1. Congratulations. You’ve done it. Your schooling has been disrupted in unprecedented ways and you’ve been on the rough end of many disruptive shifts: most obviously, COVID and strikes but also a big crisis in teacher recruitment and retention. Yet you’ve come out the other end and are on the cusp of the next stage of your life. You are about to find out whether the old saying that ‘schooldays are the best years of your life’ is correct. The chances – given the educational challenges of recent times – are that this is less likely to be true for this year’s school leavers than for earlier age groups, so hopefully you can be optimistic about the future.
2. Don’t believe the hype. You will hear lots of talking heads on the media claim that the overwhelming majority of people have received the grades they need to go to their first-choice place. This is good news. Universities have often been flexible and the admissions system has, overall, worked well. In the main, UCAS just works. But the claim about the overwhelming majority of people applying to higher education getting their first-choice place is based on a very strange definition of ‘first choice’. It refers to an institution that has offered someone a place that has been accepted – if, say, your four favourite choices on your UCAS form all neglected to offer you a place, then your ‘first choice’ might actually refer to your fifth choice. (In 2022, the University of Oxford had around 15,000 applications from people in the UK but made offers to under 3,000 of them.) So claiming 80% or so of applicants have got their first-choice places is a bit of spin; it does not actually mean eight-in-10 people gave got what was their preferred option when they filled in their UCAS form last autumn / winter.
3. This is the austerity generation. People who turned 18 in the past year are likely to have started school in 2011 of thereabouts, just as austerity was getting going. In other words, their entire schooling has been affected by it. The chart from the Institute for Fiscal Studies below shows that the big increases to primary spending had passed by the time they were at primary school and spending on secondary schooling actually fell during their time there. Higher education spending is now falling fast in real terms too, as inflation eats away at the value of tuition fees and other income, so the bad news is your higher education might be underfunded as well. When politicians refuse to raise tuition fees, it might sound superficially good but it means you will have much less spent on your higher education than other recent cohorts and your education is therefore likely to suffer.
