Year 13: the second year of A Levels, with UCAS on top

Year 13 asks a student to do three things at once, and the two that are not the exams both peak in the same eight weeks of autumn.

The dates

When	What
15 October 2026	UCAS deadline for Oxford and Cambridge, and most medicine, dentistry and veterinary courses
Autumn and winter 2026	Skills Baccalaureate individual project, coursework deadlines, mock exams
13 January 2027	UCAS equal consideration deadline for everything else
Monday 10 May 2027	AS and A Level exams begin
Friday 18 June 2027	Last scheduled exam
Wednesday 23 June 2027	Contingency sessions: stay available
Thursday 12 August 2027	A Level results day

The collision nobody plans for

October to January is the busiest stretch of the application, and it lands on top of the individual project of the Advanced Skills Baccalaureate Wales and the first set of Year 13 mocks. All three are real work and none of them can be done badly without cost.

The students who cope are almost always the ones who drafted the personal statement in the summer between Year 12 and Year 13, or in September, rather than in December. Nothing else in the year moves as easily.

The resit decision, which is a Welsh decision

Because the AS is worth 40% of the A Level and each unit can be retaken once, a Year 13 in Wales has a lever that an English student does not: a weak Year 12 unit can be genuinely repaired rather than merely explained away.

Parents get this wrong in both directions. Some do not know the option exists and treat a poor AS grade as fixed. Others enter a resit in every wobbly subject, which quietly costs a term of second-year teaching time and produces three slightly better units and three worse ones. The question is not “can we resit” but “where would this hour otherwise have gone”.

Have that conversation with the subject teacher in September, not in February.

What predicted grades rest on

Universities decide on predicted grades, and a Welsh prediction is built partly on results that already exist. That makes the prediction more solid and harder to argue with. Where a prediction sits a band below a course’s typical offer, that is a reason to keep a range on the shortlist rather than a reason to strike the course off.

What Fincho does in Year 13

The exam roadmap carries the UCAS deadlines and the national exam dates with their sources, and the project and coursework dates once the student adds them, so October is visible in September. Practice comes in the style of the awarding body and is marked against the mark scheme. Drafting the personal statement answers is a conversation Pip can hold, with the student writing every word.