Students split on latest UCAS changes

The one-page personal statement has long been a staple of the UCAS undergraduate application process. Readers will likely remember their own drafts and redrafts, and hope that their tutors do not. But this rite of passage is to be replaced from 2026. Aspiring students will instead be faced with three focused questions:

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare for this course or subject?

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

UCAS’ reform comes despite acknowledgement that 72% of respondents to a 2022 applicant survey felt positive about the personal statement in its current format, while 89% found its purpose either “extremely clear” or “clear”. The organisation noted, however, that 83% found the writing process to be stressful, with 79% agreeing that “the statement is difficult to complete without support”. This survey identifies the two key issues targeted by the reform: students’ stress and resource inequity. 

The reform attempts to combat this through “scaffolding questions [which] offer students a roadmap, breaking them down into manageable parts.” Among a sample group of Year 12 students surveyed for Cherwell, 69% agreed with UCAS’ assessment, suggesting that this “roadmap” might indeed give students a clearer vision of the end product. 

Implied is that resolving students’ apprehension towards the daunting prospect of staring at a blank A4 page should encourage more students to write with confidence. Students might also be less reliant on the wildly varying resources of their home, and crucially school, support systems. Access Fellow Dr Matthew Williams told Cherwell that “the statement contents are difficult to verify, and there is a correlation between impressive statements and relative economic advantage.” The hope, as UCAS phrases with its apt schoolground metaphor, is that “the new scaffolding questions level the playing field”.

Tight structure, though, comes at the cost of creativity and individuality. UCAS itself quoted one anonymous student saying that “I felt [the old format] made my application more personal and about more than my grades because I am so much more than just my grades!” The sample group expressed similar views. One student offered a two sided reaction, demonstrating confidence that “being able to answer more specific questions feels like I can definitely answer what the universities want to know about me.”

This was balanced by concerns that “I also do want to have the creativity that you get in a personal statement because I like the idea of being able to … talk about who I am as a person”. Another student agreed, describing the “zoomed in” questions as “restricting” and lacking the flexibility to give adequate weight to “other things I probably would have said in a personal statement” which she felt would have given universities “an insight into who they’re taking on.”

For Oxford, one insight that the reform may enable is “what else [applicants] have done to prepare outside of education”. Dr Williams suggested that this “will be especially useful to us in Oxford” as it “will capture data on supercurricular work.” Though he cautioned that Oxford “ will continue to read the personal statements, but in conjunction with other, more verifiable, data.”

This change comes in the wake of broader UCAS reform. In 2022, widening participation questions were added; in 2023, the academic reference was changed to three contextualising questions, complemented by new “entry grade reports” of universities’ “historical grades on entry data” for students to better understand offer flexibility.

These were not, however, the radical overhaul of the application process that UCAS had wanted to make. UCAS’ 2021 Reimagining UK Admissions report called for the adoption of a post-qualification admissions (PQA) system. This means that the university application process would only begin after students had already completed their qualifications and received their grades. 

In its response, the Department for Education (under the 2019-2022 Johnson Conservative government) admitted that many “felt that PQA would promote social mobility, remove concerns about the unfairness of predicted grades, or encourage more aspirational choices”. Predicted grades – whose inaccuracies disproportionately impact disadvantaged students – would be made redundant. Meanwhile, exam confidence would no longer hinder ambition as applicants could apply to institutions according to their results.

However, the Department for Education (DfE) recorded that there were also concerns that PQA would negatively impact engagement in schools’ support systems for the duration of the application process if it were undertaken after students had already effectively completed their education there. It listed this concern among its reasons in its decision not to move to PQA despite UCAS’ advice and a two-thirds majority of support during consultation. 

Rather than redressing resource imbalances, which fundamentally undermine fairness under any admissions system, the DfE hopes to mitigate these effects through small-scale reform: syphoning the personal statement into strict categories. Whether this simplification will meaningfully impact admissions equality remains to be seen, though in the meantime applicants can progress with more confidence than creativity. 

Which raises the question… DfE, why do you want to pursue this course?