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Thursday April 26th, 2018
In this month’s newsletter we will talk about how school and the parents can help the young adults in selecting their university courses.
Before we start, I wanted to touch on the biggest news in the social life in the UK this month, the birth of the third child into the family of Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
Their baby boy was born on Monday, 23 April, on St George’s day, in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, and will be the new brother to Prince George, four, who is currently attending Thomas’s Battersea prep school (at £17K per year) and Princess Charlotte, who will turn three next month.
We are currently looking forward to finding out the new Prince’s name, which has not been announced as yet.
And, of course, the country is preparing for the Royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May in London.
Prince Harry has been pushed lower down the line for the throne by the birth of the new baby, to the 6th place, after Prince Charles, his son William, William’s son George, daughter Charlotte and now the new born prince.
If you haven’t seen the new Netflix series, The Crown, depicting the life of the Royal Family, I can highly recommend it. Some interesting and, sometimes, controversial insights into the British establishment have been reflected upon there.
My personal favourite was the episode where the Queen ponders over the fact that she has not been given much of an education and confronts her mother with her concerns. Also interesting to see how Eton College was compared to a much stricter Scottish school Gordontoun, where Prince Charles was sent by his father in order to man up.
Choosing a university course is not an easy task. A few lucky students know exactly what they would like to do as a job and/or for the 3-6 university years and need not to worry, however, if you are reading this and thinking your child has not got a clue, you would be in the majority of the parents.
So when and how do the children know what to go for and is there any help available to them and to us, as parents, to make those choices.
Parents often build their own expectations for their children and encourage them to pursue this or that subject. For instance, from the height of our life experience and professional success we can say that doctors, lawyers or investment bankers earn good money and would be tempted to guide our kids towards those professions.
The truth is, many professions will change beyond recognition within the next ten years so it is quite likely that your advice could become obsolete by the time your child comes into the profession you picked for them. Lawyers, bankers and accountants are talking of being replaced with AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the next few years. So it is always safer to guide your child towards the subject they are good at and love, with the view that that would lead them later to the profession they excel at, even if that profession is not in existence as yet.
Two principles should be taken into consideration when choosing the university course:
The first principle is easier to fulfil. Presumably, it should not be difficult to identify what subjects and activities the pupil enjoys as long as the school has provided all the opportunities for the child to excel and the pupil also had a wide range of extracurricular activities to try.
The second principle is where the parents and the school should give the young people as much guidance as possible, provide them with information, facilitate some experience of the potential professions and talk to them about the ways into those professions. Often a visit to a university to attend a lecture or two in the subject of interest or a work experience in the relevant profession would help here.
Schools will also provide the following help:
PSHE lessons. PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) is the national curriculum subject offered at most UK schools. It aims to develop skills and attributes such as resilience, self-esteem, risk-management, teamworking and critical thinking in the context of learning.
It is grouped into three core themes:
Speak with your child about these lessons and what they have learnt.
Morrisby aptitude test or a similar test will be offered to the pupils at the age of 14-15 in most schools. This test includes questions about the pupil’s interests and hobbies, as well as testing them on some basic maths and language abilities. The result will come with the range of suitable career suggestions and an opportunity to explore and build your individual career path.
Morrisby career advisers are available to help make the choices and half-hour Skype interview with one of the advisers is available as a follow up.
Most schools in the UK have a careers guidance programmes and relevant staff in place.
I was recently talking with the Principal of one of the leading private schools for girls about their careers advice. I was rather impressed that the school has several dedicated specialists in that department, including an in-house specialist in US universities with an office pupils can come to any time.
Many UK schools offer excellent support for not just the UK but also the US university applications. In this particular school I visited, the dedicated careers department and a US university specialist have helped 26 out of just under a 100 Upper Sixths girls to get places at Oxford, Cambridge and Ivy League universities, such as Columbia, Harvard and Pennsylvania last year. Subjects included Computer Science, Fine Art, Comparative Literature, Engineering, Music and Psychology.
Destinations of other girls also included universities in the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Canada and Australia.
It is very common for the school leavers in the UK to take a gap year to experience the real world of work environment before embarking onto more academia at university.
Gap year experience could help the young person define the kind of work they would like to do in the future, or, in some cases, eliminate the kind of work they definitely don’t like to do. I have heard from a number of parents about how beneficial working as a waiter during the gap year was for their children. It gave the young people the drive to do well in their university courses in order to never again work as waiters.
Some interesting examples of the gap year experiences included penguin conservation work in Cape Town and Robben Island, volunteering at an orphanage in Nepal and archaeological work in Romania.
The school I visited this week hosts a careers fair every year, where a number of universities, careers organizations and professionals give talks, discuss advantages and disadvantages of various professions and where pupils get inspired by people who achieved the best in their jobs, such as the talk last year from Clair Marx, who attended the school in 1968-1972 and became the first female president of the Royal College of Surgeons.
The school also provides expert guidance in MDV (Medics, Dentists and Vets), organising a wide variety of talks on topics such as healthcare, studying medicine abroad, paediatrics, cardiology and ophthalmology.
The world is becoming smaller and smaller place with wider and wider choices available to young people. New generation of current schoolchildren is well used to attending school as far as 3-9 hours of flight time away from home, their university is likely to be similarly far away, and they will be going into the job that probably has not been invented yet. Careful planning and good advice is invaluable here to avoid disappointment.
“ Regency Education helped all three of our boys get into a wonderful school where they now thrive. ”
“ REGENCY EDUCATION WAS ABLE TO HELP US WITH EVERY STEP OF THE SCHOOL APPLICATION PROCESS ENSURING THE EDUCATIONAL SUCCESS OF OUR CHILDREN. AN INVALUABLE SERVICE. ”
“ REGENCY EDUCATION WAS ABLE TO HELP US WITH EVERY STEP OF THE APPLICATION PROCESS ENSURING THE EDUCATIONAL SUCCESS OF OUR CHILDREN - AN INVALUABLE SERVICE. ”
