For parents of Year 13 students

Richard Ferguson
Founder and Director, GlobalEd Strategies, Monaco

The deadline is Thursday 15 October, 6pm UK time.
The admissions tests are the same week.
And the bookings for them closed in September.

The honest situation is this. If your child is already booked into their admissions test, it is not too late. If they are not, for most of these courses it is, at least for this year. No amount of late-night polishing of the personal statement will change that.

If they are booked in, the next fortnight is simpler than it feels. Get the application to the school early, because it is usually the school that presses send, and an application still sitting on a teacher’s desk at 6pm has missed the deadline. Then stop rewriting the personal statement. The test, the same week, now matters more than another clever opening line.

By the time the deadline is the conversation, most of the application has already been written.

And October is only the first checkpoint. Interviews follow in December, and the answers arrive in the new year.

For families with a child in Year 11 or Year 12, the honest situation is much better. Their application starts now, with the subjects they choose, the reading they do for pleasure, and, for medicine, the experience that gives a personal statement something true to say. That is Education Architecture: the decisions made two years early, so that October is a formality rather than a fortnight of panic.

To find out more about how GlobalEd plans university pathways:
globaledstrategies.com/education-architecture

Sources: UCAS, University of Oxford, and University of Cambridge admissions dates for 2027 entry, accessed 2 October 2026.