I was going to title this post “Confessions of a NL Housewife” and decided that the resultant commentary was the last thing I needed to deal with whilst debating the relative merits of upgrading my site security and doing beggar all. Maybe substituting dithering for confessions would be more accurate anyway.

I love cooking, but never follow a recipe book. It’s not quite a confession. It could actually be a bit of a humble brag, except I always start out thinking I’ll follow the recipe and obviously love recipes and recipe books. I have tons of the things on my shelves and my own dedicated recipe box on the NYTimes site (really recommend the latter for anyone who hates losing recipes on-line).

In fact I’m always really disappointed to realise I can’t follow the recipe, inevitably because something is missing. Even if I have bought the ingredients carefully and comprehensively on-line, by the time I get around to it either a key spice has lost itself at the back of the cupboard or the kids (or man) have eaten the new fruit or vegetable “just to see what it was like”

And in part the problem is timeliness. I start out ordering the ingredients early in the week but the food is delivered on a Friday, which means cooking on a weekend or alternatively, eating out or cooking something simple because life is too busy, so it’s almost always a week or three after the ingredients are bought and delivered that I finally get around to cooking.

Which also means sometimes things are just past their best so an alternative is called for.

I’m a pretty rubbish gardener as well, despite loving the whole idea of a garden and certainly the sitting out in the shade. So I’ll order my bulbs, my tulips and alliums, and then when they arrive six months later have totally forgotten what to do with them. There is a plan, but who knows what it once was.

And sometimes this ends up with a surprise success. Having bought white/purple pansies last Autumn that failed entirely to appear all Winter-Spring but suddenly showed their faces in time for the Summer and have totally made work a white-purple-pink colour scheme, so well that I might just try to stick with it for the next forever.

But it also means that plants sometimes turn up and although I’m almost certain that I’ve planted them, I have no idea what they are. I am almost certain that the triffid like creatures popping up at the end of the pink rose bed are actually huge foxtail lilies that I planted a year or so ago. They never really turned up for the party after planting. Maybe the garden was too wet (or more likely too dry) that year and maybe the squirrels moved them about a bit (beggars).

But when I can bring myself to stick to a plan, which usually means the plan isn’t too long term, then I still am stuck waiting. because gardens almost always take a couple of years or ten, to settle into their skin. Whilst some of my plants like the perennial wallflowers singularly fail to die off in their allotted time (2 years or so) others such as the rose and underplanted salvia will take three to four years before showing signs of maturity.

Patience is a gardening asset that I may never own.

Yet I still love the garden and pottering around in it doing the nicer bits (no one likes cutting hedges except very inadequate men – and yes I do know it’s a gross stereotype but it’s held true for me). So when my 83 year old friend suggests I should open the thing for charity on one of those afternoon sessions, I’m tempted.

Then she poor water on my enthusiasm by pointing out that everyone who visits is incredibly critical. Your edges must be trim and there must be a total lack of weeds: my garden never saw a trim edge or the back of campion and dandelions so perhaps it’s a non-starter. Alternatively I could just title it “Dry as a bone, lazy garden” and be up front about my limitations.

Since the conversation was somewhat downed by a comment along the lines of “But I probably won’t live to see it” from my very sprightly 83 year old friend, we lost a bit of momentum there: I’m not ready for my best mates to die of old age. No one said this intergenerational thing would be easy, but surely their part of the deal is to live forever?

Maybe it could become a project. We both love a good project and as a minimum it would involve sitting in the garden quite a lot with her giving excellent advice on how to get rid of weeds and sharpen my border edges. If she’s really unlucky, I might even serve her some lunch with one of my new recipes.

One of my daughters is at university whilst the other will probably leave for university this September. I don’t like to think about the latter. I’m busy pretending to myself that my babies still live at home, whilst also, and in an entirely contradictory manner, congratulating them on growing into such wonderful women. But probably, by the end of the year, we will have two semi-adult, semi-independent children living away from home, and that costs money.

There is a debate at the moment about student fees in the UK. Changes in the way the UK finances tertiary education mean that we now have the most expensive undergraduate courses in the world.

University coasts break down into two component parts: fees for tuition and maintenance.

In England annual university fees are now £9250 a year. The loans are “owned” by a private company and the interest rate charged, which accrues from the minute that you first take out the loan, is around 6% making for a cost of more than £555 a year for the start of your course.

However large the loan is that you build up, let’s say £27,750 capital over three years plus interest accrued £3,465 by the end of a three year course i.e. £31,215, you will only start repaying it when you earn more than £21,000. repayment is charged through the UK payroll system of taxes (PAYE) at a rate of 9% pa. on top of the standard UK income tax rates. This additional tax is paid until either the loan is paid off or 30 years have passed, in which case any outstanding amount is written off.

So it’s an expensive business having children at university. When I consider the rather measly 6 hours contact time my eldest enjoys at university, the cost is only bearable when viewed as compensating or supplementing the 35+hours that her sister will require.

It costs roughly the same amount again for maintenance i.e. accommodation etc so in reality many children will end up with debts of around £60,000.

And since the loans are only repaid over a certain income threshold, and since many women will take a career break to have kids and return to work only part-time, a substantial proportion of the loan balance will never be repaid (around 45% of the total loan portfolio). This unpaid balance is building up, but ultimately will be the responsibility of the government ie. all tax payers, graduates or otherwise to repay.

We decided to pay for our children’s maintenance ourselves, and are obviously lucky enough to afford to do so. But we decided to encourage our daughters to take out a student loan for the fees. A number of friends find this decision incomprehensible with one going so far as to ask how we could do such a thing, having happily paid for our children to attend private schools as if they were one and the same issue.

Hmm.

In the UK we have seen a vast expansion of university places such that the number of children attending university has risen from around 20%  to 50% of the population. And that expansion has been funded largely by the rise in student fees. Calls to reduce or remove fees entirely, seem to ignore the consequence of cutting places for students to study. The country could not afford to pay for 50% of kids to attend to university if it was all paid for by central government.

And so you see a rise in the number of people suggesting that it would okay to restrict university places, because university should not be the be-all and end-all. University, apparently, is not right for everyone and we have gone too far in suggesting that it is.

My problem with this argument, is that it seems to be made mostly by people who have no doubt that their children will attend university, come what may. University may not be for everyone else’s kids, but it most definitely is the right place for their kids. other people’s kids can grow up to be plumbers and electricians. Their kids will grow up to be middle-managers, lawyers, doctors etc.

Because when people of my generation went to university, there was an obvious restriction on the number of places at university. And that had consequences. Most of the people I know now, went to very safe, very middle-class schools, private or grammar. Almost everyone they knew as kids went to university, and the idea that they were part of only 20% of the population doesn’t really ring true for them. I went to a very poor working class comprehensive state school. Out of a school year with around 180 pupils, around around 4 of us went to university. So whilst almost 100% of my middle class friends’ classes went to university, just 2% of my peers managed to make it to university.

Any suggestion that we should cut back on university places, inevitably means cutbacks for the working class, for the poorest amongst us.

So my children will take out student loans that will be expensive and unwieldy to pay back, because in part this will fund kids’ education who could not afford to attend university without a loans system.

They will also take out student loans, because at some level, knowing that they personally are paying for their university course, will hopefully encourage them to try and get the best value out of their course. It will give them some skin in the educational game.

Maybe.

I’m told that all young kids want to do is chill out and get pissed, that the loan is somethings they will simply write-off or ignore. It seems to me that some kids will be like this and some won’t. I’m hopeful that my kids have been raised with a greater sense of responsibility but also believe that times have changed and this generation of young people is incredibly more hard-working and focused than our generation ever was.

Either way it has nothing to do with paying private school fees which are absolutely indefensible from a moral societal perspective. People pay for private schools because they believe it will advantage their kids in some way, much as any other selection process within education privileges children. We paid for private education because we wanted both girls to attend single-sex schools, to be within a highly motivated, focused and quite narrow academic stream and obviously because we likes the additional facilities that mad wit easier for the kids to study and study well.

We had the money and were willing to spend it. Other people without the money, make different choices where they can such as sitting for competitive grammar schools etc. There is no moral high ground in terms of selective education.

& it would be stupid to pretend otherwise, I have voted and will continue to vote for a government willing to abolish all types of selective education, whether academic or faith. But whilst it’s available, we made use of the advantage it could offer our daughters.

And the privilege we are willing to offer our kids continues unabated. If my girls want to study for masters or doctorates because they’re enjoying their academic studies that much, then they’ll be able to do so, financed by the bank of mum and dad. If they want to live and work in London, we will help them do so again, financed by the bank of mum and dad.

& at the back of my mind is the knowledge that other people’s children don’t have those choices. The world of work is narrowing; the middle classes are contracting.  I want my girls to be happy but, like most parents, I need them to be safe first and foremost.

Because ultimately money is just a tool, a way to afford a life you want to live and we want to live close to our children and for them to be happy (in the hop that th two are not incompatible). Happiness wasn’t a factor in our decision making when we were younger. We had to earn money to live. Now that we have the money, I’d like my daughters to have broader choices, to have a safety net to catch them if those choices don’t work out.

My youngest daughter is sitting her A levels next Summer, which means that she has to apply to university around about now. And the first step in making any kind of decision is obviously to look at the subjects being studied at A level and choose a degree subject.

All my friends seem to have children (boys) of the same age and they’re all studying the same subjects: Maths, Physics and Chemistry so we’re all in the same camp. A few, like my girl, are studying further maths as a fourth subject but in the UK university offers are made on the basis of three subjects so it shouldn’t make any difference, in theory.

Of course in practice, studying further maths is extremely useful if you are planning to study Maths at university. Since Further Maths allows you to study more modules, including mechanics, it’s also very useful for any Engineering degree which was the main alternative to Maths that my baby considered.

One friend’s boy chose Chemistry as a degree subject quite early on, where as another two boys settled on Maths. There is a huge variation in the grade requirements for these subjects. Chemistry grade requirements at Imperial College, a world class university range from A*AA whilst a second tier university ie. part of the recruitment drive of the major professional companies such as Bath might make offers from AAB. requirements for Maths at the same universities would be A*A*A (Imperial) and A*AA(Bath).

Because nowadays Mathematics is a very popular subject whereas straight sciences are less so.

After sitting her AS exams we headed into the Summer holidays within clear view as to what subject she would want to study at university and that’s important because during those holidays you are expected to draft a personal statement of around 4,000 words saying why you want to study your university course.

Mathematics is quite different to Engineering and at some level you’d imagine it was an easy choice as a result but the problem of course is that Maths is a known quantity where as Engineering is not. It isn’t even one single subject. So why would she be interested anyway?

Her school has encouraged placements in different workplaces and my girl has now had two in Civil Engineering companies one of which has been incredibly kind to her, incredibly welcoming and helpful. So maybe an interest in Civil Engineering is understandable.

Mathematics versus Engineering?

There isn’t much difference in the grade requirements from various universities. Once on the course, there is quite a difference between the hours of study with Maths degrees typically requiring 10 hours contact time compared to Engineering degrees with 30-40 hours mainly because of the extra time spent on practicals. And with one child studying English (12hours a week contact) I am not fooled into thinking these courses are “easier”. If anything, it is very much down to the type of student, as to whether they can cope with so much time unsupervised. It can be isolating having so little time with other students on the course.

There are many other types of engineering and the basic course would probably be regarded as Mechanical Engineering. As she veered towards choosing Engineering we had to look through the courses listed very carefully to try and identify more general degree courses. And then there is the 3year BEng. versus a 4yearMEng. degree course. to consider.

So she’s made her choice, and decided that she might as well apply to Oxford though the odds are very long because the Engineering course sounds wonderful. And the personal statement is written on that basis.

We are where we are, moving forwards with the decisions. The only thing learned from doing this for a second time, is to allow the child to lead the way. This choice must be their choice and should, in so far as possible, be for a subject that they can love. My daughter and her friends who have chosen a subject they love are having a brilliant time, even if the university isn’t great. Where the course is not great, even the best social life at university struggles to redeem the situation.