Continuity and efficiency are UCAS’ watchwords as it confirms no major changes to national admissions process

Since February this year UCAS has been consulting on the national higher education admissions system.

That the consultation has not garnered deep controversy or breathless headlines is down to its solidly functional nature, dealing with questions of the timing of deadlines, the number of choices afforded to students, and the role of the insurance choice.

While these issues are not ones to set tongues a-wagging, in the world of higher education admissions professionals, teachers and advisors and prospective students, they do carry meaningful weight. As DK explained at the launch of the consultation, the boundaries placed on student choice-making frames their sense of what is possible; the deadlines affect the scale and quality of advice they can access in advance of applying and, on the other end, the administrative burden of processing their applications, and the speed at which offers can be made.

No more disruption please

Having undertaken initial informal consultation with its various stakeholders: applicants, schools, and universities, UCAS drew the tentative conclusion that major changes to the process would on balance be unwelcome. The formal consultation document proposed the retention of a mid-January equal consideration deadline (except for those handful of courses for which the deadline is October), the retention of a maximum of five initial choices for prospective applicants, and the retention of the insurance offer.

You might be wondering at this point why it’s necessary to conduct a consultation on keeping things the same – generally we expect a consultation to focus on what’s going to be different. But if you’re UCAS, delicately balancing the interests of various different stakeholder groups, as well as coping with the diverse needs of a very large and vocal sector for which student recruitment is becoming less of an administrative process and more of a do-or-die situation, it is absolutely worth taking the temperature of the room periodically. Those who have beef with the status quo, have strong beef, and it’s important to air the arguments and stress-test the system.

What’s come back on the three main questions is a very high degree of consensus in favour of the status quo. Even the most contentious proposal – the timing of the equal consideration deadline – found 76 per cent of HE providers in agreement and only 15 per cent who actively disagreed. Of those that disagreed, more preferred a later deadline, while a small number preferred an earlier one (and lots of people had concerns about the impact of a later or earlier deadline). UCAS notes that 15 per cent active disagreement “poses a serious question for UCAS about how application numbers can be managed effectively if these timings are to continue.”

Even with the views of the vocal minority accounted for, though, the picture is one of a sector whose cherished stability and associated capacity for future planning has been upended over the past decade. UCAS has quietly concluded that introducing more uncertainty into the system right now, without any evidence that it would mitigate a defined issue in the system, would be a misstep, and has accordingly set the equal consideration dates for 2028 and 2029 as mid-January.

Efficiency and transformation

The even less headline-grabbing but potentially more transformative element of the consultation relates to making the overall process more efficient, with particular attention to Clearing. Having shared draft consultation findings with providers earlier this year UCAS has been gathering ideas about how to streamline the admissions system, with ideas coalescing around verifying applicant information at the point of submission, rather than requiring institutions to chase applicants manually.

In 2027 UCAS will make refinements to the application forms, including pre-populating applicant choices in an application from Search, and hiding legacy qualifications in lists available to applicants. There will also be refinements and sense-checking on the criminal conviction question in the application (presumably to reduce the numbers of applicants mistakenly declaring a chequered past). And in 2028 UCAS will pre-populate applicants’ education centre details and improve wording around course eligibility so fewer students apply to courses they can’t actually get onto.

Part of the original consultation was thinking through whether reforms to Clearing could address issues arising from the number of choices available to students and the retention of an insurance choice. One clear route forward is the integration of what are currently manual processes of contacting applicants and making offers in Clearing into the online system. There is also likely to be greater provision for providers to be more proactive in Clearing – such as the opportunity for providers to issue an offer to a prospective student without the student having to initiate, and for providers to reactivate offers made to applicants in the main admissions round where applicants are unplaced. At this stage UCAS expresses an aspiration to generally streamline and update the process while noting that despite its oddities and inefficiencies the current system is well-understood, and changes will need to be carefully managed.

There will be a Clearing modernisation plan published in early 2027, but at this stage the consultation outcome logs the potential and UCAS’ appetite for building something more frictionless and user-friendly:

In the medium to long term there is a vision in which there is a seamless link between applicants seeing Clearing opportunities, noting their interest in the Hub, making enquiries, and receiving offers, all within the UCAS infrastructure. The ability for applicant data to lead to a more effective matching algorithm to help guide choices should also be explored, building on and ultimately replacing Clearing Plus. Potentially, Clearing itself could also operate beyond its current timeframes and become a reliable mechanism more broadly across the cycle for qualified applicants to secure places efficiently.

The process may be low-key, but the prize on offer for applicants and providers of a less high-octane, more supported Clearing experience, is real.

You can view and download the outcome of the UCAS consultation on the admissions process here.