Oxford University

Oxford University comprises 44 colleges. All students are attached to a college which is where they live and have tuition, lectures are done centrally by the university.

I had the privilege of studying at one such college, Somerville, it’s the college that Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher went to. I was in the second year that men were admitted, prior to that it had been a women-only college.

There I met Isabelle, and soon after we graduated we became the first ever Somerville graduate pair to get married.

And then, 18 years ago, our first child, Maryam, thus became the first Somervillian baby. Maryam grew up homeschooled, and by her mid-teens had ‘completed’ her education and was working in the company I co-founded, Jibble, a time tracking software, set to become a tech entrepreneur, the path I kind of laid for her.

But she didn’t really give her 100% at Jibble, eventually rejected this path, and went back to studying to pursue academia.

Fuelled with passion like I’d never seen in her before because now she knew exactly what she wanted in life, she did an extra two A-levels achieving A*s in both, applied to Oxford, and ended up eating both Oxford entry tests for breakfast, scoring the highest mark in at least one test, and possibly both.

Oxford gave her an offer conditional to her getting an A in her A-level Arabic, but the timing meant that she had to do the two-year course in four months flat, and she’d be one of the few non-Arabs taking the exam.

After studying 15×7 for 4 months, I was massively relieved to find out a few weeks ago that Maryam got not just an A, but an exceptionally high A*, in her A-level Arabic, thereby securing her place to study French and Arabic at Oxford, and also showing the power of passion and the effectiveness of homeschool even if the goal is to go to university.

Oh yes, Maryam’s college at Oxford? SOMERVILLE 🤣