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Your support makes all the difference.While agreeing with Lucy Hodges that "Getting into university is a game where the rules are kept hidden from the players" (Beginners' Luck, Education +, 30 January), I would like to correct some misleading information.
She mentions the likelihood of certain universities feeling sore if listed as second choice. Given that Ucas forms ask candidates to list choices in alphabetical order, it is unlikely, if not impossible, for universities to be sure of a candidate's ultimate preference.
Traditionally, results are released to candidates on the Thursday of the third week in August. Agreed. However, I feel there was a missed opportunity for clarifying precisely how that is interpreted this year. Since August 1 is a Friday it may not be abundantly clear to readers which is the first week in August, and that the results will be out on the 14th, not the 21st of August.
Vicky Hornby's blighted future is mentioned. This also raises a few issues. It is by no means cut and dried that her actual grades of AAB would necessarily have enabled her to study law. A conversion course after her politics degree would be an obvious alternative route to a career in Law.
My final point concerns "Working the System". The second term of the Upper Sixth is quoted as being the time for receiving offers. Many candidates submitting their forms early in the first term have received at least some offers by December, not to mention November, or even October.
Hilary Rollin,
Senior Lecturer School of Languages and Schools Liaison Officer,
Oxford Brookes University,
Headington,
Oxford.
Apologies for the errors, Wendy Berliner, Editor, Education +
Nursery vouchers should be renamed school vouchers, since it will be the theoretically free of charge state schools that will benefit the most from the scheme. Here are two examples: my daughter will be four in April but I will receive the vouchers only in September. She will go to school in January and benefit from the nursery vouchers for one term only. I phoned the Voucher Centre and was told that a child is entitled to vouchers at the beginning of the term following his/her birthday, but that turned out to be untrue, as my daughter will be four just before the beginning of the spring term. A friend of mine who lives in an area where the schools only have one intake per year, and whose daughter will be four in June, will have to send her to school in September, pressed to do so by the new attitude of the school authorities, eager to cash in the vouchers. So in her case she will get "school vouchers" only, not "nursery vouchers".
Annamaria Mueller,
Canterbury
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