to go through the UCAS Clearing process to see if different courses have space or even take a gap year and apply through the full UCAS process to those courses next year instead. If it’s your GCSE results, similarly, different choices at college or sixth form might be an option, so talk to them and other colleges about your great results. Don’t jump into a potentially more challenging course just because you can! Remember why you made your original choice and check if it will still suit you, your future ambitions and your learning style the best.
Results worse than expected If you didn’t do as well as you hoped, you will need to do a couple of things at the same time. Firstly, as we’ve already said in Step One, check what your school or college think, whether they can support an appeal, offer resits or advice on other opportunities.
You should also start a conversation with the college, sixth form or university you had planned to go to next. Although it is likely that with poor results you won’t be able to take up the place you had hoped, don’t automatically assume that. Whether they have room and are able to take you will depend on whether all the other people they made offers to achieved their grades too, so you just never know. If they can’t, they may well also know of other courses within their institution which are under-subscribed that you might be interested in taking up instead; it is always worth asking.
Finally, it’s not too late to make a late application. The UCAS Clearing process is open until mid- October, as students start and settle into courses, so you could still get to uni this year. Visit the UCAS website or search ‘UCAS Clearing’ to find out more.
Equally, FE and sixth-form colleges will usually consider late applications until around 5 or 6 weeks after a course has started if they have room and before you’ve missed too much. It’s also worth looking at institutions and courses you perhaps hadn’t considered before.
Going into an Apprenticeship If your planned next step was into an Apprenticeship and you already have that job offer, the good news is that lower results than you hoped might not be the end of the world. By the time you’ve received your results, it’s likely that your future employer has completed their recruitment process; you’ve been through assessment centres, they’ve interviewed you and decided you were the best candidate for the job. Even if they made you a provisional offer, perhaps dependent on a Maths or English grade, training providers will offer qualifications you can take alongside your Apprenticeship to ‘top up’ a poor result. In the first instance, talk to the training provider who will be running the Apprenticeship and seek their advice. They may well be willing to make the case to your future employer for you and are likely to have alternate employers looking to recruit if they can’t persuade them.
If you were thinking about an Apprenticeship, but don’t have an offer yet, it’s time to look at your plan B. Although employers do recruit throughout the year, not just in September, you will need to demonstrate that you are doing something worthwhile with your time until the right Apprenticeship comes along.
Make The Future Yours! Issue 2
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