AIBU to feel cross at online school and autistic daughter over A level results?

[hurtandconflicted]

We were expecting to get the results on Thursday and I had booked a day off to celebrate. However we got the results this morning and they are not great.
Late diagnosis after she started at college and just could not cope so we agreed that she leave in May and then wait to start her A levels online. No financial support from the LA and no EHCP.
At first things were going great and in her mocks she was predicted three A’s. But she took her foot off the gas, not burnt out, just not got herself into a good routine and due to her demand avoidance I resisted being too demanding of her.
We have spent approximately £20,000 on her education and she has come out with B,C and a D. I can’t decide who I am most cross with, school for sending the results on the wrong day or DD for not knuckling down.
Im hoping that someone can talk me out of feeling like this!

😂

Exactly!!!

Have I missed she's done international A levels? I can't see it in the OPs posts. Otherwise someone somewhere has massively fucked up.

Anyway be proud of your DD and perhaps next time don't fall for the online school sales pitch.

B, a C, and a D aren't too awful! She'll have options! Could go to FE college and do a foundation year/HND before university if she wants to. Nobody will care about her A levels once she has something higher.

You need to reframe it as a success in your mind before Thursday so you can react positively not negatively.

Does your daughter have the grades she needs for the uni she wants to attend, assuming she wants to go to uni? If not you could get ahead of the game by looking at alternative unis with vacancies.

I've not rtft , but on Reddit the overwhelming consensus is that there is a problem with the Cambridge grading this year. Many kids are on there lamenting that their grades are much lower than expected and teachers angry and wondering what went wrong. Do.not be cross with your daughter, request access to scripts and go from there

Much if that is from students in the Middle East where actual exams were cancelled due to the war. They have been assessed by teachers etc much like our were during COVID.

DS2 developed severe sight loss during his A levels and we had to spend a lot on tutors on top of his private school fees to try and mitigate the impact. No blame on the school, it was an almost impossible situation.

He didn’t get the A levels he was capable of but he did get enough to get onto the foundation course that lead to the degree he wants to do. He passed that comfortably and will move on to his preferred degree in Sept.

My thoughts having been in a similar situation are:

1. You gave your DD the best chance you could in the circumstances so you can park any parental guilt you may feel
2. Your DD knows you will support her and work with her to find the best options possible which matters more than you may realise
3. The grades she has got do give her options
4. Don’t rule out foundation courses as a good way for a young person facing additional challenges to adjust to university life without quite as much pressure as going straight into a degree.
5. There is no roadmap or handbook for this so you can only muddle through it doing your best based on what you know at the time.

BCD won’t define your DD’s future. Does she have a plan going forward?

She has three solid A levels, OP. Does she have what she needs to get her to her next adventure? Lots of unis will take her with those grades. Don’t worry about the people on here who tell you if she doesn’t get into medicine at Cambridge she wasting her life. Far more people go to non-RG than RG unis and go on to get great jobs.

With ND you have to factor in capacity as well as capability. I.e. capacity for sustained effort over a long period including when anxiety hits as well as for self directed revision. So really she's done very well and I'm sure BCD will get her into lots of Unis if she wants to go.

She got a BCD learning independently when the only one to one input was you moaning. That's actually really good.

Walk out any high street and look at the young people. She's smarter than most of them.

You need to help her find courses at universities that offer a lot of student support if that is her next step.

Well, what does she want to do next? Will those grades get her a degree course she’d applied for, or did she have a different next step in mind?

The results are fine. Your DD can do plenty with that. You are still allowed to celebrate her completing her a-levels.

Dd pretty much messed her A levels up. Think she got CDD on results day though iirc the 2x Ds got upgraded later on to Cs (with no input from us, we just got letters from the school weeks after).

Went on and got a 1st class degree at a pretty tough subject. Now doing a Masters at an RG university which is 2nd in the country for her subject. She even had a Cambridge interview for her Masters so it must be true that A levels are a stepping stone and it’s what happens next which counts more.

What does your Dd want to do next and will her grades affect this?

Another example of the enormity of the pressure some parents put on their children to meet the parent's expectations.
Seen it so many times.

It shows that throwing money at the problem isn’t always the best idea! I think those results are fine, not brilliant not certainly not awful! Well done to her for seeing it through to the end and not giving up!

Her plan had initially been to go to Uni but she realises that she is not ready for this. She has the chance of an apprenticeship doing digital marketing and could then consider Uni later on.

Honestly, she's done much better than many and under difficult circumstances. I do think that it's tougher to do well when you don't have the support of a real life school.

I'm not criticising - I fully understand why you used an online school. I realise that it's different days now, but I recall hearing of people with worse results getting into uni when I was a teen. (I went through the Scottish system, but attended the same international course as some English students.)

She's done great! If you knew she had taken her foot off the gas though and you didn't push her to study more then surely you can't be too surprised that the As didn't materialise.

You sound cross with yourself too. But, give it time to sink in and then by Thursday you can celebrate properly with her.

Its okay to just be angry with the situation OP, or cross with the outcome. Ultmately she's got 2 decent A levels - which given everything she's been through is an achievement. It feels like a negative when you compare it with the predicted grades and consider how much money you've spent.

I can see why you would be frustrated if you compare the results to the predicted grades, however my son (also autistic) received similar and we were delighted. Your DD is coping with so much from a sensory and social communication point of view, please make allowances and celebrate as planned.

Some autistic students do better later on in higher education for a variety of reasons.

You're annoyed that your disabled daughter got burnt out and didn't do as well as predicted in her exams? Poor lass. Maybe she had too much pressure on her from her parents. I'd have thought you'd be more concerned about her well being than her results.

I think this is really unfair and infantilising.

As an autistic person and mother to two autistic children I do understand that the change of plan might be difficult, however I would do that over risking my daughter finding out I had opened her results, seen them before her, and also then decided to sit on them for two days.

She was predicted 3 As, she obviously has capacity. I presume she is 18, so an adult - the results are hers to share with you, not the other way round.

How had she done in the gcses of the subjects?
as often kids drop a grade?
so to gets As she would have had to get 8-9 may be 7.
getting b c d suggests grades 6-7 at gcse.

however i also have an adhd/asd dc and its crap as shes very bright extremely unmotivated, cant be reasoned with. Mines y10 net year and we’re outtibg the effort in for gcse but i think alevels will have to be up to her as you cant push her.

30yrs ago i had bbc predictions and ended up cdd. Ultimately some kids cant remember such huge amounts of info!

Well done to her. Getting B,C,D with her additional challenges is fantastic. She can still go on to further education of some sort or another if that's what she wants to do. I'm not sure if you are annoyed you didn't know when results day was or with the results she got but whichever it is I think yabu