Sorry for ambushing this wonderful thread for entirely selfish reasons. I'm reposting this from a thread I've just started on Scotsnet. Apologies to those who will find it dull and irrelevant - please feel free to skip. BUT if you can help me I will be so grateful! In one of my many other name changes piggywaspushed was very helpful in particular I seem to remember! Here's what I put on Scotsnet:
Sorry for the slightly panicked title and what's going to a bit of a long one. I'm going to put this in Education as well but I know there are some good Scottish teachers on here like Lidl and...( struggles to remember names of any more but know s that there are LOADS!)
I'm a serial namechanger and have been on here for years and know that aurea has a child at Oxford and she's been very helpful in the past.
So my dilemma. My son is applying to Oxford and the deadline for entries is October 15th at 6pm. Miraculously he put his UCAS in last Thursday 7th October with all his other 4 options so he was feeling well ahead of the game. He wants to study PPE and needs to take a Thinking Skills Assessment test. These are usually held at registered centres and some of these are schools. His state secondary in Glasgow is not a test centre so he's been told that he and the handful of other Oxbridge entrants will be doing their various entrance tests at Glasgow's 'presenting centre organised through St Roch's Secondary'.
I'd been reading everywhere things on the official Cambridge (it does Oxford too it's just got a confusing name!) TSA site like:
"Please note that school error will not be taken into consideration if the deadline for registering for these tests is missed, so make sure you check that you have been registered and have your candidate entry number before the 15 October deadline"
So I have been asking my DS if he has proof of registration and/or a candidate number for a few weeks and he's asked his teachers and says he's had lots of reassurance that everything is in order. That it's going to be happening at St Rochs, not to worry etc... But nothing in writing and after reading the above, I thought, I would really like to have that candidate number in my possession.
Friday was an Inset day at my son's school and now it's half term but I managed to speak to a pastoral care teacher on the phone who has been dealing with my son's UCAS application and explained what I wanted. She spoke to a teacher who apparently had put all the applications in to the test centre and more reassuring noises were made.
I followed up the phone call with an email to the Head teacher who kindly emailed me back (she's lovely) and said that this year is slightly different in Glasgow as they have a presenting centre organised through St Roch's Secondary. She also said that they "had written confirmation in an email that DS and our entries from XX school have been received by the centre." She said they had sent an email to the Centre asking for specific details but had not got a reply yet (this was Friday afternoon). Nothing came through today but it is only Monday.
I am now getting a bit anxious. I phoned up a TSA information line this morning (the first thing they asked for was my candidate number!) and gave them my son's details but they could not find any record of him but then they couldn't find any record of St Rochs being a test centre either - they only had one Glasgow test centre and that was near George Square in Glasgow.
Does anyone here know whether St Rochs is a test centre and if I can even get hold of them during half term? Is there only one St Rochs Secondary in Glasgow? More generally, is it common for Head Teachers to be checking their school emails regularly during a Half Term? If I can't get through to the school, what should I do next? What would you do next in my shoes? I don't know any of the teachers personally so can't make a cheeky phone call.
I just want to say that the school have been wonderful in supporting my son through his application. They've really worked hard and put in the time with him. Which is just as well as he didn't get any mentoring through schemes for State school pupils like Clydeside, even though he applied. And we put our names down for schemes like Scotland for Oxford and didn't hear anything back either. We didn't hear about UNIQ until it was too late - that's the pandemic for you. But he's spent so much time watching helpful videos on Oxford Uni's website and working really hard to get his reference up to scratch. It's a really aspirational punt on his part that came out of the blue for us (who went to dodgy Polytechnics many, many moons ago!) I'd hate for it to be scuppered by an admin error.
It might all be fine of course and I'm panicking unneccessarily but I just want to have his candidate number and know that all is present and correct. I can't imagine what he would do if he didn't even get as far as taking the TSA test after all the work he's put it.
And again, the school have been brilliant but they don't have many kids apply to Oxbridge - three or four a year and some years less? They've obviously done it before but they have never had anyone apply for PPE before so they might not have done the TSA route?
If you've read this far, thank you. If you can help in anyway, thanks even more 