Secret Teacher: Pushy parents, stop writing UCAS application forms for your kids
Friday 15 January was the final deadline for the majority of university courses and sixth form staff can now shut the blasted acronym away in their filing cabinets until August when A-level results come in and the saga starts afresh.
But while I have come to expect the botched personal statements and the frantic last-minute submissions, another trend which has seriously added to my workload in recent years is the over-involvement of parents...
This is best exemplified by the father who I discovered was writing their son’s personal statement. It might have remained undetected if he hadn’t emailed to ask if he had done a good job of remodelling the original. He hadn’t; the enthusiasm and subject knowledge is best conveyed by the applicant, rather than their pushy parents. Stifling my exasperation, I explained that the school could not approve an application completed by a parent. The task was swiftly redirected to its proper owner so that he could express his indifference in his own words.
Unfortunately, this is not unusual. Once a parent contacted my colleague to check that it was OK to fill in the Ucas form for his daughter, who had limited internet access and was “very stubborn”. The teacher replied that for data protection reasons only students are allowed to create a Ucas account. The advice was that the student should contact me to guide her through the process – on her own terms. She never made an application. It was clearly her father’s dream, not hers. I was relieved that we had intervened and given control back to the student who would have otherwise been packed off to university like a naughty child.
http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2016/jan/16/secret-teacher-pushy-parents-stop-writing-ucas-applications-kids
To be fair, schools sometimes do this as well as parents!
I was told of a case (some time ago) when a student applied to an Oxbridge college, and was accepted. They were taking a gap year, and at the end of this year, the student's politically prominent parent contacted the college to say that their offspring had decided that they didn't want to go to university after all, and could the college MAKE them go! The parent seemed unable to understand that (a) a college/ uni has no power to FORCE an adult to attend; (b) no lecturer wants a totally unmotivated student.
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