How Many A-Levels Is Too Much? A Sixth Form Teacher’s Advice for Parents
Last Tuesday I found Mia hunched in the chair outside my office, ten minutes before our scheduled check-in, half a pack of ready salted crisps spilling out of her backpack and her eyes red from crying. She’s in Year 12, signed up for four A-levels at the start of term: psychology, biology, chemistry and history. She wants to study psychology at university, which only requires two of those three, plus a third. History was just for fun.
She told me she’d missed three weeks of after-school swimming, the club she’d been part of since she was 8, just to cram in history essays. She’s averaging five and a half hours of sleep a night, and her last biology mock was two grades lower than the result she got at GCSE. “My mum says all the good students do four,” she told me, picking at a loose thread on her jumper. “If I drop one, I’ll never get into a good uni. I don’t know how to tell her I’m tired all the time.”
An hour later, I met her mum in the same office. She sat down straight away, pulled out her phone, and showed me a screenshot from her local parent WhatsApp thread. Three different parents were chatting about their kids doing four A-levels, one was bragging about their child doing five. “They need to stand out these days, don’t they?” she said. “I don’t want her to have less opportunity than everyone else.”
I’ve been head of sixth form for 12 years, so I’ve seen every combination of course loads play out. I once had a student who did five A-levels, got all As, and went off to Cambridge to study engineering. He still messages me once a year, says he doesn’t regret the work, but he also never went to a single sixth form prom or movie night, and he can’t name half the people in his year. I’ve had far more students who pushed for four to impress admissions tutors, burned out by January of Year 12, and ended up with lower grades across the board than if they’d just stuck to three.
The dirty secret no one talks about on parent WhatsApp is that almost every university in the UK makes offers based on three A-levels. I’ve never seen a competitive course that requires four, not even at Oxford or Cambridge. A fourth A-level won’t make up for lower grades in the three you actually need for your course. If you’re predicted three As, that’s way more attractive than four Bs, every single time.
So when is it too many? It’s not a fixed number for everyone, but there are concrete signs you can spot. It’s too many if your kid has stopped doing the extracurricular they actually care about— not just the after-school club they complained about hating anyway, to get out of homework. It’s too many if they’re sleeping less than six hours a night most nights just to fit in studying. It’s too many if their grades in the core subjects they need for university have dropped by more than one grade since the start of Year 12.
A lot of parents tell me their kid is super smart, they can handle the extra work. Smart doesn’t mean immune to burnout, and extra A-levels don’t automatically equal better opportunities. Two years ago I had a straight-A student who did four A-levels, got three As and a C in the fourth. Her chosen university didn’t even ask about the C, they just looked at her three As and gave her the place. She told me after results day she was so stressed she threw up before the fourth exam, and she’d never do it again if she had the chance.
Instead of comparing your kid’s course load to what other parents are posting online, try three small concrete questions at your next after-school check-in. First: do you have time to do something that doesn’t involve school or scrolling every week? Second: are the grades for the three subjects you need for university where you need them to be? Third: do you usually get seven hours of sleep? If the answer to any of those is no, it’s worth talking through whether dropping a subject makes sense. If your kid still wants extra to stand out on their application, an EPQ is almost always a better bet than a fourth A-level. It’s half the workload of a full A-level, lets them dig into a topic tied to their future degree, and every admissions tutor I’ve talked to says they’d rather see a strong EPQ than a fourth A-level with a mediocre grade.
For Mia and her mum, we worked out a middle ground: Mia dropped history, got her swimming back, and did a short EPQ on child developmental psychology, which ties directly into her university course goal. Her mum was nervous at first, kept saying she didn’t want Mia to regret giving up an extra qualification later. Three months on, Mia’s biology and psychology grades are back up to where they were at the start of term, and she’s started going to youth club with her friends on Friday nights again.
Her mum still texts me once every couple of months, just to check in, ask if I still think it was the right call. I tell her yes every time, but I get the worry. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Some kids do thrive on a heavier course load, and that’s fine. The goal isn’t to collect as many A-levels as possible. It’s to get the grades you need for the future you want, and still have enough energy to be a teenager while you’re doing it. That’s a trade-off most parents and students don’t talk about enough, until it’s too late.
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