Friend has asked for advice on her DS's exam results

[MaximiseProductivity]

I'm the only person in her circle who has any A-Levels, so I'm the one she asks for anything to do with school, but it was a long time ago....

Her DS has just finished his 2nd attempt and the 1st year of sixth form. He was originally taking 2 A-Levels and a BTec (equiv 2 A-Levels?) but struggled and dropped an A-level, still didn't pass the AS Level at the end of lower sixth, so repeated the year.

Just has the results for the end of his 2nd 1st year (IYSWIM!) and he's failed the AS level. In the Btec he's got merits or distinctions for 4 our of 5 modules, but a fail in one of them, which I'm told = fail overall.

He's had poor attendance at school due to anxiety, often friend can't get him out of bed until evening, then he stays up all night.

So, he has to decide what to do next. My "advice" would be to do something completely different for a year and see what he wants to do then. Maybe a year of NMW jobs will motivate him to actually work next time. Friend says he's still saying he wants to go to Uni so they will look at him either repeating school again (if the school allow it) or continuing the BTec at college. I don't think the BTec alone would get him on a degree course?

What would you advise? Where can they get proper advice? Personally I don't think they were best advised to let him repeat the year at school, he's been very unhappy seeing his year group progress without him.

or maybe he'll spend a year totally de motivated if he didn't have a course to attend.
my ds(21) stays up late and has done thoughout hi degree course i don't think it's rare for a teenager. He also got onto his course with a Btec and just graduated with a 2:1.

dread to think what he would have done if he'd just left school after 6th form.

I think that's where his parents are ATM southeastra, what on earth will he do if he doesn't study....He's supposedly taken over his brother's paper round (brother is working too hard to do it) but mum usually ends up doing most of it, so I can't see work working out either.

He has seen the doctor over the anxiety and been offered some counselling which he's refusing. They won't medicate at his age, which seems fair enough when he's being offered other treatment. His mum has suffered severe depression on and off since she had PND so is very sympathetic, whereas to people less involved it might look like lack of application....

I can't se how things will improve once he's at Uni either, or for that matter, during a further year of school. But he has to do something...

Southest - read the OP - has HASNT stayed up late, that's not the reaon he's failed. He has MH issues and these need addressing first. Spending yet another year at college and failing a third time could totally destroy him.

He could look into doing an apprenticeship, he still gets the chance to improve his qualifications and won't rule him out of going to Uni but it may help to focus him on seeing the effort needed to progress, it may bring home to him that there tends to be a correlation between effort and reward ie wages.

I work in an admissions team for a computer science dept at a university.

As someone up thread said, you don't necessarily need an IT qual for a cs or IT degree, but a good standard of maths is usually required. A lot of unis ask for A level maths (we look for a grade A ideally).

You say he has anxiety issues: do you know if he asked for this to be taken into account in his first year? mitigating circumstances can help, as missed deadlines for assessments may not immediately be a fail (sorry not familiar with btecs so that may not apply). However it's rare that mitigation can be done in retrospect.

Back to his current situation: if he wants to complete the btec, it's important to check the funding issue to ensure it can be done in the time he has left.

However, I am another who thinks it would be best to consider time out completely and perhaPs consider an Access to HE course instead. Ideally he needs to look for science-based access courses as these will give him the maths/physics background that would be useful for a cs/it course.

I'm not sure if there are IT access courses, but these would have a more 'applied' approach, and perhaps better for IT degrees with a 'business' slant.

I really do think he needs to talk to the school/college for more advice in the first instance. He needs to prepare for a frank discussion about his performance and where to go from there. But more importantly perhaps, think about what he really wants to do. Time out to rethink / regroup is a very brave thing to do and could be the best thing he'll ever do. (And I speak from experience there!)

Wishing him all the best of luck.

This may sound harsh but I think If he can't pass one AS level after 2 years of trying then he is not university material.Somebody needs to tell the kid instead of blowing smoke up his arse.Wasting more time and in the future,money on something he can't do is not doing him any favours.

In his position, I would look at what work was needed to complete the BTEC L3 and compare that to doing an access to higher education course at 19.

He may also want to look at IZt based apprenticeships. He could maybe do one of those ( they seem to take one to two years)and then ( if he still wanted to go to uni) do an access to HE course. He could then apply to uni with some some good work experience and an understanding of what working in IT would be like. Or he could do an OU 'certificate' level course in IT as a way of getting into a brick uni. He is still very young and had plenty of time to find the style of learning that suits him best.

If he is suffering from anxiety and struggling to pass AS levels, I would think that 6th form isn't working for him, but the decent marks in BTEC modules suggest that something with continuous assessment could suit him better (without the pressure of also trying to pass an AS level).