The Parent's CAO Checklist: Help Without Taking Over

Your child holds the pen on this application. You hold the calendar. Keep that division clean and your house gets through the next three months with the relationship and the college place both intact.

One ground rule before the checklist. The CAO assumes one applicant, one account: offers, emails and the application record all flow to your child's address and login. Agree at the start that anything from the CAO gets opened the day it lands. Much of the trouble families hit in August traces back to a message that sat unread in May.

The dates that matter now

Change of Mind is open. Until 1 July at 5pm your child can rework their CAO course list as many times as they want, at no charge. After that deadline the list freezes until offers arrive in August. The written exams run through June, and a teenager mid-exams has no spare attention for course research, so the window for clear thinking about the list is the next two weeks. Late May does the thinking. The first of July enforces it.

The post that gets missed

Around the end of May the CAO issues a statement of application record to each applicant, setting out the course choices and personal details it holds. Read it together. If a course is missing, a detail is wrong, or the statement fails to arrive, contact the CAO straight away. An error caught now costs an email; the same error discovered on offer day costs a great deal more, and the burden of checking sits with the applicant.

One rule for the kitchen table

If you repeat a single sentence between now and July, make it this one: list the courses in genuine order, with the dream at number one. The offer engine moves in one direction. When offers run, your child receives the highest course on the list they have the points for. The choices below it disappear, and the choices above it stay live for later rounds. A "safe" course placed first wipes out whatever sits beneath it the moment it offers, including the course they wanted most. Ambition at the top carries no penalty. Our guide to genuine order walks through the mechanics, and the Change of Mind guide covers the editing window itself.

Help that helps

The course choice belongs to your child; the logistics can belong to you. Jobs worth taking on:

• Put 1 July at 5pm in your own phone, with a reminder a week before.
• Watch for the statement of application record and ask two questions: did it arrive, and is it right?
• Sit down once with last year's points together, and keep your views on the choices to yourself.
• If they want to test scenarios after the mocks, the points calculator turns grades into a points total in under a minute.

Students who own the choice tend to stick with it through four years of college. Parents who own the calendar make sure the choice survives the paperwork.

If you are worried about August

Points move year to year, and the trends data shows most movements are small. The Level 8 median cut-off stood at 377 in 2025, the bulk of applicants receive an offer from their list, and a near miss in August has remedies through later rounds and other entry routes. For now the job is smaller: one deadline and one piece of post. Hold those, and let your child hold the rest.