April 24, 2013 | Mum In The Madhouse

Turbo-Boosting Your Child’s UCAS Personal Statement

thinking of the Personal Statement a good deal in advance, and how you might help your child to connect their extra-curricular interests, achievements and hobbies with their academic pathway of choice, you can steal a march on all of the rest of the university applicants.

Karen Martin, from the Admissions & Student Recruitment Department at the University of Dundee, explains: “Remember that your Personal Statement is the only piece of written work we will see when selecting the best applicants.”

Pretty crucial, then.

None of this is of course a direct substitute for quality academic performance but, done well and properly, the Personal Statement is often the deciding factor between so many applications of equal weight.

Outlined at the outset on the Personal Statement, there need to be cast-iron reasons for why your child has chosen that particular subject, that university and why exactly they want to go to continue in Higher Education in general. This is the Personal Statement bread and butter.

But, the essentials aside, what other ingredients can you think about in advance that could help boost your child’s application and save you all a whole world of heartache at a later, more stressful date?

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An ironing revolution and at what age is it OK to teach children to iron?

Normally on a Sunday I do my ironing whilst watching One Born Every Minute on catch up. But alas the series had ended, so I decided to watch Paul Hollywood instead and you know what I managed to get the ironing done in that time. Now those of you in the know, will understand this statement, but for the uninitiated OBEM is an hour long, whereas Paul Hollywood’s Bread is only 30 minutes long. So I managed to halve my ironing time. Which delighted me. OK this week wasn’t the week that I do our bedding, which is super kingsize and yes before you ask I ironing my own bedding because I love getting in to clean laundered and ironed sheets, but still it was a lot faster than usual.

The Tefal Pr Express has lots of positives, you can fill it up at the tap, large water tank, anti calc spoon for hard water areas, safety catch (so you can store the hot iron) and an auto off facility too. I do, however, need to get a new ironing board with somewhere to put the steam generator.

The thing that got me thinking about how old I was when I learned to iron was the fact the iron is a lot lighter than a traditional steam iron as it doesn’t have to have a tank to hold the water.

So when is the right time to teach my boys how to iron? When did you teach your children?