Teacher Resources – FAQS

Students may only enroll on one programme. However, they may apply to both the US and UK Summer School programmes. The US programme makes their selections during the UK Summer School application period, so any successful students must decide whether to take up their US place at that point.

Our programmes are designed to support students in UK state schools. The only exception to this is if a student’s place at an independent school is completely covered by the local authority.

Students are expected to fill out their application themselves. Once these have been completed, you will receive an email from us asking you to verify important details from the student. This will include grades, FSM eligibility, care and first-generation status.
If the details are correct, you simply have to confirm this. If the details are not correct, there is space available for you to make corrections. Correcting information in a student’s application will not disadvantage them, as this will be amended on our system before the information is sent to universities.
There’s also an opportunity for you to provide any extenuating circumstances but you do not need to provide a UCAS style character reference for the student. Please complete this form to the best of your knowledge.

If you are unable to verify the application by the deadline, your student’s chosen university team will contact you directly to verify details.

Please email us with the name and email address of a more appropriate teacher to contact.

Please contact [email protected] and we will rectify this.

Yes. We will send a summary of all students from your school who have applied following the application deadline. We will send a follow up with student outcomes once we received all decisions from our university partners.

All of our programmes are free of charge. This includes travel, accommodation and food. In some cases, students may be asked to pay some travel costs upfront, but these will always be reimbursed. If paying upfront costs is a concern for a student, please contact the university that your student has applied to.

In most cases, our programmes are targeted at students in Year 12 in England and Wales, S5 in Scotland, and Year 13 in Northern Ireland. There are exceptions, so please do check the individual programme page that your student is interested in.

Our UK and US Summer Schools accept students from across the UK and all transport costs will be covered by the Trust. Our Pathways programmes are geographically limited in their recruitment and currently are only running in England.

All of our programmes are very popular, and unfortunately we get many more applications than we have places. For example, there can be up to seven applications for each place on our UK Summer Schools. This means that we often have to reject many highly eligible students. To understand which criteria students are meeting on our programmes, please see above for the demographic makeup of students enrolled last year.

Applications are assessed on how many of our eligibility criteria students meet. The more of these students meet, the more likely they are to get a place. Since we receive so many applications, we are unable to provide individual feedback.

Due to having a small team we are unable to make school visits. However, we have created a number of resources to help you advertise the programme including videos, assembly presentations and posters.

Please click below:

• Summer Schools teacher resources
• Summer Schools video
• Pathways programmes video

Yes, but we try to minimise the time students may be out of school by holding the majority of activities during holidays and weekends. However, all Sutton Trust activities are focused on work experience or academic enrichment at undergraduate level and students are fully supervised at all times.

The Sutton Trust is committed to providing an environment on our programmes which is welcoming and safe, and enables young people to speak up in confidence knowing that their worries, fears or concerns will be heard and acted upon. We work with our partner universities to take all reasonable measures to ensure that the risk of harm to a young person’s welfare is minimized. All staff who work on our programmes are DBS/PVG checked. Please click here for our full safeguarding policy and procedure.