Bill: Harvey: Sunshine on Leith

My youngest is going through the UCAS process at the moment. What I hope is the last parent’s evening I may have to attend took place recently and it proved quite eventful.

At one point, one teacher gave a presentation underlying the importance of choosing a university, not on the basis of its historical reputation, but instead on recent success indicators such as the quality of training and the likelihood of gaining useful employment once graduating from there. They then displayed a list of 20 universities and next to it a list of careers. The university list included all the usual suspects (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham), many a red brick (Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol) and many of the newer institutions. The careers list included law, medicine, dentistry, veterinary studies and, interestingly, optometry. Parents were then given the task of matching the career with the university rated most highly for each career option. The point of this iconoclastic exercise was to change parental mindset about assuming some universities would be best for certain careers.