Dd 16 has ADHD. It was a late diagnosis at the beginning of lockdown and it took a while to get her medication that worked. The ADHD was diagnosed as she was actually seeing a psychiatrist for depression and self harm which appears to have been triggered by her stress at failing in school and feeling "stupid" and getting into trouble for not focusing in class.
Properly medicated she's now happy and has managed to catch up well in most subjects. Predicted grades range from 8/9 (geography) to a 5/6 (maths) with one exception- history.
History has been a catastrophe for her. There's a huge amount of content being delivered by a very dry teacher (in fairness he provides the children with massive amounts of revision materials etc, but just as big walls of text that she struggles to engage with)
She couldn't engage with online history during lockdown and has failed to catch up. She hates it and it's begun to upset her. I've just spent all day trying to help her gather things for revision and practice for paper 2 and it's a disaster. She's got no sense of how it all fits and very little of what she learnt has stuck (memory is an issue with ADHD) For example she worked for days on her coursework essay and got a 6- we've gone back to the time period she wrote about (the Great Depression and Germany) and she's retained nothing. She was fine writing with the materials in front of her but it hasn't stuck.
I anticipate it's going to take hours and hours just to get her to at best a level 4/5. These are hours she needs to focus on other subjects as well.
I'm thinking of suggesting she drops history and just does 8 GCSE. This is likely to improve a few of her grades in the remaining subjects as history takes a disproportionate amount of time. However she would like to go to university. The school is confident she'll do well in the A level subjects she's picked but would only having 8 GCSEs rule out the better universities? Do they have minimum GCSE requirements?