How Many A-Levels Is Too Much? A Sixth Form Tutor’s Guide for Parents
Last November, I sat across from Mia and her mom in my tiny tutor office, the one where the radiator clanks non-stop and I keep a jar of plain biscuits for nervous parents. Mia had just got her first half term report back, and her mom pushed a crumpled UCAS course printout across my desk before we’d even said hello. Mia’s 17, wants to read history at Oxford, and she’d started the year with five A-levels: History, English Literature, Politics, Latin, and Fine Art. Her mom leaned forward, coffee mug slipping a little in her hand: “Everyone says she’s bright enough for five, so why would we cut any? We don’t want to put her at a disadvantage, do we?” Mia just picked at a loose thread on her school jumper and didn’t say a word.
I’ve been a sixth form tutor for 12 years, and this question comes up at least 20 times a year. Ever since more students leave GCSE with 10+ top grades, parents and students alike assume that scaling up to as many A-levels as possible is the next logical step. I’ve seen students sign up for four, five, even once six A-levels, all because they think more looks better on a personal statement.
A month into that term, I’d already noticed the shift with Mia. She’d been the one who brought homemade shortbread to form time every Friday, and by October she’d stopped. She missed two form meetings because she was in the library catching up on work, and her history essays – which were consistently A at GCSE – dropped to a high B. When I asked her after class one day how it was going, she shrugged and said “it’s fine, just a lot.” At the parent meeting, when I pushed a little and asked how many hours of study she was doing outside of class, she finally admitted 4 to 5 every weeknight, plus 6 on Saturday. She hadn’t been to the cinema with her friends since starting sixth form, and she’d quit the life drawing class she’d gone to every Saturday for three years. Her mom looked shocked – Mia had said everything was fine when she asked, so she’d believed her.
The thing is, there’s no hard number for how many A-levels is too much. I had a student two years ago, Jake, who did four A-levels – math, further math, biology, chemistry – for medicine, and he sailed through. He got bored if he had empty time in his week, he loved all four subjects, and he still made time to play rugby every weekend. He got four As and went to his first choice med school. Four worked for him, but four would break a lot of other kids.
What I tell parents is: too many A-levels isn’t about the number, it’s about what your kid is giving up to keep them. When extra subjects start eating into the time they spend on things that don’t go on a UCAS form – time with friends, hobbies, even just downtime to sit and scroll or watch a show – that’s when it’s too many. Unis don’t actually care about extra A-levels the way most parents think they do. 99% of undergraduate courses in the UK ask for three A-levels, and even top Russell Group and Oxford/Cambridge courses don’t penalize students for only taking three, if those three are top grades. I’ve had admissions tutors tell me directly that they’d rather take an applicant with three As than an applicant with four A/Bs, every time. The extra one doesn’t make up for lower grades in the core subjects your kid needs for their course.
The first thing I tell parents to do is look up the entry requirements for your kid’s target course before you agree to extra A-levels. If the course asks for biology and chemistry for medicine, that’s two, plus one more – that’s three. Any extra is just gravy, and it’s not going to give your kid a leg up if it pulls their core grades down.
Second, instead of asking your kid “can you handle this?”, ask them two specific questions: how many hours a week are you spending on each subject, and what are you cutting out of your week to make time for the extra A-level? Kids will almost always say they can handle something to please you, or because they don’t want to look like they’re not capable. But when you ask what they’re giving up, you get the real answer. When I asked Mia that, she said she’d stopped going on her monthly Sunday walks with her grandma, and she’d given up life drawing. Those were things she loved, and she didn’t want to give them up – that was our answer.
Third, if you and your kid are set on doing an extra A-level, do a four week trial. Most sixth forms let you change your subjects in the first half term, so agree that after four weeks, you’ll sit down and check in. The only rule is: if they don’t still have time for at least one non-study activity they enjoy every week, they drop the extra. No guilt, no questions asked.
We ended up dropping Fine Art for Mia. It wasn’t that she wasn’t good at it – she was brilliant – but it was an extra she’d only added because her mom thought it would make her application “more interesting”. After she dropped it, her grades climbed back up to AAA within two months. She started bringing shortbread to form time again, and she went back to life drawing on Saturdays. She’s got her Oxford interview in January, and she’s calm going into it, instead of burnt out like she was three months ago.
I still get parents asking me if four A-levels will always look better than three, or if five is worth the extra work. There’s no one answer that fits every kid. Some kids thrive with extra challenge, and some just get tired. The best thing you can do is watch for what they’re giving up, not just count the number of classes on their timetable. Right now, Mia’s still waiting on her Oxford decision, but whatever happens, she’s not going into her final exams already exhausted. That feels like a win to me, whatever the outcome.
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