Your parent bought you this. Here’s exactly what they can see.

By default: how much you’re doing. Not what you wrote.

They can see how many things we’ve suggested and how many you picked up. They can’t read your notes. You can change what they see whenever you want, and you don’t have to ask us or them.

That’s not a setting buried in a menu. It’s one tap, and it’s the first thing we’ll show you.

What it’s actually for — first half

Nearly a third of 14-year-olds in the UK start a Bronze DofE.

30.9% of them, last year. Across all levels, 589,237 young people were taking part.

That isn’t a dig at DofE. It’s arithmetic. Whoever reads your UCAS application has seen “Silver” more times than they can count, and on its own it tells them almost nothing about you.

Like what?

An essay prize with forty entrants. A society that didn’t exist until you started it. A month in a working lab that’s free and doesn’t need your parents to know anyone.

You’d struggle to find most of that on your own — not because you aren’t looking, but because nobody tells you it’s there. Finding you those is the first half of this.

And the second half

In eighteen months you won’t remember any of it.

In September of Year 13 you’ll have to write, in at least 350 characters, what you’ve done outside school and why it mattered. You’ll be trying to remember eighteen months back.

You won’t. Nobody does. People end up writing something vague about a book they half read in Year 12.

So we ask you at the time

Every few weeks you write two or three sentences about what you made of something, and in eighteen months it’s all sitting there with dates on it, in your words. That’s the other half.

What you get

Things that interest you — and the university admissions tutor.

Not a feed. Not notifications. Not a streak you’ll feel bad about breaking.

One thing a week we actually think you should do, picked from what you said you were into. Sometimes with a shorter alternative underneath, because we don’t know whether you’ve got a free weekend or three mocks.

Some weeks it’s something to read or watch related to your interests:

Antarctic ice doesn’t melt evenly. It melts in patterns satellites can see and nobody can fully explain — a six-week course that teaches you to read them.
A Kurzgesagt video, and then the source list they publish under every one. That list is the bit almost nobody opens, and it’s where the actual value is.
Steve Mould noticed a chain leaping out of a beaker before it falls. Nobody could explain it, and it ended up as a Royal Society paper. Watch it, then read the paper.
Seven states divided up the Colorado River in 1922 using ten years of records, and those ten years turned out to be one of the wettest stretches in five hundred.

And separately, things with dates on them. Those sit to one side rather than replacing the week’s pick, because a talk will still be there next month and a deadline won’t. Usually there’s nothing there at all. When there is, it looks like this:

Nuffield Research Placements — four to six weeks in a real lab this summer, free, and it doesn’t need family contacts.
Oxbridge colleges run essay prizes with actual prize money, and hardly anyone enters compared to how many people apply to university.
Your local parkrun needs a timekeeper most Saturdays. Forty-five minutes, and you could start this weekend.
Societies restart at the beginning of term. If the one you’d want doesn’t exist, that’s the week to start it.

No countdowns and nobody chasing you. Just the date, and then we leave it alone.

Skipping the week’s pick doesn’t get rid of those, and ignoring those doesn’t affect the week’s pick. They’re separate things and you decide on them separately.

Some of it will be online courses. A lot of it won’t — essay prizes nobody enters, free summer programmes that don’t need your parents to know anyone, a club that doesn’t exist at your school yet that you could just start.

You can skip any of it. One tap, costs you nothing, doesn’t show up anywhere. If you skip enough of the same kind of thing we’ll stop suggesting it.

And the things we won’t do

We won’t just send you videos.

Watching something doesn’t count for much and everyone knows it, including the people reading your application. So most of what we send has a second half: watch this, then go and find what’s underneath it.

Kurzgesagt publish their sources for every single video. Hardly anyone opens them. That’s the bit that’s actually worth something — and it’s about twenty minutes.

It’s not homework and nobody checks. It’s just that one of those is worth writing about and the other isn’t.

We don’t write your personal statement.

We won’t, and you shouldn’t let anything else either — UCAS checks, and it would be worse writing than yours anyway. What we do is ask you decent questions while you still remember the answers, and hand it all back when you need it.

We don’t tell your parents what you think.

Unless you decide to. Your notes are yours. You can make any single one private even if you’ve shared everything else.

Nobody scores you.

There’s no number. There’s no comparison to anyone else. We’ll tell you if you’ve got nothing for question three yet, and what would fix it. That’s all.

It’s yours.

If your parent stops paying, you keep everything you wrote and you can download it. It was always your account.