Silverdale Sixth Form is one of the most successful in the city, indeed in the entire country.

We pride ourselves on the exceptionally high levels of attainment and progress achieved by our students.

The close academic and pastoral relationship between students and staff results in sixth formers fulfilling their potential and beyond.

Supporting aspiration

At Silverdale School Sixth Form, we support academic and individual aspirations for all students.

We encourage all students to view university as an ambition to follow and provide an array of opportunities to assist students in fulfilling this.

We are most fortunate to have a strong association with a number of universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Newcastle, Sheffield and Manchester. Our students have the opportunity to undertake a full day at a university in the summer term of Year 12. This allows us access to university experiences for our students focused on course choice, career aspiration, apprenticeships and preparing for university life.

All students have the opportunity to attend the Apprenticeship Show in Year 12 to gather information from employers about the many varied apprenticeship schemes available. The UCAS Discover event in the summer term allows all Year 12 students to speak to university representatives from across the country and find out more about courses they are thinking of studying after A-levels.

We work in partnership with the University of Sheffield through their Access outreach programme. This provides our students with a wonderful range of experiences in dentistry, STEM, medicine, engineering, law and humanities subjects.

As a school, we encourage all students irrespective of social or economic background, and we are passionate about our belief that education is a chief means of achieving social mobility. To this end, we work with the Social Mobility Foundation to ensure our able students from disadvantaged backgrounds have equal access to the opportunities available, including residential courses with major employers and mentoring from Year 12 until university graduation. Through this work, students from Silverdale Sixth Form have gone on to become the first generation in their family to achieve degrees and postgraduate employment.

With attainment and progress at Silverdale Sixth Form being amongst the highest nationally, we also focus on aspiration to the highest national level. To support this aim, we run Oxbridge and Russell Group sessions within the school as well as attend the Sheffield Oxbridge Conference each year.