For parents and caregivers: how to find activities and scholarships for your child

Work experience, competitions, and summer schools are all excellent ways for your child to boost their applications, while a scholarship could pay towards their tuition fees. But how can you find out what opportunities are out there, which ones your child is eligible for, and when to apply?

You can do all three easily with Unifrog’s Special opportunities tool. Here’s how it works. 

In a nutshell 

The Special opportunities shortlisting tool makes it easy to compare different types of support for students’ applications, and decide which ones to apply to.

You can:

• find out about activities like summer schools, residentials, volunteering, virtual work experience, and competitions, and opportunities like contextual offers
• compare one-off and recurring scholarships
• exclude opportunities that aren’t relevant to your child (e.g. those related to a religious affiliation, or those based on financial need)

A snapshot of what’s available

Here are five opportunities live on the tool at the time of writing: 

1. Time and Space Award – your child will work with The National Trust to develop and present a ‘big idea’ in science, art and culture, society, or nature and climate.
    
2. Climate Change and Sustainability Work Experience  – a virtual programme with EY where your child will help to find solutions to environmental, social, and economic sustainability issues. 
    
3. The Sekforde House Trust Scholarship – a £20,000 scholarship to study at City University, London. 
    
4. School Science Writing Competition – a chance for your child to have their article published in the University of Oxford’s student science magazine and win a £50 Amazon voucher.  
    
5. University of Reading Contextual Offer – your child will receive an offer two grades lower than the top end of the grade range for the programme they’re applying for (to find out more about contextual offers and how they work, click here). 
   
    

How to use the Special opportunities tool 

1. With your child, log into Unifrog, scroll down to the ‘Searching for opportunities’ section, and click ‘Start’ on the Special opportunities tool. 
    
2. Select where your child lives, the country they’re interested in, and the subjects they’re interested in (or select ‘Not tied to a subject’ to see opportunities that aren’t tied to a particular subject). 
    
3. Hide opportunities that aren’t relevant to your child. For example, you can hide any that are just for girls, or any based on a religious affiliation. 
    
4. Click ‘next’ to see your child’s longlist. The opportunities are split into three columns:
   • Activities (things like virtual work experience, summer schools, and contextual offers)
   • One-off scholarships (a sum of money your child will receive once)
   • Renewable scholarships (a sum of money your child will receive every term or year)
      
5. Use the filters to see results based on things like artistic ability, opportunities for those in care, and specific opportunity types (like gap years). Use the rank button to see results in order of things like the deadline or institution. 
    
6. Select the opportunities your child is interested in and click ‘next’ to go to the Shortlist page. There, you’ll see more information including who you can contact about each opportunity, and how and when to apply. Click ‘save’ to save all the information. If you don’t click ‘save’, your research will be lost and your child won’t be able to come back to their shortlist!

And that’s it! Your child’s shortlist will be emailed to them, and they can revisit it at any time by going to ‘Favourites’ on the top menu of the site, then ‘Search tools’, and clicking ‘Opps’. 

What about applying? 

If you child has to submit a written application, we have tonnes of resources to help:

• To see our guides on how to write an essay or personal statement, click here.
• To see our guides on how to write a strong CV, resume, or cover letter, click here.
• Your child can also use our Personal Statement and Writing tools to structure their application.

Good luck!