Helping your children get the right result

To parents, it can often seem that the General Uncertainty Principle, which governs every aspect of raising a family, is at its most extreme in the third week of August. All those years of reading and writing and sums and tests and school-runs and best friends and off-games notes culminate in one flimsy computer print-out. Their whole future, it seems, depends on just a few little points. And if the news is bad we are, as usual, eager to shoulder the blame. What could we have done better?

Conception could have been the first mistake – the timing thereof. Forget about passion and the white heat of desire: such romantic notions play no part in responsible parenthood. Everyone knows that summer babies are at a disadvantage from the start. Mothers who give birth at the start of September offer their treasures the maximum time at school and thus the best chance of getting into the universities they choose.

It's one of several million things we did wrong. By the end, we managed a couple of winter babies but our first three were born in July and August and one of them, Iggy, hit the very centre of the bull's eye so that the A-level results arrived actually on her 18th birthday. It wasn't a good day: the grades failed to reflect her genius and, as luck would have it, soon after the post came she set off to take her driving-test and failed. To show her I had faith in her, I insisted that she drove us, however tearfully, back from the test centre but unfortunately we collided with our neighbour's car on the way. We limped home and set about general and particular damage-limitation.

She hadn't quite enough points to get into the course she wanted. It was one of those years when everyone wanted to do psychology and so did she. We started by pestering the prestigious institution of her choice but they were emphatically no longer interested in her. Slightly daunted, we set about scanning the Clearing columns of this paper for other courses. And we talked about what she'd really enjoyed most at school. It proved to be English, in which she'd done well, but English degree courses are even more popular than psychology. However, we discovered a course with a few places left to fill at one of the newer universities. It wasn't "straight" English, but "English and Creative Studies" and we rang them up. They asked her to come and see them, saying that they only gave places on the basis of interview: could she bring anything with her that she'd actually created?

This was a problem. She's a very good potter, this girl, but most of her great works are either screwed firmly into walls or too heavy to shift. We settled on a marginally less weighty clay model of some fishermen caught in a storm at sea. They are in a bad way, virtually naked and either leaning from their listing boat or reaching to the vengeful heavens for mercy: the piece has something of the desperate air of The Raft of the Medusa about it, but we call it, affectionately, Three Men in a Boat.

She was not in the best of moods when she arrived. It is, seriously, horrible to have your future thrown into doubt just as you have left the comparative security of school and she felt strongly that she wasn't prepared to compromise. She was who she was and if they wanted her and she liked them, fine: if not – forget the whole thing.

It was perfect. The woman who saw her clearly enjoyed her feistiness and arranged for the chap in charge of the creative elements of the course to inspect her work, which I'd lugged in from the car. To my dying day I'll treasure the memory of this man walking round the doomed boat, scratching his chin and muttering "Why am I supposed to know about these things?"

To her joy, she was accepted on the spot. Two days later, her first-choice university rang to offer her a place for psychology, after all. But she no longer wanted it. The course she preferred was academic, immensely varied, demanding and tremendous fun; she got a good degree and is now happy as a sandboy working in arts publicity.

There are, of course, other ways to deal with tiresome results. Our girls had occasional boyfriends who failed to make the grades required. Once, the results arrived when one of them – a gentle, sensitive boy – was on holiday with us in Norfolk. His mother rang up to tell him the news, in a state bordering on hysteria. "There's nothing for it," she said to him, "you'll just have to join the army." Luckily for the defence of the realm, he didn't: he found a place to do a degree in philosophy.

One or two of ours sailed through with good enough grades to get them into the courses they had chosen, but another, Mags, recently had a salutary and unexpected experience. She elected to take a gap year and to apply post A-level and at last we thought we had the system licked. She should have had no trouble at all. She got marvellous grades – 3 As and a B – and it seemed reasonable to apply to some pretty good places. In the event, she too nearly washed her hands of the whole business because one of them gave her such a horrible interview.

The vile interview used to feature high amongst the thorny hurdles facing young applicants but I'd thought its days were past. Not so. My daughter, humiliated by aggressive questioning, came away thoroughly disillusioned with the patronising academic world. A month or two later, while she was studying abroad, a letter came from this august establishment refusing her a place to read geography. It gave me pleasure to let them know that she was unlikely to be cast down by the news: indeed, she wouldn't have known what to do with such a place as she'd applied to read English.

In the event, her only offer of a place came from Scotland and so, a couple of years ago, we loaded the car with the usual eclectic rubbish, and drove north, duvet flapping. She was wildly excited by the whole adventure and, as the countryside around the motorway opened up, the land around the Solway grew large and magnificent, the air became brisker and more bracing and the sign by the road bade us welcome to Scotland, she turned to me in rapturous delight: "Oh look!" she said, with the joy of discovery, "Scotland's joined on!"

She's off again, at the end of this month, to do a year's Erasmus exchange in Copenhagen. I must remember to warn her that Denmark is not joined on. And occasionally I wonder if it would've been better if she'd read geography, after all.

But no, of course, she wouldn't have got in.