For parents, A-Level results day is often the culmination of a long and emotionally demanding journey. For students, it is frequently presented as a defining moment that determines the direction of their future.

Yet once the celebrations fade and university places are confirmed, a more important question begins to emerge. What exactly made those results possible in the first place?

The answer is rarely found in a spreadsheet or league table. It is often hidden within the countless conversations, moments of encouragement and relationships that shape a young person’s confidence long before they sit their final examinations. While grades remain the most visible measure of educational success, they are often the final chapter of a much larger story.

Few educators understand this dynamic better than Yasmin Sarwar. Across a career spanning more than two decades, she has become one of the most respected figures in British and international education, leading institutions that reached the top of the national A-Level league tables while helping thousands of students gain places at some of the world’s most competitive universities. Under her leadership, Cardiff Sixth Form College and Oxford International College both achieved national recognition for exceptional academic outcomes, with more than 2,000 students progressing to institutions including Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London, LSE and UCL.

Impressive as those numbers are, they tell only part of the story. Speak to parents and students who have worked with Sarwar and a different picture emerges. Rather than focusing solely on results, many talk about confidence, resilience, clarity and personal growth. Their reflections suggest that the most valuable outcomes of education are often the least visible.

This became particularly apparent through feedback gathered following a series of university guidance sessions and educational programmes delivered to students in Asia. While the students came from different backgrounds and were pursuing different ambitions, a common theme ran through their responses. They did not simply describe receiving admissions advice. They described feeling understood, encouraged and inspired to think differently about their futures.

One student from St Paul’s Convent School thanked Sarwar for being “so inspiring and encouraging us to stay resilient”, adding that she hoped they would meet again in the future. Another spoke of how a university admissions session had helped her better understand interviews and application strategies, particularly for competitive degree programmes. Rather than focusing on technical admissions guidance alone, she highlighted the confidence she had gained from the experience.

These comments may appear small in isolation, but collectively they point towards something significant. At a time when education is increasingly measured through data and outcomes, students themselves often place greatest value on mentorship.

The distinction matters because the modern admissions landscape has become extraordinarily competitive. Achieving excellent grades is no longer enough to guarantee success at the most selective universities. Students are expected to demonstrate intellectual curiosity, wider engagement with their subject, leadership potential and a clear sense of purpose. They must perform strongly in interviews, articulate complex ideas and often compete against equally talented applicants from around the world.

In this environment, academic knowledge alone is rarely sufficient.

Sarwar has long argued that students need more than admissions coaching. They need personalised guidance that helps them understand who they are, what genuinely interests them and how to communicate that effectively. Her educational approach centres on building pathways around individual strengths rather than forcing students into a standardised model of success. According to her philosophy, the goal is not simply securing an offer letter but helping students discover what they are capable of achieving.

That philosophy is reflected in some of the more detailed feedback received from students. One particularly thoughtful message came from a student preparing for A2 examinations who found herself caught between two very different futures. She was considering medicine because of her desire to help people and her fascination with science, yet she had also developed a growing passion for linguistics. Complicating matters further were family expectations and concerns about future career prospects.

The student was not asking for help with grades. She was seeking guidance on identity, ambition and decision-making. Like many young people approaching university age, she was attempting to balance personal interests with external pressures and practical considerations. Her message revealed a level of trust that goes far beyond the conventional student-teacher relationship.

Stories such as these help explain why parents often value mentorship as highly as academic outcomes. While examination success remains important, parents increasingly recognise that the world their children are entering is changing rapidly. Careers are becoming less predictable. Technological disruption is reshaping industries. Employers are placing greater emphasis on adaptability, communication and critical thinking.

As a result, families are looking for educational guidance that prepares students not only for university but also for life beyond it.

This broader understanding of success has become increasingly important in the aftermath of the pandemic and during a period when student wellbeing has become a central concern for schools and universities alike. High-achieving students frequently face significant pressure, balancing academic expectations with extracurricular commitments, university applications and uncertainty about the future.

For many parents, therefore, the most reassuring sign is not necessarily a perfect set of grades. It is seeing their child become more confident, resilient and self-assured.

That theme appears repeatedly throughout the feedback associated with Sarwar’s programmes. Students refer to encouragement, motivation and belief. Teachers attending the same sessions have expressed similar sentiments, describing the guidance as valuable not only for pupils but also for educators themselves. One teacher thanked Sarwar for inspiring both students and staff, adding that the advice shared during the programme would be passed on to many more young people in the future.

The significance of such feedback becomes clearer when viewed against Sarwar’s wider career. Throughout her years leading high-performing institutions, she consistently advocated a model that combined academic excellence with personal development. At Oxford International College, she introduced the Strategic Global Pathways framework, designed to integrate academic achievement, career preparation and personal growth rather than treating them as separate priorities. The underlying principle was simple: students achieve more when they understand the purpose behind their efforts.

This perspective challenges a common misconception about elite education. High-performing schools are often portrayed as environments focused exclusively on grades, university admissions and competition. While strong outcomes remain essential, the most successful institutions frequently invest just as heavily in culture, mentorship and student support. Academic achievement tends to be a consequence of these factors rather than a replacement for them.

Parents understand this intuitively. When they reflect on the educators who had the greatest impact on their children, they rarely talk first about examination techniques or admissions statistics. Instead, they describe teachers and mentors who recognised potential before the student recognised it themselves. They remember individuals who provided reassurance during moments of uncertainty and encouragement during periods of self-doubt.

Those are qualities that do not appear in league tables, but they often determine whether a student thrives.

In many ways, the testimonials received following Sarwar’s recent work serve as a reminder of what education is ultimately about. Results matter. University offers matter. Future careers matter. Yet behind every successful application or outstanding grade is a young person navigating challenges, questions and aspirations that extend far beyond the classroom.

The most effective educators never lose sight of that reality. They understand that academic success and personal development are not competing priorities but interconnected ones. Students who believe in themselves tend to perform better. Students who feel supported are more willing to take intellectual risks. Students who understand their own motivations are more likely to sustain success over the long term.

That is why the most meaningful feedback often arrives after results day has passed. Long after certificates have been framed and university places accepted, students remember the people who helped them find confidence, direction and purpose.

For Yasmin Sarwar, whose career has been defined by helping ambitious young people realise their potential, those messages may represent the most important result of all. Academic success opens doors, but confidence, resilience and self-belief are what enable students to walk through them.

More customers usually means more conversations, but volume is only part of the problem. Support requests may need to move between departments, customer information may live in different systems, and managers need better visibility into response times and recurring issues.

Customer service software can bring these processes together. Here are 10 platforms businesses can consider as their support operation grows.

1. Hiver

Hiver is built for customer service teams that need to manage complex requests across multiple channels and departments.

Rather than treating support as a series of isolated tickets, Hiver brings conversations, teams, and connected business tools into one workspace. Support teams can assign owners, prioritize requests, collaborate with colleagues, and maintain context when an issue moves between departments.

Its AI capabilities are also designed for more than simple FAQ automation. AI Agents can investigate requests, follow defined procedures, and take actions across connected systems. AI Copilot can support human agents by finding information, reviewing similar tickets, suggesting next steps, and drafting replies.

That combination makes Hiver an option for growing teams that need customer service software to support both human agents and increasingly automated workflows.

2. Help Scout

Help Scout is a popular option for businesses that want customer support software without an overly complicated implementation.

Its shared inbox gives teams a centralized place to manage customer conversations, while additional tools support knowledge bases, reporting, and customer information.

It can be a practical fit for growing teams that want to introduce more structure to support without building an especially complex service operation.

3. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk can be particularly useful for companies already using products within the Zoho ecosystem.

It provides core help desk features such as ticket management, automation, reporting, and multichannel support. Connections with other Zoho applications can also help businesses bring customer service closer to sales, marketing, and other operational processes.

4. Gorgias

Gorgias is particularly focused on ecommerce customer service. Its platform allows online businesses to bring customer conversations into a centralized support environment.

For ecommerce teams, integrations with store and customer data can help agents access relevant information while handling questions about orders, products, and customers.

5. LiveAgent

LiveAgent provides a broad range of customer service features, including ticketing, live chat, call center functionality, and other communication channels.

This makes it worth considering for businesses that are moving beyond email-based support and want to bring multiple customer contact points into one platform.

6. HappyFox

HappyFox provides help desk functionality for businesses looking to organize and automate their support operations.

Features such as ticket management, workflows, reporting, and knowledge management can help growing teams establish consistent processes as customer volume increases.

7. Kustomer

Kustomer is designed around customer-centric service. Instead of focusing exclusively on individual tickets, it gives agents a broader view of customer interactions.

This approach can be helpful for businesses where the quality of support depends on understanding the customer’s previous conversations and history.

8. Missive

Missive combines shared inboxes with team collaboration. This can make it useful for growing teams where customer conversations frequently require input from multiple people.

Rather than moving every internal discussion into a separate application, teams can collaborate around customer conversations within the same environment.

9. Freshservice

Freshservice is designed primarily around IT service management, but its service-oriented workflows can be relevant for organizations that need structured request management across internal teams.

Its focus on workflows, automation, knowledge management, and service processes can help organizations formalize operations as they become more complex.

10. Intercom Alternatives

Businesses looking for customer service software have a wide range of platforms beyond the most established names in the market.

Depending on the support model, alternatives can include dedicated help desks, shared inbox platforms, ecommerce support tools, and AI-focused customer service platforms. The important factor is matching the platform to the complexity of the team’s actual workflow rather than selecting software based solely on brand recognition.

What should growing businesses look for?

Growth changes what a support team needs from its software.

A tool that works for five agents may become difficult to manage when the team has several departments, multiple channels, and hundreds or thousands of customer interactions.

Look for software that offers:

Centralized conversations

Customer requests should be easy to find and manage regardless of where they originate.

Clear ownership

Every request should have a clear owner, status, and priority so customers do not get lost between teams.

Cross-team collaboration

Support often involves departments outside customer service. The software should make it easy to involve the right people without losing the original context.

Automation

Routing, notifications, repetitive updates, and other manual tasks can consume significant amounts of agent time as volume increases.

Useful AI

AI can help with more than answering basic questions. Consider whether it can assist agents with research, drafting, classification, workflows, and more complex requests.

Analytics

Growing teams need to understand more than how many tickets they closed. Reporting should help managers identify recurring problems, bottlenecks, response trends, and opportunities to improve service.

The right customer service platform should give a growing business more control over its support operation without adding unnecessary complexity.

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Quick Read

• Oracle stock plunged 50% despite co-CEOs delivering a $664 billion contract backlog and 121% cloud infrastructure revenue growth in one year.

• Q1 capex hit $28.5 billion with free cash flow negative $5.4 billion, as FY27 spending guidance reaches $90 to $95 billion.

• Wall Street remains 82% bullish with a $238 consensus target, and we award the co-CEOs a B+ for operational execution in year one.

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One year into the most recent co-CEO era at Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), the stock is down 50.2% over the trailing 12 months, with a 52-week range that has swung from a high of $329.50 to a low of $114.50. Shares changed hands around $148.99 in Monday’s premarket.

Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia took over as co-CEOs near the peak. The contracted business under their leadership then grew at a pace almost nothing in enterprise software has matched. The stock went the other way. Did the business genuinely improve, or did the market simply reprice what investors will pay for growth that requires heavy capital investment?

What Changed Under the New Chiefs

Remaining performance obligations, essentially the dollar value of signed contracts not yet recognized as revenue, ended Q1 FY2027 at $664 billion, a $209 billion year-over-year increase. Cloud infrastructure revenue grew 121%, and Oracle booked more than $30 billion in new AI cloud contracts in a single quarter.

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The operational execution has real substance. Oracle delivered 850 megawatts and more than 300,000 GPUs since Q4, with utilization at 97.9% and renewals coming in at a 20% premium. Total revenue reached $19.34 billion, up 29.6%, versus the $14.93 billion posted in the quarter the handover happened. Co-CEO Magouyrk said, “We are delivering data center and GPU capacity at a pace that would have seemed impossible only a year ago.”

The multicloud pact with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Azure, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) AWS, and Google is the strategic pivot. Multi-cloud database revenue grew 353% year over year. The GPU muscle comes from Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), whose Vera Rubin systems ship to Oracle customers in Q2. (The power, cooling, and networking suppliers riding the same buildout are the subject of a free report on seven non-chipmaker AI infrastructure names.)

Where the Skeptic Case Lives

Capital intensity is the whole bear case. Q1 capex hit $28.5 billion, free cash flow was negative $5.4 billion, and management guided FY27 capex to $90 billion to $95 billion. Oracle completed a $20 billion at-the-market equity issuance, and interest expense rose 55% to $1.4 billion. CFO Hilary Maxson has flagged a roughly five-percentage-point full-year gross margin decline for fiscal 2026.

The earnings optics deserve scrutiny. FY26 EPS of $7.63 flatters against FY27 guidance of $8.10, but Q2 FY26’s $2.26 EPS included a $2.7 billion Ampere divestiture gain. The remaining performance obligations figure is only as good as the customers behind it, and cash goes out years before revenue arrives.

Verdict: Year One Grade

Grade: B+. The co-CEOs inherited businesses they already ran and delivered a scale test with numbers that back the story. Worth watching over the next 12 months is whether operating cash flow of $23.1 billion continues to outpace net cash capex, which management estimates at no more than $70 billion for the year. Wall Street is with them: 82% bullish and a $237.97 consensus price target. Now the co-CEOs need to prove it.

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Contact editorial@247wallst.com for any questions or corrections.