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It has been a very stressful week. I enjoyed reading the comments on the blog but then there was my daughter’s break-up with her boyfriend. That required hours of good listening skills and sympathy. This was swiftly followed by more hours of discussion about the potential new boyfriend, back at university. He is called Cocoa, which is slightly worrying. And sandwiched in between all this excitement, there were various arguments with two schools, in two countries to occupy me.

My daughter has been busy socialising and finding somewhere to live in the north of England, while one son has been dragging his heels at school in the south of England. He has decided not to apply to university this year because he wants to take a gap year and improve his A Level grades first. Good idea in my opinion. The school doesn’t agree. They have spent most of the week trying to scare us into applying this year, on the basis that it is so competitive out there at the moment that if a place is not secured as soon as possible, he might not get to university at all!

And in the stampede to get to a good university, are we all missing something important here? Why are they doing this at all? Adolescents now have to prove that they not only have the top grades, they are also well-rounded individuals who have packed lots of worthy activities into their short 17-years. So, when they are not studying hard to achieve the best grades, they must spend every spare minute joining a committee or volunteering for something that will look good on their university application and any future CV.

Quite frankly, all this being well rounded is overrated in my opinion. Where did being well rounded ever get you in life? The answer: passivity and years of drudgery, doing something that everyone else thinks is worth doing. Like spending seven years learning to play a musical instrument that you never pick up again when you leave school. By the end of formal education, the most important lesson that kids have learnt is to accept authority and that boredom is to be expected as part of life. What is university they ask? More of the same? No wonder lots of young people are thinking, why bother?

After a week of scrutinising my son’s draft personal statement for UCAS and talking to him about which university he wants to go to and why, we have decided to put it off for another year. He hasn’t got a clue but why should he have? Nowadays, it is not good enough to just apply and get some half decent grades. There is the whole personal statement, outlining why you want to do the course, what you have to offer the university that makes you better than all your friends who are applying and detailing all your worthy extra-curricular activities and future plans. What about just writing something like, ‘this looks like a good university and I want to spend three years away from home, growing up and finding out about life in a drug, sex and alcohol induced stupor. And by the way I don’t know what my future plans are and I never joined a committee at school because they were all full of geeks.’

Well the school wouldn’t let you write that of course. It would just be silly. But isn’t that what we went to university for? Something different….