Teachers' Admissions Guide

Supporting medicine and dentistry applicants requires an understanding of a process that is significantly more demanding than standard UCAS applications. Students need to build work experience records, sit the UCAT, write a detailed personal statement and prepare for interviews, all while managing A-level coursework.

This guide is for teachers, form tutors, careers leads and pastoral staff who support medicine and dentistry applicants. It covers what the process involves, where students commonly struggle and how to track preparation across a cohort without adding significant workload to your own role.

A medicine or dentistry applicant in Year 12 is typically managing:

• Active work experience placements and logging throughout the year

• UCAT preparation from around Easter of Year 12 through to the summer test window

• Early research into university entry requirements and course structures

• A-level coursework and examination preparation

This is not unusual for high-achieving sixth-form students, but it does mean that students who fall behind on work experience or reflection in Year 12 face a significantly harder Year 13.

Entry requirements for work experience vary between medical schools, but most expect applicants to demonstrate meaningful experience in at least one clinical or caring setting, with genuine insight into what they observed.

What schools can do

Schools cannot arrange clinical placements for students, but they can support students in identifying opportunities, tracking what they have done and prompting reflection. Some schools have relationships with local GP surgeries, hospitals or care homes that can be offered to applicants.

What to ask students in meetings

• How many hours of work experience have you logged so far?

• Have you written reflections for the experiences you have completed?

• What did you learn from your most recent placement?

• Which medical schools have you researched, and what do they require?

The UCAS personal statement is 4,000 characters. For medicine and dentistry applicants, it is expected to demonstrate specific insight from clinical experience, honest reflection on what medicine involves, and genuine academic motivation.

Your role in the process

Teachers can add significant value by reading drafts and asking clarifying questions, but not by rewriting content. Admissions tutors are experienced at identifying statements that do not sound like the student. The most useful feedback a teacher can give is: “You mention this experience. What specifically did you learn from it?”

Encourage students to start with a draft based on their logged reflections. Students who have recorded their experiences throughout Year 12 will find this significantly easier than those who are reconstructing experiences from memory.

The UCAT consists of four sections: Verbal Reasoning, Decision Making, Quantitative Reasoning and Situational Judgement, and is a school-external test that schools are not expected to prepare students for directly. There are, however, practical things careers teams and tutors can do.

• Make students aware of registration dates. UCAT registration opens in May of Year 12. Students who miss the early window have fewer available test dates in the peak summer period.

• Encourage early preparation. Students who leave UCAT preparation until July are at a disadvantage. Schools that mention UCAT early in Year 12 allow more preparation time.

• Understand that UCAT scores affect shortlists. Some universities use UCAT as a threshold before considering other application components. A student's university choices should reflect their UCAT score.

One of the biggest challenges for schools with multiple medicine and dentistry applicants is understanding who is prepared and who needs support, without relying on students to self-report accurately.

Students who are behind on preparation rarely volunteer this information. By the time a teacher discovers that a student has not logged any work experience by October of Year 13, there is very little that can be done.

Early visibility into experience hours, reflection completeness and UCAT preparation allows teachers to intervene in Year 12, not after the UCAS deadline has passed.

MedCompass gives schools a teacher dashboard with readiness scores, experience hour counts and reflection completion for every student in the cohort. It updates automatically as students log experiences and write reflections.

What teachers can see in MedCompass

• Experience hours logged per student

• Reflection count and recency

• University shortlist per student

• Application readiness score

• Missing evidence alerts

• Upcoming deadline visibility

See how MedCompass works for schools