An Academic School: Learning At AHS

Aylesbury’s Grammar School for Girls

As a fully selective girls’ grammar school, we turn academic potential into achievement, enrichment and success. In addition to A Level qualifications, we will ensure that you learn the skills you need to fully develop as a person so that you emerge from AHS as a mature, engaging young adult; ready for the challenges and opportunities ahead.

We provide you with the chance to follow your dreams and to make your own futures. Our Sixth Form is very much the transition point between GCSEs and the world of Higher Education (HE), Apprenticeships and employment.

A Level Study

One of the most important things you can do is to choose the right courses for you. Most of our Sixth Form students study three A Levels in their two years of Sixth Form, along with an enrichment course. Some students, with strong GCSE results, qualify to study four A Levels. We will support this ambition and advise you along the way to ensure you are comfortable with your workload.

Our students choose A Levels from a wide range of subjects and wherever possible, we will run a subject if there is sufficient demand. Extension subjects are usually part of a Year 12 timetable to complement the examined academic subjects.

Even before the Pandemic, we committed to increase classroom teaching time in Year 12, and our students have timetables that typically give them five lessons a week in every subject, which means around 15 to 20 lessons a week - along with timetabled time for the private study, whole-school and co-curricular activities that are fundamental to your time here.

Private Study, Independent Study and Homework

Our students are going into a world that is changing fast. Whilst they may enter careers that don’t yet exist, using technology yet to be developed, core skills will always endure. Our students learn how to be genuinely independent and self-motivated learners ; they are self-starters AND team players. They work hard in the classroom, and know that A Level success relies as much on what they do outside their lessons as it does inside.

Our status as a ‘Google Reference School’, following our "exemplary" work with 1:1 devices and BYOD is testament to our commitment to leading modern teaching and learning initiatives.

There are three areas that you can choose to study in during a school day:

• you can browse books and periodicals and study in our fantastic and well-resourced library

• you can work quietly in our Sixth Form Study Centre, where study periods are supervised until it becomes more like a Common Room and student area at break and lunch.

• or you might choose to work in the Main Dining Hall, where you can work collaboratively over coffee and a pastry, throughout the day.

Whatever your learning style, we have a way of supporting it.