Really great state sixth form or a good grammar school?

I’m assuming the former is likely Brampton Manor? If so take it. The reason they get so many kids into oxbridge is because they work you HARD. They know what it takes to get people in and the results speak for themselves. Instead of the school being grammar or state which is irrelevant to getting in, the amount of students a school gets into oxbridge is more of a telling factor. Go where ever you think will suit you best, you are the one who needs to put the work in and get the results ultimately x

Brampton Manor is no doubt a great school, but as with other highly selective schools, it achieves fantastic A-level results largely due to the students getting in already being the best of the best. The sixth form prospectus might say minimum 7 in GCSE, but you have about 10 applicants for every place, and it selects on GCSE results as per its stated criteria, so you end up having almost everyone with 9s across the board.

However good or bad the teaching is, a sixth form full of students with perfect GCSE results, will end up getting better A-level results than the school next door.

Oh completely you also have to interview. I had a fair few friends that went there, they didn’t have perfect GCSEs by any means although they did have 9s in their chosen subjects but I never saw them. They literally never left their bedrooms studying and had no social life. Both got into their chosen uni courses (engineering at Warwick and economics at LSE) but I’m not sure I could cope with the pressure they were put under constantly.

However this is the case with most grammars anyway, they have perceived excellent results because the students are all selected for being very academic. It’s not necessarily the school creating those results, they simply foster what is already there.