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Since 2026 entry the UCAS personal statement is three answers rather than one essay, with 4,000 characters between them and at least 350 in each, and the same statement goes to all five choices. A tutor can help you decide what belongs in each answer and read your drafts the way an admissions tutor or interviewer would, though the words have to stay yours.
We also build cookie, which has a free guide to the three questions and what to put in each, and a counter that checks each answer against the character limit as you write. Neither needs an account, and nothing typed into the counter is sent anywhere.
Read the personal statement guideUCAS asks why you want to study the course or subject, how your qualifications and studies have helped you prepare for it, and what else you have done outside education to prepare and why those experiences are useful. The answers are read together, and how you divide the 4,000 characters between them is up to you.
Because one statement goes to every course you apply for, it has to be about the subject rather than about one university, which is harder when the five choices are not all the same course.
A tutor can help you work out what you actually have to say, which is usually the hard part, and then push on the vaguest sentence in a draft until it names a book, a problem or something you did. For Oxford, Cambridge and medicine the statement is also what an interviewer reads before meeting you, so a tutor can ask you the questions it invites.
What a tutor cannot do is write it. UCAS asks every applicant to declare the statement is their own and runs every one through similarity-detection software, and a statement that sounds like somebody else is also easy to see through at interview.
Most people draft over the summer after Year 12, because applications can be sent from early September and Oxford, Cambridge and most medicine courses close in mid October. Two or three rounds of feedback over a few weeks usually does more than one long session the week before.
4,000 characters across the three answers, including spaces, with at least 350 characters in each answer.
No. UCAS asks you to declare that it is your own work and checks every statement for similarity to others, and the universities decide what to do about one that is not.
UCAS says AI can help with brainstorming and structure, but copying text an AI tool wrote into your statement could be treated as cheating by universities.
No. UCAS does not let you change it once the application is submitted, so if something important changes afterwards, contact the universities directly.
From £30 an hour, set by each tutor. Most people book a few sessions spread over the drafting rather than a course.
We are selective about who teaches here: we look for tutors at top universities, everybody is interviewed by us, and nobody is listed without a criminal record check on file. Lessons run in the browser with live video and a shared whiteboard.Rates start at £30 an hour, the first 15 minutes with any tutor is free, and every student gets cookie's study software at no extra cost.