Contextual admissions

Contextualising individuals' achievements using additional information about their educational, social and economic background may lead to fairer and more inclusive selection processes.

How the data is used

All the questions in the Contextual Admissions page of your Application have a Prefer Not to Say option. However, if you can answer any of these questions to provide additional background about you, we encourage you to do so.

The information you provide may be used:

  1. by Course Centres as part of their selection processes
  2. by Course Centres and the Clearing House for audit, research and service enhancement e.g. to consider developments to selection processes in future years
  3. by Course Centres and the Clearing House to create monitoring statistics and reports for themselves, for reporting data as required by relevant public bodies, and for possible publication in anonymised form

Please see each Course Centre's own website for up-to-date information about how the data you provide will be used by them.

Postcodes and POLAR

We ask you for your home UK postcode when you were age 17. We compare this with the national POLAR data produced by the Office for Students about the participation of young people in higher education.

Individual Course Centres may use postcodes for comparison with other similar databases on socio-economic background e.g. at a more local level.

Last updated:

2nd September 2024