It’s already that time of year again. The time when you and your students prepare to submit UCAS applications. Undoubtedly, you will now be thinking about all of those UCAS references you will be writing, to help give your students the best chance of securing a place at their university of choice. This blog will help to guide you through the process and give you some top tips on supporting your students’ applications.
Where I work at Durham University, UCAS references can often be crucial in determining whether or not we make an offer to an applicant. Durham receives a high volume of applications and often has to make difficult decisions about very similar candidates. Providing an understanding of an applicant’s achievements within their education and home context is important. Often the reference can be the one thing that sets an applicant apart from another. We really rely on teachers, as educational professionals, to provide informed assessments of applicants.
You should always begin the reference with some contextual information about your school or college. The most useful is information that we will not know from the UCAS form. For example, the proportion of students eligible for free school meals, the percentage who progress to Oxbridge or Russel Group universities, any resource or timetabling constraints – ones which might limit a student’s choice in subjects to study, and your typical provision. Now the big question! Should you include a URL with this information? The answer is – you can, but please be aware that not all universities will open it. It’s therefore really important that you put the most relevant contextual information in the reference, it should only take a few lines. You can then include a link, but it means those that don’t open it will have the key information.
There is no set structure to a reference, however, like with the personal statement, we would always recommend that it has a split of being 80% focussed on academic information and 20% extra-curricular information. Also, again like with the personal statement, the word limit is 4000 characters or 47 lines. The reference should include:
Subject information should include:
To finish here are some top tips when writing references:
You can watch our short Reference Writing Top Tips video on YouTube and you can also sign up to Durham University’s teacher mailing list or get in touch if you have further questions on teacher.engagement@durham.ac.uk.
Finally, good luck and thank you!
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This article will discuss different barriers which LGBTQ+ students may face, and tools we can effectively use to dismantle these barriers.
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