Personal statements on university application forms, which are perceived as giving an advantage to middle-class and privately educated students, are to be scrapped.
The UK’s university admissions service Ucas, which has today published its latest applications data, has announced that those applying for undergraduate places in 2026 will, instead of giving lengthy personal statements, be asked to answer why they want to study the subject and how their studies or qualifications helped them to prepare for the course.
Academics are increasingly of the view that the 4,000-character personal statement or essay particularly benefited those who had a family history of higher education and who may have had tutoring. They have also been open to fabrication, Ucas believes.
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Lee Elliot Major, a professor of social mobility at Exeter University, said: “The love letter from a university applicant to their chosen university subject has increasingly become a barometer of middle-class privilege as so many personal statements are now co-created and polished by advisers, teachers and parents.”
Jo Saxton, chief executive of Ucas, said the changes were part of a sector-wide effort to ensure more people from disadvantaged backgrounds can benefit from the life-changing opportunity of higher education.
“The new approach with guided questions aims to give greater confidence to those students, as well as their teachers when advising on how to secure their dream course,” she added.
Ucas also announced that, for the second year in a row, there had been a fall in undergraduate applications by sixth formers in England and Wales.
The application rate for UK 18-year-olds fell to 41.8% for 2024 – down from 42.1% last year, and the peak of 44.1% in 2022. Among the most disadvantaged students, it fell slightly to 27%, while it remained unchanged for the least disadvantaged, at 57.6%.
This meant that the application rate gap (of 30.6 percentage points) is unchanged from 2015. By the June deadline, a total of 667,650 students are applying to UK courses – down 1.6% on the year before.
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