TGIF! (sort of)

[selenay]

Today is A-level results day in the UK and thus today is a day of tension for my family. My youngest cousin is the last one to do the A-level thing and there is a very strong probability that she won't get the grades she needs.

This isn't an issue with my cousin's ability, more to do with her school. When she arrived to start her A-levels, they announced that they weren't doing the Spanish A-level that she really, really wanted and advised her to do something called Financial Studies instead (WTF?). At no point did they mention that this was a BS subject that didn't actually count as an A-level for most universities. She was signed up for three other A-levels including another mandatory BS one (General Studies) and the school also told her that the teacher doing English that hated her (no, seriously, she's admitted to staff and my cousin's parents that she just doesn't like my cousin) wouldn't be teaching her at A-level and she was.

Unsurprisingly, my cousin has not done well in English. Thankfully her French has been going well although she admits that she took her eye off the ball when she turned eighteen, partied too hard and probably screwed up a bit on her course-work *sigh* She's probably looking at a C in English and a B in French.

Four months ago, the school finally told her parents that oops, they'd screwed up and the Financial Studies A-level was not, in fact, going to be acceptable for a university. You can't get to university most of the time without three good A-levels. My cousin was, at best, going to have two moderately-OK A-levels and two useless pieces of paper.

Argh!

Believe me, the school is going to be regretting their actions here because my uncle is very, very angry.

The university that was my cousin's top choice and that had given her a conditional offer has agreed that, if my cousin gets straight As in everything, they will "consider her for a place". All the other universities they contacted bascially said "no way in hell".

It's unlikely that my cousin will get straight As at this stage. Therefore, it's unlikely that any unversity will take her even through the clearing process. She might, maybe, get a place on a course that she doesn't want to take but she isn't willing to spend three years and all that money on a degree in a useless subject from a low-end unversity.

So, unless there is a minor miracle, she's got some choices to make. The plan that all of us are backing is that she takes a year out and goes to college. There she will re-sit one of her A-levels and take a fast-track A-level, probably in Spanish because that's always been her strongest and favourite subject.

Hopefully that would then give her access to a degree in linguistics at a good unversity, which is what she really wants to do.

The other option is to call it quits with education and look for work, but in this economy with her probable A-level results that is probably not going to get her anywhere except the dole queue.

If her school had admitted up-front that they weren't going to run Spanish she could have taken her A-levels elsewhere, but by the time they told her this registration was closed everywhere else. If they'd told her that Financial Studies was a useless subject then she could have found another subject or another way to do things.

I'm just going to spend the next however long until we hear from her uncle biting my nails because really? I have very little hope that this will end well for her *sigh*


Due to my new working hours, today is my Friday :-D I love having alternate Fridays offf. I've got the house to myself tomorrow morning so there will be veging and bad telly and all the stuff mother disapproves of :-D And then I'll take Kate to the vet in the afternoon and buy groceries. I know, my plans are so exciting.

Last night we watched the first episode of the new Great British Bakeoff series. Now I want upside down cake. Nom.

We've got so much Holby to watch. I think that will be the plan tonight. I need my trashy medical soap!

There is a good chance that sometime next week I'll be posting new fic. I've got one part left to write on the fic that I wasn't going to write that is now 8k words damn it. Then there is resting it and editing it and flailing about it. So probably very late next week.

The Marvel Big Bang fic is progressing slowly but still progressing. Chapter six is nearly done and then there are only two rather-action packed chapters. This monster is definitely more than double the minimum word count.

Let's not discuss the other two fics that I have on the go. There is way too much in my head right now. At least it means that if I get stuck on one thing, I can write another thing? Um?

Comments

[katlinel]

I'm really sorry your cousin got messed around so badly by her school. I'll keep my fingers crossed that things work out well for her in spite of all this nonsense.

[netgirl_y2k]

Eek, sorry about your cousin, I hope things work out for her in the end.

I spent the summer after secondary school crashing a higher maths course at the university I'd end up attending because my school at been, um, deliberately obtuse about how you didn't always need higher maths to get into uni (hint: yeah, you do) and my uni ran these summer courses because a lot of people who'd applied through clearing had gotten caught out by this. The theory we came up with at the time was that with league tables and all our schools hadn't wanted people taking highers they thought they were likely to fail. Although if instead of lying to me they'd stressed that maths was really, really not optional if you wanted to into any sort of higher education I probably would have put my head down and got through it during the school year instead of having to crash it in three months and ruin my summer.

In conclusion, grr argh!

[fahrenheit-f430.livejournal.com]

A-Levels - Christ. D: That's appalling behaviour by the school. :(

As for ficses... *shakes pom poms quietly*