Curiosity is the only advantage left.

Your child’s UCAS personal statement will ask what they have done outside their A-levels, and they will have to answer it. Certificates can be collected, statements can be coached, work experience can be inherited — and all of it has been, which is why none of it counts for much any more.

What’s left is being genuinely interested in something and being able to say why. That is what makes an application stand out, and it is the one thing nobody can buy in Year 13.

Every week Sidelore sends your child one genuinely interesting thing to do, chosen for what they’re actually into — plus anything real that’s open to them right now, from essay prizes to local volunteering — and helps them write down what they made of it while they still remember.

£4 a month. Cancel any time.

Subscribe — £4 a month

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What changed

UCAS now asks three questions. The third one is the hard one.

From 2026 entry, the personal statement stopped being one long essay and became three questions, with a minimum length on each. The third is: what else have you done to prepare, outside of education, and why was it useful?

There is no longer anywhere to hide a thin answer. That box has a minimum of three hundred and fifty characters and every applicant has to fill it — including the ones who spent two years doing nothing but their A-levels.

It’s a fair question. It’s just not one most sixteen-year-olds are thinking about yet, and they have no way of standing out from the crowd.

How it works

1

We suggest

Curated things to study or do, chosen for what they’re actually into.
2

They take it up

Or skip it. Skipping costs nothing.
3

They go further

Watch the talk, then read the paper behind it.
4

Record it

Two or three sentences, while they still remember.
5

It becomes a habit

And they start finding their own.

Eventually, without us.

We find out what they’re into by showing them ten genuinely interesting things and asking which they’d read. Not “Geography” but ice and the poles, or why people move, or how cities grow and who gets pushed out. It takes about four minutes.

Never a feed. Nothing piles up, nothing goes unread, nothing to get behind on.

Where the value actually is

Most of it is knowing what to point them at.

An essay prize with real prize money that almost nobody enters. A month in a working lab that’s free and needs no family contacts. A society they could start next term because their school hasn’t got one. Almost no parent knows these exist, and almost no sixteen-year-old goes looking.

Finding the one that fits a particular student, and making the case for it in a sentence they’ll actually read — that’s the job, and it’s most of what you’re paying for.

And then: what to do with it.

Where the suggestion is something to watch or read, it almost never stops at “watch this.” Watching is passive, and passive is what admissions tutors discount.

Nineteen minutes on a surgeon who published every mistake he made for a year — then find the paper he wrote about it, and see whether the hospital ever actually changed anything.

Kurzgesagt publish a full list of sources for every video they make. Almost nobody opens them. That list is worth more than the video.

And this one outlasts the application. Going from “I watched something” to “I followed it up and made my mind up about it” is just how enquiry works. It’s a habit, not a tactic, and they’ll have it long after the UCAS form is filed.

An actual week

This is what arrives.

This week

Antarctic ice doesn’t melt evenly. It melts in patterns satellites can see and nobody can fully explain.

A six-week course from the University of Exeter that teaches you to read them. About two hours a week, free, and you can stop whenever you like.

Then: the satellite record goes back to 1979 and is a free download. Plot it yourself and see whether it says what the course said it does.

Because you said you’re into ice and the poles.

Open to you now

Nuffield Research Placements — four to six weeks in a real lab this summer, free, no contacts needed. Applications open in December.
Your local parkrun needs a timekeeper most Saturdays. Forty-five minutes, start this weekend.

Or, if it’s a heavy week

A nineteen-minute talk by a surgeon who published every mistake he made for a year.

An example week. The programmes named are real and public; the week itself is an illustration.

What you get

A weekly email, and something to ask at dinner.

Every week we tell you what’s been happening — and, more usefully, we give you one good question to ask them about it.

“Tom’s stuck with the same thing for four weeks now — longer than anything else this year. Ask him what it is, and why that one.”

That’s the product, really. Not a dashboard you check up on them with. A way to be interested in what they’re doing without becoming the person who nags them about it.

The honest part

What Sidelore doesn’t do.

It doesn’t write their personal statement. It never will. We give them prompts and structure and their own words back; they write it. Anything else risks their application being flagged, and it would produce worse writing anyway.
It doesn’t score them. No number, no percentage, no progress bar. We tell them where their evidence is thin and what would fix it. A score would be invented, and the day a student who scored 78 gets rejected is the day the number turns out to have been worth nothing.
It doesn’t report on them to you. Your child chooses what you can see, and can change it without asking. By default you’ll see how much they’re doing, not what they wrote. We think that’s the only version of this that a seventeen-year-old will actually use — and one they don’t use is worth nothing to you.
It can’t get them work experience. Nobody can sell you that. What we can do is show them the free programmes and placements that don’t need family contacts, and teach them how to ask.

Price

£4 a month.

Billed monthly. No annual plan, no minimum term, and cancel whenever you like — you keep the rest of the month you have paid for.

More than one in sixth form? £2 a month for each additional child. They each get their own account, their own settings and their own weekly email — and you get a separate digest for each of them, deliberately. We don’t put siblings side by side.

Some schools and trusts fund places themselves, including funded places for Pupil Premium students. If yours does, it costs you nothing — it is worth asking them before you pay for it.

The record belongs to your child, not to us or to you, and that holds whoever paid for it. If you cancel, they keep it, and they can take it with them.