only three GCSEs?

[Marshallstreet]

Home educated dd is on a path to only gain three GCSE’s (if she is lucky).

She has been working extremely hard to get in to a selection of academies abroad for a certain activity (so sorry for being vague but it’s a small community so would potentially be outing). It turns out she has been waitlisted at all of them, against expectation, and it is overwhelmingly likely that she won’t have a place come September.

I know I have failed her by not making her take her academics more seriously but please understand it has been a very difficult situation, where she has this specific plan of what she wants to do, and enough aptitude to be seriously considered for places in these academies. She has had to be very focused on developing in this area and things have been incredibly intense, so we decided that she could go for it, as it couldn’t wait for later, while academics can always be caught up on.

Things are not great right now and we have to salvage what we can. She has one gcse from
last year which she took one year early, and is doing foundation maths and one additional subject now. I think the best she can hope for in her second subject is a 6 or 7 and she’d have to have luck on her side for that.

For September, could she go to school for a levels with only three GCSE’s? I am guessing no? Would she have to repeat year 11? we could home school a levels and provided she does well in those, what effect would her poor gcse outcomes have? Would employers and universities have an issue with it, if she does have good a levels?

OP, contact the colleges and 6th forms individually and explain your situation. Often HE kids have less GCSEs or they have been taken over a couple of years. This is in no way a barrier to A levels or BTEC. Obviously, it depends on the grades and the GCSEs the young person has taken. Take advice from the college. It is not at all uncommon and many people on this thread don’t have relevant knowledge of HE, they are just quoting the standard prospectus info.

What is it to you

do you know my son and his struggles at school no

do you know anything about his personal life no

i am very proud of him this is a brilliant achievement to get these predicted results

its mn and why am I surprised by the spitefulness of some

Agreed. Plenty old children suffer from learning disabilities and that doesn’t mean they should try their best and succeed in their own way.

Everyone is assuming the DD will get 3 GCSEs but according to the OP - even that is very unlikely.

So she can do them next year. The world isn't going to end.

Exactly. This mindset that children (or indeed adults) should be educated in a uniform linear fashion to a uniform curriculum is so restrictive and does not reflect human nature.

I think the OP has realised by now that she/her DD have made some less than ideal decisions. In fact I think she knew that before she started the thread. I'm not sure what good telling her what she should have done several years ago is supposed to do, unless her DD's special interest is time travel. Yes, it would have been wise to devote more time to academics and I am surprised that the girl's coaches for whatever the activity is didn't also push that as based on my own experience they usually stress the need for a plan B,C,D etc. But for whatever reason, that's not happened and the OP is looking for advice on what to do about that now, not berating for past errors.
@Marshallstreet, personally I would not advise your DD to attempt a A levels right now, even if she can find somewhere that will let her. It will depend on the subjects to some degree but I'd imagine that she will be lacking in both the base knowledge and study skills to tackle A levels right now. That's not to say it's not a remediable situation but I suspect she may be setting herself up to fail if she tries that now. This must have been a difficult year for her. I'd think that dealing with disappointment regarding the academy admissions and struggling with GCSEs is likely to have dented her self confidence and the last thing you'd want is for her to be starting a course that she is likely to struggle with.
But it really isn't the end of the world. She's still a child and there are many roads to Rome. I agree that talking to the local college is probably a good start. They may not have encountered this particular situation before but they will have experience of young people taking non standard routes. Not everyone reaches their potential at 16 for all kinds of reasons but it doesn't mean they never can. I have a friend who is in quite a senior NHS role now who left school with no GCSEs. He has an MSc now. Not the easiest way to go about things obviously and he does go into schools to encourage kids not to make the same mistakes he did, but also to show them that there is still a future if they do "fail" at 16.
Your DD will have transferable skills from whatever her special interest is. People who have worked hard at things like sport, dance, music etc have had experiences and developed attributes that give them advantages in other fields. Try to look at her strengths and where they may take her. Things probably look pretty bleak right now but she is young and able - there will be a path for her I'm sure.
Oh and @Asfnfn you obviously have very clever children. That's great, good for you and them. But surely you realise that their academic achievements are not average and that not everyone can reach that level of attainment no matter how hard they work? And that there are other ways to succeed in life besides academic achievement? You can be proud of your own children without having to denigrate others. I hope your DC have the emotional intelligence to match their academic abilities because you aren't showing a lot of that on this thread.

Even balancing with an intensive and time consuming sport - to be “lucky” to scrape 3 GCSEs indicates very little effort.

I would get down to your local FE college and see what they offer in terms of functional skills courses or Level 1 vocational courses. No chance of A level courses at this point if your child is finding GCSE hard.

She will get there. Just not in the accepted timescale.

For some people
For other ,s it can take a huge effort.

I would also add that only about 1 in 4 students who resit GCSE get a grade 4 or better. ( Usually those who only narrowly missed it in the first place). More people succeed by trying something different like functional skills or a vocational course at a low level.
Doing something different means a fresh start, rather than repeating stuff you have already failed on. It's far more motivating.
It also draws a line under any poor decisions made in the past.

Exactly what do you use in RL that equates to what you learned in school.

I think I would have been better off not going to school beyond the age of 13.

I would say the only thing I learned in a geography lesson was how there was so little coal in the mines that pits would close.
Try telling that to parents of peers who worked in the mines.
It still came as a shock when the mines were closed as history would tell

People in stem use the maths and science they learnt.

My DC in finance occasionally draws upon economic concepts from their degrees.

I remember stuff like population pyramids which is a problem we currently have with the ageing population and falling birth rates.
Also when I go to the beach or walk by a river and see smooth round rocks, I remember my physical geography lessons about erosion.

While I do not use say chemistry as much, I am grateful for the people who use their chemistry knowledge to create stuff that makes my life better and healthier.

The only things I can remember from GCSE science are-

Biology - the stigma is sticky
Physics - red shifted bodies are moving further aware and the fact most are red shifted shows the universe is expanding
Chemistry - I was going to say nothing but I can remember a few chemical symbols, eg Sn = Tin, Fe = Iron

But I’m also grateful to others for knowing!

Physics blew my mind im 52 and i still cant get over being told the stars we see in the sky are probably not actually there anymore due to light years and the amount of time it takes for the light of the stars to reach the earth.

Who told you that? Almost all the stars we can see with our naked eye are still there. The light is many many years (centuries) old, so what we see is a snapshot of that star from that time, but they are still there and still burning and the light they release today will reach the earth many years from now. They aren’t all dead. Who told you all those stars had now died?

For the ones we can see, we know what type of star they are, we know what stage they are at in their lifetime and can work out from
there which ones are still going. It’s most of them. Loads of stars have died of course, but when you look up and see stars - they aren’t all/mostly dead.

Well i must hsve miss understood whst my physics teacher told me ,it was nearly 40 years and i got an F so clearly not my strongest subjrect.

I was told the same thing

@x2boys @WaitingForMojo I think it's an understandable misunderstanding if a teen isn't quite paying attention to or isn't quite understanding what the teacher is saying.

Looking up at the night sky there are about 2000 stars visible to the naked human eye on a dark cloudless night and they will range from 5ish light years away to 10,000 ish loght years away. The light we are seeing from a star 10,000ly away is 10 000 years old so if it went supernova 8,000 years ago then we wouldn't know about that event for another 2,000 years. That's all.

There's no reason to suspect that this has happened to any significant number of the visible stars we can see. The typical lifespan a star is several million or tens of million years so the probability that one of these particular 2000 stars just happened to reach the point of death at some point in the last 10,000 years is pretty low. To put it on a human scale, the death rate of visible stars per 10,000 years would be similar to the death rate of human residents in a village with a population of about 2,000 people (eg Stowe-In-The-Wold, Chipping Camden or Market Bosworth) in a typical month. Could happen to one or two, but it's not going to be a lot.