A “black hole” in school career advice has led to many pupils being given the wrong or inadequate advice when it comes to choosing their A-level subjects, according to a new student survey.

The report from web forum The Student Room found that the majority of students actually believed they had been given enough information to select their subjects of study. Indeed, six out of ten respondents said they felt they had been well enough informed about how their choices could affect their options in the future.

But a sizeable proportion - 23 per cent - said for them this simply hadn’t been the case.

Over 900 students added comments explaining where they felt the advice they had been given was falling down. In many cases, it was the A-levels that might be best suited to specific degrees where many felt they did not know enough.

For example, one student said that they had not been told that maths was an important and often required subject for chemistry and natural sciences courses, meaning that their degree options were not as wide as they could have otherwise been.

Another claimed they were informed that biology was not a required subject for medicine, and they had lost out on a place as a result, while a different student said they had not been made aware history was a desirable addition to applications for English courses.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Education told the BBC that the government is working to improve the quality of careers advice for school and college leavers.

Perhaps that is just as well, since the average score students gave the quality of careers advice at their institution was just 5.5 on a scale from zero to ten. While 39 per cent rated their careers advice as seven or higher, nearly a third of students rated the guidance they had received as four out of ten or worse.

Just 23 per cent ranked school careers advisors and teachers as among their top three most useful sources of information. Instead, it seems most students prefer to find out from the universities themselves - open days, university websites and prospectuses were the three most commonly-cited resources.