Plagiarism

I would say that you go with the statement option. And write that this was under the sixth forms instructions, and that (only if he actually did) he used it for 'inspiration', and areas to cover and did not directly steal from them resource.

Cover the fact that he has not done similar in any other exam.

That's what he's chosen I think, the school is heavily pressuring him to simply withdraw the coursework in order to cover their reputation, which is annoying.

I think he's included that, but the problem is that he used them for every single unit in this subject. So he did it six times basically, simply because he was given no other guidance about it.

If he references the examplar properly (in-text references and as a Bibliography reference in full at the end) then it's not technically plagiarism, although it sounds like his school have already been very rigorous in working out what he's done. He might be able to remedy this by providing the requested statement and then referencing his work properly.

He'll need to go through his work in detail and put a page reference to the exemplar after each sentence that he's paraphrased. If he's actually done something as daft as cut & paste or directly copied, then he'll need to lay these sections out so that it's obvious that they are direct quotes and not his writing - maybe as an indented paragraph, in italics, contained within quotation marks and followed by the appropriate in-text reference.

Even if he does this, if he's used the exemplar very extensively, then he may not have enough original material remaining to pass the work.

Also he used the exemplar for all of his work so unless he references almost every sentence, which would be ridiculous, he's going to be stuck.

It's a harsh lesson, but when you turn in a piece of work which is essentially copied, there's always the risk of being found out. The consequences are logical I'm afraid. They'd be far worse at uni, so best to take the hit now and learn the lesson.

I completely understand, being at uni myself. My point is, if you are instructed by a teacher to do a certain thing in order to get the grade, that it what you would do. Because you assume that the teacher is telling you the correct thing. However him, and half of his ICT class are now in jeopardy, and most of them will not get into uni, purely because the school told them to do something ridiculous. I just wondered what was best for him to do, since essentially, it's not his fault, just like it isn't the fault of the other 10 people in his class.

I can't understand how a guaranteed fail could better than writing a statement.
Are there none of his own words in it at all?