Why University Counsellors Should Partner With Young Scholarz

We’re heading to Dubai to exhibit at the UAE Education Fair, and if there’s one group of people I most want to connect with while we’re there, it’s university counsellors.

Counsellors play a role that I don’t think gets talked about enough. They’re experienced, deeply knowledgeable, and genuinely skilled at matching a student to the place where they’ll thrive, which, when you think about it, is the entire point of the last few years of school. Getting a student from where they are today to the right university, and eventually into a fulfilling career, is one of the most pivotal transitions in a young person’s life. Counsellors are excellent at guiding that transition.

But here’s where I think Young Scholarz fits in. A counsellor can help a student find the right university and put together a strong application. What they can’t always do, because it isn’t their role, is build the day-to-day academic foundation that gets a student the grades to make that offer real.

And grades matter differently depending on where you’re applying. For UK universities, everything rests on predicted grades and then final results; there’s no room to coast partway through and recover later. Compare that to somewhere like Australia, where applications often come after final results, so consistency across the two years matters a little less. UK-bound students in particular need someone in their corner making sure the grades hold up the whole way through, not just at the finish line.

That’s the part of the story we specialise in.

We also try to be honest with families about what’s actually going on. A student might come to us thinking they need more economics tuition, but when we look closely, the real issue is that they’re struggling with essay writing, and that shows up across the board, not just in one subject. Every student we work with has a dedicated academic coordinator who can see those patterns and adjust, rather than throwing more of the same subject at the problem. English, in particular, is the foundation under almost every essay-based subject- global politics, economics, psychology, the extended essay- so strengthening it often solves problems that look, on the surface, like they belong somewhere else.

We built Young Scholarz around that kind of individual, bespoke attention tutoring that flexes around a student’s own hectic schedule and time zone, not the other way round. And because many of our tutors are IB, IGCSE, and A Level examiners themselves, students learn directly from people who understand exactly how their work will be marked.

We’ve kept that up consistently for 18 years, 6s and 7s at the IB level, year after year, and I honestly can’t recall a single student who didn’t get into the university they were aiming for.

That combination a counsellor who knows where a student should go, and an academic partner who makes sure they arrive with the grades to get there is, I think, a genuinely strong partnership.

If you’re a university counsellor and you’ll be at the UAE Education Fair on 2–3 October, come find us. I’d love to talk.