Your go-to guide on contextual offers for some of the UK’s leading universities.
What are contextual admissions and offers?
Contextual admissions: Where the background of a university applicant is considered as part of the admissions process. This can include giving students from underrepresented backgrounds guaranteed interviews or extra considerations.
Contextual offers: Where the background of a university applicant is considered as part of the admissions process and leads to reduced grade requirements for students from underrepresented backgrounds.
Why we created the tool
The type of school you attended, your socio-economic background, or your personal circumstances can impact the grades you will achieve at school and not everyone has access to the same educational opportunities and support.
To help, we have collected information from many of the top universities across the UK so students can easily see which leading universities are offering contextual offers and the criteria they are using.
We provide detailed data about each university and the criteria they use, as well as a link to their contextual offers information. This is a first step. After finding universities that you are interested in, you should visit their websites and go to their open days or call them to find out more.
Not all UK universities are included in our tool – this is because they might not offer contextual offers or this information is not publicly available. You should speak to the university directly or ask about contextual offers when on open-day visits.
How to use the tool
Step 1: Use the filters in the tool below to select the relevant criteria you meet. You can use the criteria table below to see what each criterion means and how to work out which applies to you. You may find it easier to flip your phone into landscape mode to view this bit more easily.
Step 2: Once you apply your filters, you will see the universities that match your criteria. These are the universities that could make you contextual offers if you apply to them.
Spend time playing around with the filters – you might find that applying multiple filters will strip away many universities so we recommend applying a few filters at a time to see how the results change.
Read the column titled ‘Summary’ carefully as this outlines what happens if you meet the criteria set by the university.
Step 3: As you hover over the university name (first column), you will see an ‘Open’ button that provides further information for that university (see image below), including links to their website, contact details, and a list of the criteria they use. If you’re on a mobile, then just click the university name to see more detail including crucial notes on specific courses and outreach programmes you may be eligible for.
This is just a selection of universities offering contextual offers – there might be other universities not included in our list that also offer contextual offers or run contextual admissions where they guarantee interviews or give extra considerations, so it’s always worth doing additional research or reaching out to universities directly. Whilst receiving a reduced offer can be one factor in helping you to select which university to apply to, it shouldn’t be the only one.
Criteria
Universities will use a range of factors to determine who receives a contextual offer. You might not know which criteria apply to you, but the table below should help, and you can always talk to your teachers if you get stuck or need more help.
| Criteria | Explanation | How to check |
| Care Experienced | This means you will have spent time living with foster carers under local authority care, in residential care (e.g. a children’s home), looked after at home under a supervision order, or in kinship care with relatives or friends, either officially (e.g. a special guardianship order) or informally without local authority support) | Ask your school. |
| Ever6FSM | Where a student is known to have been eligible for Free School Meals (FSM) in the previous six years. | Ask your school. |
| School Performance | The performance of the school/college where the applicant took their A-levels (or equivalent qualification). Specifically, where the school’s or college’s performance is below the national average. | England, Wales, Scotland & Northern Ireland or ask your school. |
| ACORN | CACI Acorn classifies postcodes according to a range of socio-demographic indicators. | You cannot currently check your postcode via CACI Acorn. |
| IMD & SIMD & WIMD | Your home postcode is compared against the IMD (Indices of Multiple Deprivation) or SIMD for Scotland and WIMD for Wales datasets. This flags students living in postcodes in quintiles 1 and 2 (the 40 per cent most deprived areas). | England, Wales, Scotland & Northern Ireland or ask your school. |
| POLAR | Your home postcode is compared against the POLAR 4 dataset. The Office for Students (OfS) assesses how likely young people from different postcodes are to progress to Higher Education. This flags students living in postcodes in quintiles 1 and 2 (the 40 per cent least likely to progress to Higher Education). | The OfS Postcode Checker or ask your school. |
| Other Factors | Refugee status, first in your family to apply to university, responsibilities as a young carer, ethnicity, disability or any other extenuating circumstances. | You can speak to your school or you can reach out to the universities you are interested in applying to. |
| Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) | EPQ is an A-level qualification designed to extend and develop a student’s abilities beyond the A-level syllabus and prepare them for university or their future career. | You will know if you are doing this but if you are unsure then you can ask your school. |
| Outreach Programme | Participation in outreach programmes at a university. Examples of this include programmes run by the Sutton Trust, access programmes at specific universities or programmes run by other organisations.
In some cases, a university will only make contextual offers if you participate in an outreach programme at their university, and other universities will make contextual offers if you participated in an outreach programme at other universities. We recommend you check this with the university. |
You will know if you are doing this but if you are unsure then you ask your school. |
Information for teachers and parents
We cannot emphasise enough how important it is that this page is only the starting point for research. For example, teachers could use the tool to identify which universities certain sub-groups of students should prioritise applications to. Parents could look through it to get a feel for the different schemes out there that their children might be eligible for. We recommend always contacting the universities – they have admissions staff who are very helpful and knowledgeable and do their best to make sure that students’ applications are treated fairly.
The Sutton Trust conducted research on Contextual Admissions in 2017 and we recommend reading the exec. summary. It discusses what fair admissions should look like and how it has evolved over time. Many universities are now taking a more nuanced approach to giving young people from lower-income backgrounds a fair chance to access universities, and the Sutton Trust will be releasing a further report this year.
If your students complete a Sutton Trust outreach programme, universities may give them a contextual offer. You can find out more here. You can also sign up to attend webinars specifically aimed at teachers delivered by the Sutton Trust.
Disclaimer & Feedback
The information provided on this website is based on data available as of the creation date on 1st June 2023. We strive to keep our content as up-to-date and accurate as possible, however, university policies and criteria can change frequently. Therefore, there might be instances where the information could be out-of-date or incorrect. We strongly recommend you directly verify all information with the universities you are interested in. We are not responsible for any decisions made based on the information provided on our website. Please use this tool as a starting point in your higher education journey, and not as the sole source of information for your university admissions decisions.
We really want to make this useful and accurate. We constantly strive to improve the accuracy and usefulness of our tool, and your insights are invaluable in this process. Remember, our shared goal is to aid prospective students in navigating the higher education landscape. Together, we can help to make this journey as transparent and navigable as possible.
If you have any feedback please get in touch with us: [email protected].