Reviewing the admissions system

Offer-making stage

We want to hear your views on three issues related to the offer-making stage of the admissions system:

contextual admissions and contextual offers
unconditional offers and attainment offers
incentives or inducements.

Issue four: The role of contextual admissions and contextual offers

Universities and colleges use contextual admissions to take account of applicants’ different circumstances.

Contextual information may include:

data about the area where the applicant lives or about their school or college
information such as whether they are from a disadvantaged background.

Sometimes universities and colleges use this information to make ‘contextual offers’ based on lower grades than the standard offer.

Some may make ‘conditional contextual’ offers, where they will only make a lower grade offer if the applicant makes that university or college their ‘firm’ choice.

We want to learn more about:

how universities and colleges use contextual admissions
how much applicants understand contextual admissions processes
how the processes could be improved or adapted.

Issue five: The use of unconditional offers and ‘attainment offers’

An unconditional offer is an offer that does not depend on an applicant getting specific results.

Some unconditional offers may have a ‘conditional’ element; for example, they only become unconditional if the applicant makes the university or college their ‘firm’ choice.

A related type of offer is the so-called ‘attainment offer’ or ‘incentivised offer’, where the offer is conditional but with very low requirements: for example, two E grades at A-level.

We are interested to hear:

what types of unconditional offers are seen as appropriate or inappropriate
how they might impact applicants’ decisions about where to study.

Issue six: The use of offer incentives or inducements

Some universities or colleges may make misleading marketing claims or offer other more direct forms of incentive to encourage applicants to choose them, such as:

a bursary or cash payment
a promise of accommodation.

This could result in applicants making decisions which are not in their best interests.

We would like to understand the scale and nature of this issue and the impact that it has on applicants.

Tell us what you think about these issues

Published 27 February 2020

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Reviewing the admissions system

Offer-making stage

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