List of Universities and their entrance requirements

I work very hard at being the embarrassing one in our relationship

it works well

The job we do gives us such enormous scope.

That is sooooooo true

Hi there. Please don't take this the wrong way, but I'm writing as a sixth form tutor here as well as a parent who's gone through this sort of thing twice myself with my own children. By all means find out the sources of information and have a look for yourself out of interest, but it's really your son/daughter who should be doing this. You can lead a horse to water, etc! Feel free to message me if I can help.

I would agree with this up to a point. My eldest has AS and feels overwhelmed by the whole process a lot of the time, so the vast majority of what should probably have been done by him was either done by me or by us both together. All the decisions have been his, I just did research / booked open days / organised exam entries (STEP) and he's now happily setting sail to Warwick next month on his own. If he had to do it over again he'd be able to do it on his own now and if he'd had more (any) support from school it might have made my input less necessary. As it was, if I hadn't stepped in he'd probably still be half-way through the first draft of his PS!

Yes, when I wrote that I was feeling a bit fed up with a bunch of helicopter parents at work who appeared to be reliving their lives through their children and seemed to be applying for what they wanted to do, rather than what the kids wanted. It never ends well. The kids do usually make it to university and then drop out because it's not what they want to do and they haven't learnt the skills they should have to cope with university study because their parents have done it all for them. It can have quite tragic consequences.

However, I was probably over forceful. Of course it helps if parents are knowledgeable and supportive and some kids do need a bit of a push. It's the giant shove I take issue with!

Absolutely! Helicopter parents are a nightmare, I run Explorer scouts and the amount of parents whose kids are being shoved head first through DoE and Queens Scout makes me really cross for the same reasons. From personal experience the school and my parents pushed me in to engineering which I hated and dropped out from. Eventually did OU and got my maths degree in my own time on my own terms

parents going to open days with their kids, which is so common as to be the norm nowadays, but far worse, parents going and staying with the kids for the first week or two when they start at university.

Going to an open day (or the open day element of a combined open day/interview) is fine, I believe, as parents have a better idea of what to look for and can act as extra, experienced, sets of eyes and ears for the student.

Doing anything when starting university, other than delivering, helping unpack the car and leaving within an hour, though, should be made a criminal offence, as should having anything to do with an interview other than driving the car.

One of the mums joined several university drama-based activities as well.

One wonders how that can happen. Surely the university must stop non-students from taking part?

The daughter still doesn't have a boyfriend or anything....

I wonder why...