This section covers educational, social and economic background.
- For data on characteristics protected under the Equality Act, please see the Equal Opportunities section
Questions you are asked
To see the questions we use for contextual admissions data, please download a Sample Contextual Admissions Form (for information only):
- Please see the Contextual Admissions Data page if you want to download data
How the data is used
All the questions in the Contextual Admissions page of your Application have a Prefer Not to Say option. However, we encourage you to answer the questions you are able to, to give additional background about you.
The information you give may be used:
- by courses as part of their selection processes
- by courses and the Clearing House for audit, research and service enhancement e.g. to consider developments to selection processes in future years
- by courses and the Clearing House to create statistics and reports for themselves, for reporting data required by relevant public bodies, for possible publication in anonymised form, etc
Please see each course's own website for up-to-date information about how the data you give will be used by them.
- Please see the Courses section for links to each course's website
Postcodes and POLAR
We ask for your home UK postcode when you were age 17. We compare this with the national POLAR data produced by the Office for Students about the participation of young people in higher education.
Individual courses may use postcodes for comparison with other similar databases on socio-economic background e.g. at a more local level.
- Please see the Office for Students website if you need more information about POLAR
Last updated:
7th September 2026