Contextual data

For all students who are living in the UK when they apply to Oxford and who have been educated in the UK secondary school system, we consider:

1. Information about your school

This helps us to understand the whole school context in which you have achieved your grades. To do this, we access the following information from the Department for Education in England or, where available, equivalent data from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales:

• The performance of your school or college at GCSE. 
• Your attainment at GCSE compared to GCSE attainment at your school or college.
• The performance of your school or college at A-level or equivalent level.
• The percentage of students eligible for free school meals at your school or college at GCSE or equivalent level.

2. Information about your neighbourhood

We use your home postcode to consider the environment in which you were raised and educated in order to understand any factors which may have influenced your upbringing and opportunities. To do this, we use two data sets which are publicly available and widely used:

• ACORN - a measure of socio-economic disadvantage in a given area.

•  Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) - a set of relative measures of deprivation for small areas across England based on seven different domains of deprivation.

IMD combines information from the seven domains to produce an overall relative measure of deprivation. The domains are combined using the following weights: Income Deprivation (22.5%), Employment Deprivation (22.5%), Education, Skills and Training Deprivation (13.5%), Health Deprivation and Disability (13.5%), Crime (9.3%), Barriers to Housing and Services (9.3%), Living Environment Deprivation (9.3%). The weights have been derived from consideration of the academic literature on poverty and deprivation, as well as consideration of the levels of robustness of the indicators. Further information can be found on the UK Government website.

3. Any experience in the care system

If you have been in the care system, we realise that you will have faced high levels of disruption to your education. Therefore, you will automatically be identified as being within the most disadvantaged group of applicants. This means that you will be strongly recommended to be shortlisted for interview, provided that evidence suggests you are likely to achieve the standard conditional offer for the course, and that you perform to a suitable standard in any required admissions test. Throughout the application process, our tutors will keep in mind influencing factors which may have negatively impacted on your accomplishments. 

We obtain care status information from the UCAS application in the first instance, and will later verify this. 

Time spent in care may involve some amount of time:

• living with foster carers under an official Local Authority Care Order (formal care);
• living in residential care such as a children's home (formal care);
• being looked after at home under a supervision order (formal care);
• living with relatives or friends, either under a special guardianship order (formal care), or without local authority support through an informal arrangement (informal kinship care).

4. Free School Meals (FSM) eligibility

If you are flagged as FSM eligible, you will automatically be identified as being within the most disadvantaged group of applicants. This means that you will be strongly recommended to be shortlisted for interview, provided that evidence suggests you are likely to achieve the conditional offer for your course, and that you perform to a suitable standard in any required admissions test.

FSM eligibility data for English, Northern Irish and Welsh applicants is provided by the relevant educational authorities via UCAS. More information about the data provided can be found on UCAS's website. For Scotland the equivalent FSM eligibility data will be sought and verified by the University, until we receive it directly. 

5. Additional Widening Participation (WP) information

New Widening Participation (WP) questions will be added to the UCAS application form for the 2023 UCAS cycle. These questions, as for UCAS's other contextual information questions, will be for applicants living in the UK. The questions will be optional for applicants but are designed to help universities better understand applicants' background and provide support when considering applications. 

The University will take this additional information into consideration when reviewing your individual circumstances and our tutors will keep in mind influencing factors which may have negatively impacted on your accomplishments.