By Dr Tom Fryer (@TomFryer4) Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester, Professor Steven Jones (@StevenJones_MCR), Professor of Education at the University of Manchester, and Dr Bowen Zhang (@charlzhang1996), Lecturer in Education at Durham University.
Our recent paper found that university guidance regarding the UCAS personal statement lacks transparency.
Our evidence suggests:
- Most universities do not provide course-specific information about UCAS personal statements, despite research suggesting that the importance of the statement varies between different courses.
- There is a mismatch between how universities claim they use the UCAS personal statement on their websites and how they actually use it in practice.
- Most universities say little or nothing about how the personal statement is incorporated into admissions processes and the specific competencies that it is used to assess.
This research is timely because, in the 2025-26 application cycle, the UCAS personal statement will be reformed from a long-form free-response essay to three short questions. All universities will need to update their public-facing guidance, which presents them with an opportunity to address the transparency issues found in our study.
Our paper hopes to support universities to re-design their public-facing guidance in two main ways.
First, we have developed a tool that can be used to assess the transparency of a university’s personal statement guidance. This tool covers three key aspects of UCAS personal statement guidance: 1) how the personal statement is incorporated into admissions processes; 2) what is assessed; and 3) what information, advice and guidance is provided. Within our tool, each of these three aspects is divided into particular features and assessed on a Red/Amber/Green rating.
This tool is available for download here. We hope this provides university staff with a way to reflect on the transparency of existing information, as well as the opportunities to enhance transparency within their updated guidance.
The second way our paper seeks to support university staff is by sharing concrete examples of best practice about UCAS personal statement guidance. As an illustration, we commend the University of Oxford for clear guidance that addresses applicants’ misunderstanding of the advice to ‘stand out from the crowd’:
Students sometimes feel that they need to say something dramatic to stand out from the crowd and be really memorable in their personal statement but this is not true. Applying to Oxford is not like a talent show where you may only have a few seconds to make an impression. Tutors consider each application carefully on its individual merits, looking for evidence of your commitment and ability. If you use your personal statement to demonstrate your academic abilities and your engagement with your subject(s), then your application will be memorable for all the right reasons.
We believe that greater transparency in personal statement guidance is essential for UCAS’s reform to widen participation and address inequalities. A fair university admissions system must be open and honest about the nature of its processes and assessments. Universities should seize this opportunity to design a fairer and more transparent system, demystifying the process and helping to level the playing field for all applicants.
This blog is based on a paper by Fryer, Jones and Zhang. Due to its time-sensitive nature, the paper has been published as a preprint, and therefore has not yet been subject to peer-review.
The personal statement transparency tool is available for download here.
It is very dificult for universities to be transparent about what they are looking for in personal statements as long as applicants have to submit the same statement to all of their choices. There is never going to be a consensus among universities – or even among courses (especially competitive ones) within the same university – on how they should be written. I lead on admissions for a competitive course and we are very explicit about what we want to see in the personal statement and how we use it, but this is a problem for students if they are getting the impression from other universities and/or courses that they should be writing something different.
UCAS had the opportunity to allow for submission of multiple statements in the current revision of the personal statement structure. It would impose a burden on schools & colleges, which might be why they chose not to do it, but they shouldn’t be taking into account the views of universities, which have little or no interest in how other institutions select and would therefore not be likely to express a wish for the option to submit university/course-specific statements.
Why do we fixate on the Personal Statement to the exclusion of all other parts of the UCAS application? Guidance for writing references would do more to reduce inequalities in the way applications are treated across a larger number of institutions. School and college staff supporting students from non-traditional backgrounds are keen to support applicants, but often are unclear about what to write in the reference.