Bobby and I were both practically incandescent with rage this evening.

We got a letter home from college today, with a list of all the homeworks that Stephen has either not handed in at all, or handed in and done shockingly badly on.

The bit that made us angry rather than disappointed was that Steve was firmly in denial about the issue. In his mind, there was no problem - just a few late homeworks, just a few assignments he hadn't done very well on. In reality though, things are bad enough that he is at risk of being excluded from his courses.

Evidently he has been thinking that because he did well in his GCSEs, he can rest on his laurels for the foreseeable future.

(For the record, "college" here is sixth-form college - the last two years of high school - rather than university. The students are allowed much more freedom than they are at school, and some - coughStephencough - don't cope well with that).

Anyway, we did a lot of talking, with the end result being that Steve does seem to understand that there is a problem, and be committed to fixing it.

So this evening Bobby and I have been standing over him and making sure that he files each and every one of the papers that have been spread across his bedroom floor in a horrible crumpled sea. We will be checking his work every evening - ridiculous, at his age, but it seems he can't do it on his own at the moment.

Hopefully getting all his notes and so on organised will break his current cycle and make it easier for him to tackle his work wholeheartedly. I can see that trying to keep on top of his work with things as chaotic as they were would have been very hard. I think - hope - that once he's established new study habits, we won't need to keep hounding him.