Choosing subjects for who they are, not who they are afraid to be

Now's the time for leaning in, not away.

When Term 3 begins in the next 1-2 weeks (depending where you live), a quiet and consequential thing will start happening in Year 10 and 11 homes across the country.

Courses handbooks and information will come out, an online selection portal will open, and your fifteen or sixteen year old will sit down to choose the subjects that will carry them into their final years of school.

To them, and very often to us, the moment feels enormous, as though a wrong tick in a box now will close a door that can never be opened again.

You can see it in the way the conversation tightens, the way "what do you actually like" so quickly becomes "but what will keep your options open", frenzied thinking of friends’ selections, and the way a teenager who five minutes ago was excited about a subject suddenly looks unsure whether they are allowed to want it.

This is one of the moments we find ourselves talking about most on More Than a Score. because subject selection is where the pressure of the scoreboard reaches down into a child years before any final result, and quietly starts shaping the choices they make.

The fear or worry in the room is rarely about the subjects themselves.

It is often about the future, and a particular story we have all absorbed about how the future is supposed to work, that there is one correct sequence or path…with the right subjects leading to the right score leading to the right course leading to the settled life. And, lo and behold, that single misstep early on knocks a young person off the track for good - no way back, ever.

Held tightly enough, that story turns a moment that should be about curiosity and discovery into a defensive exercise in not closing doors, and a teenager learns to choose from fear rather than from interest, strengths or emerging talent.

It is worth saying plainly that the story is mostly not true, and the evidence keeps confirming it.

The single number we treat as the gateway to everything turns out to be far less of a gateway than the pressure suggests. Reporting from The Conversation on admissions data has found that around 30 per cent of Year 12 students who go on to university are admitted without their ATAR even being considered.

For the many who take a less direct route, enabling and bridging courses are a real and growing door into a degree, and the students who walk through them do just as well once they are there. (If they decide to pursue study at a university rather than an apprenticeship or moving directly into full-time work initially).

None of this means the choices do not matter.

But, maybe it means they matter far less catastrophically than the fear insists, and a young person choosing subjects this month is not sealing their fate.

They are simply picking a starting direction on a road with more turn offs than anyone admits. Especially given the current state of change and uncertainty we are all facing with all the potential, hype and evolution of AI.

So, what can we do now?

As you’re sitting at the kitchen table over the coming weeks, there may be a better question to try out. One the people we speak to on the podcast keep pointing back to.

Not "what keeps the most doors open", but "what does this person lean towards when no one is making them".

The answer is usually visible if you watch for it, in the subject they talk about without being asked, the thing they lose track of time doing, the area where the effort seems to fall away.

Blaise Witnish, who runs a global company with more 2500 employees now (with a wide majority between 18-25), spoke to us about how rarely young people seem to actually know what they are good at. Not because the strength is hidden but because the ease of it can disguise its power.

The thing that comes naturally sometimes may not feel like a strength from the inside, because we just use or do it without thinking. This is exactly why a young person needs a trusted mentor or adult to notice it and name it out loud.

Subject selection time is one of the cleanest chances a parent gets to do precisely that. It's a brilliant opportunity to hold up what you have seen in your young person and let the choices have some further information to help them.

It helps, too, to remember that the path almost never runs in the straight line the fear imagines.

Athan Didaskalou’s (co-founder of the highly successful company July) great insights were about running your own game, refusing to measure yourself against a scoreboard someone else set, and trusting that a wobbly or unusual start can be seen as side street rather than a dead end.

As you and those around you begin discussing selecting subjects, hold these perspectives alongside that subject form and the form shrinks back to a more realistic size. Yes, it is a meaningful choice, worth making thoughtfully, but it is the first of dozens, and certainly not a guarantee of anything.

After all, we are much more than a score and a set of subjects.

Dan

More Than a Score Co-Founder & Co-Host

P.S

If this brought a particular young person to mind, the one staring down a subject form as though it decides everything, the kindest thing you can do is send it to the parent walking through it with them.

And if it reached you because someone cared enough to pass it on, you can subscribe to More Than a Score and get our next free podcast conversation, article and resource straight into you.