What happens when your child gets a near-perfect score and still feels stuck?
This episode is for any parent, or any young person, who is high-achieving but uncertain, and it is a reminder that a great score is a starting point, not a life sentence.
In this episode of More Than a Score, we sit down with Felicity “Flick” Pountney: former chartered accountant, prenatal yoga and hypnobirthing educator, birth doula, adventurer, and mum of three.
Flick left an academic all-girls school in Melbourne with a score around 95, and was still disappointed. She had fallen just short of the double degree she had set her heart on, and had absorbed a powerful belief that she needed to use the score to its full potential. So she chose commerce, a path she admits she did not fully understand or love, went on to a graduate program at PricewaterhouseCoopers, qualified as a chartered accountant, and spent years at Sony PlayStation’s London head office. The work opened doors, and the travel and the people were the real prize.
But a quiet question kept surfacing: is this actually me?
That question came to a head when she fell pregnant, and a chance meeting with a prenatal yoga teacher cracked something open. What followed was a complete reinvention, from corporate finance to heart-led work supporting women through pregnancy and birth.
For parents, it is a generous, honest look at how the pressure to match your score can quietly steer a young person away from what they actually love. For young people, it is proof that the winding path is not a wasted one, and that no single result defines where you end up.
What you’ll discover in this episode
• Why a score of 95 can still leave a young person feeling like they have fallen short
• The trap of treating your ATAR as “currency” you are obliged to spend
• How choosing subjects for the score, not for passion, can lead to real regret
• Why non-examples, the things that do not fit, are as useful as the things that do
• Flick’s “checklist of three” for weighing up whether a job is worth staying in
• How overseas experience revealed that a score means very little once you leave the system
• Why the biggest career changes tend to come from conversations, not courses
• How to spot the transferable skills a “wrong” path quietly builds
• A practical first step for anyone who knows they need a change but feels scared to make it
• Why there is no failure in “no man’s land,” and how progress beats a tidy definition of success
More Than a Score is hosted by Laura Pitt and Dan Steele, a former secondary teacher and a former award-winning assistant principal, on the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria, with over 35 years in education between them.
New episodes fortnightly. Subscribe and follow the show to hear each new conversation as it lands at muchmorethanascore.com.