Year 13 2024 - General support thread part 2

[Rollergirl11]

All welcome as our young people head in to their last full term before the summer exams. Between UCAS applications, receiving offers/rejections, learning to drive and taking driving tests, revising for mocks and sitting them the pace hasn’t let up for our DC.

This thread has been a lovely supportive and immensely helpful place to talk as we guide our DC’s through this challenging time!

Old thread here https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/further_education/4851165-year-13-20232024-general-support-thread?page=40&reply=132323436

Good luck to those submitting in the last few days, hope the offers come through quickly.

Nice to have all of the decisions in @WombatChocolate and your ds will have a bit of time to mull things over now. I think I'd be inclined to go to the offer holder day to make it more real and exciting but £400 is costly.

A bit nerve wracking for you @stoneysongs! There is time to improve between now and the real thing and hopefully she'll do well.

Thank you @Lightsabre
She's very capable, IF she does eventually get going on the revision 🤞

It's not time to worry yet so I'm parking that for a couple of months 😬

@stoneysongs lots at DC's school didn't bother with their Mocks but intend to work hard for the real thing. Apparently the view is that predicted grades are already in, so why bother with Mocks.

Haha sounds familiar @Aardvarksforall

I do have some sympathy with that tbf. As long as they don't have a history of coming unstuck with exam technique I think mocks can be ignored relatively safely. (Also maybe less important for DD because she did AS last year.)

I think the issue with post application to university mocks is that the incentive isn't there because the predicted grades are already done. My DC wasn't able to adequately revise for one of the subjects because his mocks coincided with the Oxford interviews and he just didn't have the time. The mark in that mock did suffer but he knows that he can get the grades if he does the work.

These are going to be a busy few months for our DC, they'll run out of steam potentially if they are working too hard now.

I can totally see the reasoning with regards to the mocks. DD has a second round of mocks in Feb that are even more meaningless for DD than the November ones given that her PG’s had already been entered for the early app deadline in Oct. Her grades had dipped slightly in the November round though (the teachers said they had set them hard so were expecting it) and she was just off her PG’s so she will definitely be wanting to achieve them in the next round.

No danger of DD burning out 😂🙄😂

Her mocks finished last week and she did a bit of work for them but nothing like what she did for end of Y12 ones.

She has spent the last 2 days tidying up her work folders and revision notes. Trying to persuade her to do some practice questions but being met with raised eyebrow.

DD is apparently starting her long-term revision plan next week, so definitely wouldn't disrupt that for another round of mocks in Feb. She knows what she has to do and is trying to get herself organised a bit earlier than last year, when things got a bit messy in the last few weeks.

DD is doing history NEA work

Same as @MirandaWest DD also has final draft of History and English lit NEA to hand in before she concentrates on her actual revision.

Also DS is researching and writing an essay for his uni course. So DH and I are staying put in the living room. Feels a bit like when they were studying for A Levels and GCSEs

Sorry stoney but this made me laugh. I can't help but admire the attitude, even though it would irritate the hell out of me if one of mine said that!

We're back home after a horrible drive through whatI assume is the beginning of the latest storm with plenty of food for thought. There are only 3 Universities that offer the specific course that DS wants to do. He has offers from them all. Today we visited the one which we expected to be in third place by quite a long way...and he really liked it. Still Offer Holders Days to come at the other 2 mind you so nothing set in stone. I suspect today's place will end up as his insurance as I think when he revisits one of the others he'll remember why he decided he wanted to go there initially, but we shall see!

Update from me: course work handed in, personal statement written but won't let us see it (assume that's normal?) so hoping next week the form will be done. Not sure if the plan is a gap year or not but any sort of paperwork is good, right? Grades have slipped massively and on second warning for late to lessons but if the bus doesn't turn up I'm not sure what DS is supposed to do - I can only drive so fast and the traffic is awful so the 10 miles takes more than an hour and makes me late too - those who live local or in villages with trains but buses do have an advantage...

Mocks in a few weeks time but just two papers...

Oh and taxis - I'm lucky that those 10 miles only take 30 mins in an Uber at 2am so DS doesn't ask for lifts. He works to pay for Ubers.

PS: DD happy to talk about hers, DS not. Didn’t see references from either school and neither did DC.

DSs school also quite different to DDs: with DSs they all completed and submitted PS/UCAS etc at school so when DD came home with a booklet saying how to complete UCAS it was the first I’d ever seen of it. Kids vary as schools do!

That’s pants re the bus and traffic. 😟

My DS has received all 5 offers now for a science subject which is amazing. 1/5 is a foundation year which is a def no; 2/5 are within predicted grades and the other 2 offers are above what he is predicted and not likely to achieve. Just wondering what the next steps are. Luckily the 2 that are achievable offers were the 2 he wanted. So I'm guessing that he should use these as 'firm' and 'insurance' choices. Also the offer days are not till late March so should he wait til after that to do the responses? I guess my main questions are 1) when do you have reply to offers by and so people wait til after offer days 2) do people ever choose the higher offers as their choices. Thanks in advance

UCAS has a deadline to reply - it will say when your DS logs in. From memory it’s May sometime. BUT - if he has picked a uni that is first come first served accommodation (eg Nottingham, York etc) then he will need to he will need to have firmed that ahead of when their accommodation goes live, which could be earlier than the UCAS deadline. Also be aware of offer holder days wrt. A friends DD missed out on accom she wanted as they were still doing offer holder days when her first choice unis accom had gone live.

Re firm and insurance. For both, only pick unis that he actually would be happy to go to. He may have an amazing offer from one but if he’s not prepared to go there, then there’s no point having it as an insurance option. He’d just have to reject it and go into clearing, which wastes time. You have to be very quick in clearing!

He should pick the one he likes best as his firm, no matter whether the grades are higher or lower than insurance option. It negates the insurance option but so be it. Also it’s worth thinking about what accommodation guarantees his insurance choice offers - most don’t offer it. In face some give first dibs to clearing over insurance!

@dyzzie

The deadline for choosing firm and insurance is 6 June but he can do it at any time before then.

He doesn't have to go to offer holder days but many do. They can be really useful as you get more of a sense of the course, so might help him to be sure about what he wants / which of his two favourites he likes best. Definitely worth going if he hasn't already been to an open day imo.

Most importantly, his firm and insurance choices should both be places he really wants to go to. People do firm courses with higher offers, but only if they like it best. If he gets the grades he will be going there, so it's really important. (You can still withdraw once results come out, but then would have to go into clearing, big headache and there's no need in your DS's case if he has two achievable offers from places he likes.)

@dyzzie my DS is waiting to do a couple of offer holder days before he decides but they are over by the middle of February which reduces the pressure a bit. I guess it depends how certain your DS is about where he wants to go. My DS is in the nice but tricky position of having 5 offers that are all within the reasonable bounds of possibility (one would need a bit of luck but the others should all be ok barring some fairly major mishap) and is torn between 3. The other 2 would probably also be fine to be honest. So I think it's really important he sees them all. Were he very certain I think I'd be encouraging him to decide right away to try get the widest possible accomodation options.
I think if one of the higher offers is your DS's favourite then it is worth still considering it as firm, but make sure that the insurance is somewhere that he would be happy going to and he is likely to achieve. But if the two he prefers are more attainable anyway I would pick those.

I don't think waiting until March would affect accommodation but definitely worth checking each uni's policy and timetable.

This all just reiterates why applying with grades is so much better - but I know it's the system we have and must work within it!
My DDs school were great in helping her with ucas even though she'd left - private and they said last year totally happy for kids who were taking a gap year to come back. Knowing her grades (higher than predicted) meant she knew exactly where to apply. The school read her reference out to her and asked if she was happy with it, and specifically as they mentioned her MS, they also read her PS a couple times but with slightly conflicting advice (the Oxbridge guru said she should write it targeting them only as she should act as if totally confident of a place)! She let me proofread it for grammar and spelling.
Cambridge results Wednesday and we are still waiting on Bath! If no from C we will definitely be going to offer days as she's never been to Durham and while we know the city of Bath not the university campus. But in the near future she's going to work experience in Lisbon in February which is equally exciting and nerve wracking due to lack of details! But it will take the sting out of things if rejected this week.

We are waiting on C on Wednesday but DD has an offer holder day booked in for Exeter. She probably doesn’t really need to go as we went to the open day and she had a good subject talk and managed to look round quite a bit of the accommodation. But she wants to go back to see if she still feels the same about it. She is also really hoping for an offer from Durham and if so then hoping she gets in time to attend an offer holder day. We went to the open day here too but unfortunately there were no English specific subject talks because of the teaching strikes. She does have a general concern that she will be waiting ages to hear from Durham and miss the accommodation opening at Exeter so we will have to play it all by ear.

I know what you mean @mondaytosunday
My elder DS didn't apply with grades in hand but he did defer due to needing an operation, which sounds stressful but actually made things easier I think! We went to the offer holder's day after he had his A levels, knowing he was definitely going and when it came to accomodation could say "We want this room, in this hall, here's the deposit" and the certainty was nice. It also meant that had he done much better or much worse than anticipated, he could have dropped out and reapplied. (He didn't, but knowing the option was there was good.) DS2 is doing things the more usual way and I have a feeling that results day is going to be a lot more stressful this time around!

I didn’t know Exeter was part of the early accommodation crew. DD has an offer but don’t think it’ll make the final cut.