One university saying no doesn’t decide what a student can do next. Every year I speak to students who were turned down by a university, then resat, reapplied and got there the following year with the grades to back it up.

The families who dread a resit year often miss what it can give their child. Most students learn to study on their own for the first time in university halls, with nobody checking on them. Office for Students figures show roughly 1 in 10 students at English universities don’t continue into their second year.

A resit year lets a student take responsibility for their learning before they get there, with support around them. If they repeat the same approach, they risk the same result. If they change how they study, they get to university already knowing how to work alone, which I’d call a head start.

Most of my friends have children who have sat the 11 plus or are about to. Observing it from the outside, it’s obvious the parents split into camps.

Some don’t believe in tutors at all. Some have had a tutor booked since Year 4. Some pay for a solid year of tutoring before the exam. Some leave it until the last few weeks and hope for the best. A few hold their child back from sitting it at all, because the thought of their child failing frightens them more than the exam frightens the child.

Each camp is certain it has got it right. The school gate and the WhatsApp groups make sure everyone knows it.

It takes me back to my own experience. I went to a selective school. Eight of us from my primary school applied and I was the only one who got in, until my friend Rachel won her place on appeal. We have been friends ever since.

Neither of us went round the playground bragging about it. What I did get was a hymn book full of messages. In 1995 that was the cool thing to sign at the end of Year 6. Most of them said some version of, “Have fun at boff job school, you boffin.” It didn’t bother me in the slightest. I had worked for my place and I was proud of it. It still makes me laugh to look back at these comments.

Fast forward to today. Parents turn up at the school gate with balloons and cakes for the children who got in, with no thought for the ones who didn’t. Those children are standing right next to them. Thoughtless.

I saw the other side as Head of Year at a grammar school.

Some families maintained a healthy environment. There was a desk away from the TV and someone at home still asked what they had learned that day.

Other families relaxed. The thinking was “They’re in now, my job is done.” I understand why. Getting a child through the 11 plus is exhausting for everyone in the house. By Year 9 some of those children were on the PlayStation until midnight. They arrived tired and did the minimum. Their grades started to slip long before anyone at home noticed.

Grammar school hides this for a while. A bright child can coast to good GCSEs on the same habits that got them through Year 6.

A Levels are where that stops working. The content is harder and the questions ask students to apply what they know, not repeat it. Re-reading doesn’t prepare anyone for that. The child still sits at the desk every evening, so the parent assumes all is well. The first real feedback is results day.

I don’t say this to make anyone feel guilty. If you stepped back after the 11 plus, you did what most parents do. You trusted a good school. Schools teach students what to learn. Very few have the time to teach them how to learn.

I taught for 15 years, first at an inner London comprehensive and then at a grammar school. The two schools were very different. October was the same in both.

Students came back in September with new folders and big plans. By the end of October the folders were a mess and the plans had gone. Most of them felt guilty about it.

I always worried more about the guilt than the missed revision. A student who feels behind stops opening their notes. They fall further behind and feel worse about it.

So my advice for the next few weeks is simple. Survival mode is fine. Turn up to your lessons. Do the work your teachers set. Get to bed at a sensible time. That is enough for now.

Tim Ferriss calls this the minimum effective dose. It is the smallest amount of something that still gets you the result you want. Anything on top of that is effort you don’t need to spend yet.

Being on autopilot is fine too. Most of what you do each day already runs on autopilot. You brush your teeth without deciding to. You pick up your phone without thinking about it. The trick is to put something useful on autopilot as well.

James Clear writes about this in Atomic Habits. He says a new habit should take less than two minutes to start. It sounds too small to matter, but a tiny habit doesn’t rely on motivation, so it still happens on a tired day.

The research backs this up. In 2021 a team from Freie Universität Berlin and UCL asked 192 adults to link a small new habit either to something they already did every day or to a set time. Both worked. What made the biggest difference was repeating the habit every time the cue came round.

One day my Grandma will need a doctor. When that happens I want the person at her bedside to be someone who chose to be there. I do not want someone who is there because their parents decided at fourteen that medicine was the plan.

I have taught a lot of students who wanted to be doctors. Some lit up when they talked about it. Others told me about medicine the way you might describe a dentist appointment. When I asked why, the answer usually came back to their parents.

The numbers tell you why this matters.

Competition is fierce. By the October deadline last year, 25,770 students had applied to study medicine for 2026 entry. England had a cap of 8,126 places. You will spend years of your life just getting through the door.

The job itself is hard. In the General Medical Council’s 2025 workplace survey of almost 4,700 doctors, 19% said they were considering leaving UK practice. Around 18% of doctors were at high risk of burnout, rising to 23% of doctors in training. The most common reason doctors gave for wanting to leave, other than retirement, was the effect of the work on their wellbeing.

If you get through all of that for someone else’s dream, I worry about how you will feel at 3am on a night shift in your second year as a doctor.

I also love that a medical degree can take you somewhere completely different. Of the doctors who finished the Foundation Programme in 2025, 57.6% applied for core or specialty training straight away. Many of the others took a year out first and 12.8% went abroad. Doctors go into research, public health, medical technology, policy and writing. That is a brilliant thing about the degree.

Whatever you end up doing with it, choose it because you want it. A fascination with how the body works and a pull towards caring for people when they are frightened, are good reasons. Making your parents proud is a lovely thing to want, but this feeling won’t get you through six years of training on its own.

There is a name for what is happening here. It is called survivorship bias. You only hear from the students who made it. The student who did nothing but past papers and came out with a C does not film a video about it.

You also don’t see what else was behind that A*. A one-minute video leaves out two years of lessons. It leaves out the teacher who explained osmosis four different ways until it finally made sense, the practicals, the marked essays and the lunchtime sessions before mocks. Past papers worked for that student because the knowledge was already there. Past papers test what you know. They cannot teach it to you.

Every student gets a different school experience. Some have the same specialist teacher for two years. Others have a run of supply teachers or a teacher who leaves at Christmas. I have taught in an inner London comprehensive and in a high-performing grammar school, so I have seen both ends of this. Copying the revision method of a student who had a completely different two years to you makes no sense.

I see the result every single year. Students predicted an A* end up with a C and lose their university place. Most of them were not lazy. They worked hard on the wrong thing because someone online made a shortcut sound like a strategy.

This has a name. It is called Solomon’s paradox, after King Solomon, who was famous for his wisdom. He gave out brilliant advice, ignored it himself and his kingdom fell apart.

Two things get in the way: our ego and our emotions. When the problem belongs to someone else, you see it clearly. When it belongs to you, you feel embarrassed about how far behind you are and you avoid it.

Students do this all the time. If you ask them what a friend should do three weeks before a test, they know exactly what to say. If you ask what they should do, they tell you they are going to fail.

In the same way that you can’t out-train a bad diet, you cannot outwork a bad system. You can do hours and hours of a weak revision method and achieve very little.

The students I have taught who did the best were curious and they did the reps. They asked why something worked instead of writing down that it did. They wrote the essay, got it back covered in feedback and wrote another one. Nothing in that requires a particular type of brain. It’s just a system that works.

I’ve been a research scientist, a food microbiologist, a lifeguard, a kennelhand, a waitress, a barmaid and a call centre worker. I spent one very fun summer making bus passes for the council. Every one of those jobs made me better at the thing I do now.

I started teacher training in a deprived area where students smoked in the playground at break-time. I taught in the school I went to myself. I finished my classroom career at a top grammar school. Along the way came ski trips, table tennis tournaments, two horse riding teams I set up from scratch, Head of Year, Head of House. You are very rarely just teaching the subject you signed up for.

I was not even good at teaching for about the first four years. I had no idea how we learn. I based everything on what school had been like for me. I got things wrong, changed them, got them wrong again and kept tweaking things. That is how you learn to teach.

Anyone can call themselves a tutor. There is no qualification required. You can finish your A levels in August and you can charge more than a teacher earns in an hour by September.
Fair play to the ones doing it, by the way. A nineteen year old spending Tuesday evening explaining photosynthesis to a Year 12 is using their time far better than the ones drinking their student loan. I would much rather see that.

However, nobody watches the session. Nobody asks the student afterwards whether any of it went in. Nobody tells the tutor they lost the room ten minutes from the end. They get paid either way…
We have mentors at The A Level Club who are exactly those people, medics and recent A* students. They are brilliant at what we ask them to do. They talk students through the thinking behind exam questions and refresh topics. They do not deliver the courses. Qualified teachers do that. Their subject knowledge is incredible, but that is not the same as knowing how to get the best out of a student. Olympic coaches aren’t necessarily former Olympic athletes.

What makes it work is everything around them. Our mentors are trained across every exam board we teach and they work to a plan I have written. Their sessions run on our Zoom account and what happens in them comes back to me. I pass feedback to parents because I am your point of contact, not them. If something is not working with a student, we change how we do it.

That is the bit you are paying for and it is the bit an hourly rate on a website does not give you.

Plenty of you will have teachers off sick, teachers on maternity leave, long runs of cover lessons where someone hands out a worksheet and sits at the front. That happened when I taught and it will happen to you at some point over the next nine months.

Here is the part students do not want to hear. None of it is a good enough reason to get a lower grade…and this is because your teacher is not responsible for your result. They teach the specification, they set work, they mark it, they give you feedback. You get the grade. A good teacher makes that easier and a poor one makes it harder, but neither of them sits the exam for you.

So, build something of your own that works whether or not the lesson delivers. Know what your class covers this term. Turn every lesson into secure knowledge within a couple of days. Test yourself weekly without waiting to be told. Students with no system of their own are always the ones who struggle the most and then blame everyone apart from themselves.

Once you have a system in place for yourself, use the word…

Teacher off sick. And? Which resource covers that topic, when this week do you cover it, who checks you understood it?

Don’t like your teacher. And? What do they have that you need? Take the content knowledge from them that you need, the past papers, the marking. Get whatever is missing from somewhere else.

Feeling unwell, tired, fed up. And? What is the one useful thing you can still do today at a lower level than usual?

Friends not including you in their plans. And?

Parents annoying you. And?

Got four A levels. And? You chose them. Timetable them properly!

None of this means doing it alone. Asking for help is a strength. Emailing a teacher a question, putting your hand up in front of thirty people, telling your mentor you still don’t understand something from last March, all gets you where you want to go faster. Students who stay silent to look capable, are the ones who suffer.

The jump between GCSE and A Level is bigger than almost anyone expects and it isn’t just that there’s more content or that it’s harder, though both are true. It’s that the two exams test different things. GCSE, for the most part, rewards knowing the material and being able to recall it. A Level rewards understanding it deeply enough to apply it to a situation you’ve never seen before and that is a genuinely different skill. This is why so many students who cruised through GCSE hit a wall halfway through Year 12. They keep doing the thing that worked, which is learning the content and revising it until they know it, and they’re baffled when that produces a C on a paper they felt they’d revised thoroughly for. The content was in their head. What was missing was the ability to use it under pressure on an unfamiliar question and no amount of the old kind of revision builds that. Take the students who got through GCSE science leaning on Freesciencelessons on YouTube. Those videos are genuinely excellent and they carry an enormous number of students to strong GCSE grades and there’s nothing wrong with using them. But watching a clear explanation is a GCSE way of learning, because it gets the content into your head and at GCSE that was mostly enough. At A Level watching someone else make it look clear is the trap, because it feels like learning whilst asking almost nothing of you, and understanding a topic well enough to answer a hard applied question is a different thing entirely from watching a good explanation of it. The video gets you to the start line. It doesn’t get you round the course. So the shift isn’t doing more of what worked, it’s changing what you do. Less watching and re-reading, far more producing the material yourself from nothing, testing yourself before you feel ready and doing applied questions early even when it’s uncomfortable, because that discomfort is the exact thing your GCSE method let you avoid.