Among the myriad gifts that lockdown has given teachers this year is the extension of the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) deadline until the end of the month.
Did I say gift? I meant curse. Ucas has been part of my direct responsibility for three years now and I still haven’t got it 100 per cent right.
The first year that completing the form was part of my lessons, I gave students the choice of whether they registered or not. Some swore they would go nowhere near a university and so they were given alternative work - CV building, making a LinkedIn profile, looking at job fairs etc. Then about 80 per cent of them would decide just before we broke up for Christmas that, actually, they did want to go to university and I would spend the first week in January desperately dragging them through form filling and personal statement writing, usually submitting their forms five seconds before the deadline and telling them to get out of my sight very quickly.
The second year, I decided that I would not make the same mistake and made them all register and fill out the personal details section.
This took an extra two weeks because they had a lot of trouble with details such as their home postcode and getting their first and last names in the correct boxes. I spent virtually the whole first half-term getting them to fill out the form, and gave them the half-term break to write their personal statements, which they absolutely did not do. I spent the weeks before the deadline frantically pulling students out of classes to complete their forms and calling parents to tell them that Johnny would be at home with them for the foreseeable future unless he got his backside in gear, which actually expedited the process quite a lot.
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This year, I limited Ucas to only four lessons, to spare those who didn’t want to go to uni and give those who did a bit more urgency over filling in the form.
This was a terrible error. They were so keen to get the form filled in that when they finally sent them and paid, I had to return them multiple times. Key issues were not knowing the exam board or indeed the subject of the qualification they had been studying for the past two years, forgetting to enter any previous qualifications and, for some reason, claiming that they or their spouse had lived or worked in the EU when they hadn’t.
A common response was “we were still in the EU when I started filling the form in, so I have lived there”. This year I sat at my laptop at home until 5.59pm waiting for that one final returned form. So that’s three years on the bounce that I have started planning earlier, and it has had absolutely no effect.
I will not be caught out again. As of today, 80 per cent of my first-year level three students have a draft of their personal statement and have filled in a survey about where they would like to live in the future, because I am not having the “which unis are close to nice beaches?” discussion again.
I will do two lessons in September regarding Ucas, and then those who want to go have until November to book in a one to one with me where we fill in the form together. Bookings will be made only for those with a completed personal statement that I have already proofread. All parents will also receive a link to an article about young people who live at home well into their thirties. That should do the trick.
