The senior grades are the reason students come here from four other islands, and they are taught differently from the rest of the school.
The four combinations: physical sciences with mathematics, life sciences, business and accounting, and humanities with languages. Every combination is three main subjects plus the common periods, and group sizes run from twelve to eighteen.
The teaching at this level is closer to a supervision than a lesson: work set, work attempted seriously, work pulled apart together. The skill that separates students here is handling an unfamiliar question, and it is the thing we spend the most time on, because a student who has only ever practised recognising question types meets a paper that has been written specifically to prevent that.
What these two years also demand is study out of lessons, five or six hours a week per subject, which almost nobody arrives able to do. The supervised study hall exists for this and the first term for every grade eleven group includes actual teaching about how to study, which sounds unnecessary and is the single most useful thing we do in that term.
What we will not do is take a student into a combination the assessment says they are not ready for, because two years of failing is worse than a year spent repairing grade ten mathematics. Where that happens we say so to the family, in person, with the paper in front of us, and we offer the alternative rather than the door.