subject name, and none of the three explains itself on the page a parent actually sees. Set side by side, with who produces each one, the difference stops being a mystery and becomes mechanical. The wider question of whether mock grades predict final results at all has no national dataset behind it.

Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Boys sets out the target-grade mechanism without ambiguity: “All students have a target grade, which is set based on their prior attainment at Key Stage 2.” It is fixed by a formula run once, from primary-school data, months or years before a pupil sits a single GCSE mock. A mock grade looks more current because it comes from a paper a child actually sat this term, but AQA is explicit that even that number carries less weight than it appears to: the board provides “notional grade boundaries” for individual components “for illustrative purposes only,” because “there are no official grades for individual components” at all in a linear qualification. A predicted grade sits between the two — not fixed by a formula, and not read off one paper, but a judgement a teacher forms from several pieces of evidence and then submits on a form. For more on how a school actually arrives at that judgement, see our separate guide to how predicted grades are set. It is the number Esher Sixth Form College’s own 2027-entry application asks for by name: “GCSE subjects and predicted grades.”

None of this makes any one of the three figures more real than the others — a target grade, a mock grade and a predicted grade are all legitimate for what they are built to do. The problem is only ever the substitution: writing down whichever number is closest to hand, or happens to be highest, without checking which one an application actually wants. Sixth-form forms are not consistent about how they label the field either, which is exactly what pushes some families toward guessing rather than checking. Searching for the difference between these grades mostly turns up results that define one term at a time, or define target and predicted grades for a single school’s own termly reports rather than for the application that depends on getting the right one — which is a reasonable part of why a confusion this basic still generates long, unresolved parent forum threads rather than a single clear answer.

Why a KS4 Target Grade Is Not a Predicted Grade

One parent’s account on Mumsnet shows exactly how the target-grade mechanism above can catch a family out in practice. Their daughter had been achieving an “8+” in her Year 10 maths mock, and had been “performing consistently well and getting higher grades in Maths in mocks as well as internal exams” — yet the school’s own “End of KS4 Target” for the same subject stood at 6. The parent explained why the two numbers disagreed so sharply: the target grade “is computer generated based on Year 6 SAT’s and the teachers are unable to change it,” regardless of how the child was actually performing three years later.

A reply further down the same thread corrects the exact mistake a parent in that position might otherwise make: “End of KS4 target grades are not predicted grades. Do not put that down on the sixth form application.” The distinction matters precisely because the two numbers can differ this much for a strong student — a target grade generated years earlier from Key Stage 2 data has no mechanism for catching up with genuine improvement, while a predicted grade, set by a teacher working from current mock and classroom evidence, does. Writing the older, lower figure on an application in place of the current predicted grade understates exactly the pupil a sixth form is trying to assess.

The mechanism is not a one-off computer error, either. A target grade of this kind is not designed to update as a pupil’s results change — it is set once, near the start of secondary school, and normally stays fixed regardless of what happens afterwards in the classroom. That is a reasonable way to track progress against a baseline. It is not a reasonable substitute for a predicted grade on a form asking what a sixth form should expect a pupil to achieve now, several years and several sets of mock results later.

When a School Gives Mock Grades but Calls Them Predicted

The reverse failure is just as real, and it can cost more when it happens. A second Mumsnet parent described an independent school that “don’t give predicted grades, only their best mock grades,” with no separate predicted-grade process run at all. The consequence was concrete: “This has meant that DS has not go an offer at one of our preferred sixth forms… he needs a 7 for one of them (maths) so didn’t get on his course.” The parent was specific about what went wrong procedurally, not just about the outcome: “The school never told us what grades they would use nor what their policy is on using mock grades as predicted grades.”

Nothing here suggests a school is doing anything improper by working this way — schools vary in how they arrive at the figure a sixth-form application needs, and a mock result can be a genuine input into a predicted grade. The failure in this case was that the family found out only after an offer had already been decided, when there was no longer time to ask for anything different. A predicted grade and a school’s “best mock grade” are not guaranteed to be the same number, and the only way to know before it costs a place is to ask the school which one it actually submits, and when.

Not every school runs a separate predicted-grade process at all, and a school’s own reporting calendar decides when a family finds out which approach it uses. Some issue a predicted grade well before the first application deadline of the year; others generate it only once, later in the autumn term, alongside a full round of parents’ evening reports; and some, as in the case above, use mock results as the substitute without naming it as a substitute. None of these approaches is inherently wrong on its own — the difficulty is that a family cannot tell which one applies to their own child’s school from the outside, and a sixth-form deadline does not wait for a school’s own reporting calendar to catch up.

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The Deadline Collision: Why Some Sixth Forms Close Before Mocks Even Start

For some sixth forms, the timing above turns this from an academic distinction into an urgent one. Esher Sixth Form College’s application for September 2027 entry closes “Tuesday 29 September 2026, at midday” — and its form asks for predicted grades specifically, not mock results. Even the earliest-starting school identified in this project’s own 54-school mock-calendar dataset, Queen Elizabeth High School in Northumberland, does not begin its Year 11 mocks until 14 October 2026, running “Wednesday 14th October to Thursday 22nd October 2026” — more than two weeks after Esher’s deadline has already closed. For a pupil applying to Esher, no Year 11 mock result in that dataset arrives in time to feed the predicted grade the form is asking for. Mock timing itself varies widely school to school; see our guide to when GCSE mocks actually happen for the wider spread.

This is not true of every sixth form, and it should not be read as one. Aquinas College’s deadline for the same entry year is 30 November 2026, and Peter Symonds College’s is 7 December 2026 — both comfortably after an autumn mock round, wherever a given school schedules one. Across the three colleges checked for this page, application deadlines span 29 September to 7 December 2026, more than two months apart. The honest generalisation is a range, not a rule: some colleges close before this year’s mocks have even started, some close months afterwards, and the only way to know which applies is to check the specific college’s own published date.

The mismatch exists because a school’s mock-exam calendar and a sixth form’s application calendar are set by two different institutions, working to two different planning cycles, with no requirement that either consults the other. A secondary school times its Year 11 mocks around its own teaching calendar and its own need for evidence ahead of predicted grades and, eventually, real GCSEs. A sixth-form college times its application window around its own enrolment planning, open evenings and staffing decisions for the following September. Neither date is wrong on its own terms. The problem only appears when a family assumes the two must line up, and discovers, at whichever college they are applying to, that they do not.

What to Do When the Deadline Falls Before You Have the Number You Need

The practical response is the one that would have protected both families in the cases above: ask the school, in writing, well before a deadline is close. Two specific questions cover most of what goes wrong. First, which figure will the school actually submit — a predicted grade, and not the End of KS4 target grade described earlier, which a reply on Mumsnet warned parents not to “put… down on the sixth form application.” Second, by what date will that figure be ready, set against the specific sixth form’s own deadline, whether that is Esher’s 29 September 2026, Aquinas’s 30 November 2026 or Peter Symonds’s 7 December 2026.

Where a school’s normal predicted-grade process would not finish until after a preferred college’s deadline, the school is the only party that can resolve it — by bringing an assessment forward, or by issuing an early predicted grade from the evidence already available. Neither of those is guaranteed, and asking does not manufacture time that does not exist. But the family in the second case above lost a place at a preferred sixth form not because the timing was impossible to solve, but because nobody asked the question until the deadline had already passed. A written question sent weeks in advance costs nothing and forecloses nothing; silence forecloses the answer the family actually needed. Our GCSE tuition programmes are built around exactly this evidence — mock results, coursework and topic-by-topic diagnostics — so a predicted grade reflects what a student can actually do, not an old formula.