Advice for anxious daughter starting college engineering course after long absence from education

[Clockworkbanana]

I’ll try and give the whole picture…..

Dd (16) has had a massive gap in learning due to ill health and hasn’t attended school for 3 years. She should be doing GCSEs this year but due to her health, she wasn’t put in for them and will be doing functional skills instead (fingers crossed by the summer break).
She has made massive improvements recently and is keen to go to college in September.
There’s another layer to this though….she didn’t leave the house for nearly 2 years with crippling OCD, she has no friends and was bullied quite badly at school when she did go, so finds it difficult to trust anyone.
She wants to do a STEM subject like engineering, because of the bullying, her biggest concern is making friends on the course and fitting in. She’s concerned there won’t be many girls, which I know there won’t be but I’m sure there will be a small percentage. She’s painfully shy, self conscious and anxious, though we are working on this.
Any words of advice?

My dd is similar. Lockdowns and doing a lot of home learning in the last year or two if her secondary school career I think is the main reason she coped.

She did a computer science and it did turn out that she was the only girl on the course and she was worried about that but it ended up being a good benefit for her, she used to get bullied at school for her hobbies and the boys on her course shared her interests, never bullied her for her taste in clothes or music, never called her a freak or weird, they were mostly students who’d also been badly bullied.

She is autistic and a lot of the kids in the course were too and I think that really helped. Dd said she could be her true self around them in a way she couldn’t at secondary school. She’s still on the introverted side but she has introverted friends. I won’t say it was all easy but even when it was hard, it’s was nothing like the secondary school level of hard.

My neice is currently doing engineering and had a similar experience, she says the difference of how she’s treat is like night and day and if her secondary school experience could have been the same as her college one there’d have been no self harming and eating disorders because she’d not have been bullied.
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I hope your dd settles, thrives and finds her people. I know it’s a cliche but she should be herself. Regardless of how she gets on she should be very proud of herself for giving it a go because I imagine it’s a big scary thing for her and also you to have to watch her struggle. ❤️

Thank you so much for your reply, this had brought a tear to my eye 🥺 That’s so lovely to hear.
She’s not the most academic, but I know there are routes in that don’t require high grade GCSEs. I think she’s concerned she’ll be the “dumb” one, but I’ve tried to explain there will be a mixture of abilities.

College and school are worlds apart. Bullies get short shrift at college. All the students will be keen on engineering so there's a common interest. Some will be older and others will have friends on different courses so she'll soon have a group to hang out with. So long as your daughter accepts offers to join most gatherings I'm sure she'll be fine.

My son undertook an engineering apprenticeship at 16 and the age range for the course was one to four years older and it matured him much faster than if he'd stayed at school and entered sixth form.

Good luck to your daughter.

What level is she starting at?
When DD started college after missing y11 she dropped down a level from 2 to 1 in the first week as it was all a bit overwhelming. But she thrived from then as she could have iffy attendance but still keep up. Did the level 2 a few years later.

I think if she manages the level 2 functional skills, she might start at level 2 and see how she gets on….the course info says this is ok if they’ve had a break in learning or didn’t get desired gcse, as they’d usually start at level 3 I think.