UCAS reforms to the personal statement: One step forward, more to go?

This blog has been kindly written for HEPI by Tom Fryer, Steve Westlake and Professor Steven Jones. 

On 12 January, UCAS released Future of Undergraduate Admissions, a report that contained details of five upcoming reforms. 

In the report, UCAS proposes to reform the free-text personal statement into a series of questions. This is welcome. As we noted in our recent HEPI Debate Paper on UCAS personal statements, an essay without a question is always going to breed uncertainty.

So the change does represent progress towards a fairer admissions system. However, the number of steps we take towards this fairer system will depend on how the questions are designed.