Personal statements

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What is the Personal Statement Builder?

Developed in close partnership with our panel of careers leaders, Indigo’s Personal Statement Builder guides students through drafting their personal statement.

— Part of Indigo’s Universities module, the Personal Statement Builder breaks down UCAS’s required 4000-character statement into manageable chunks, with help and support at every stage, ensuring all of the required points are covered.

— Students can access a range of advice and support from careers professionals such as Ian Stannard, author of How to Write A Winning UCAS Personal Statement, and selection panel members, giving students the chance to self-direct their learning.

— The innovative chat panel facilitates unlimited back-and-forth interactions and feedback from their teacher — helping careers professionals to vastly increase the number of 1-2-1 interactions with students.

Getting started

The first step is to set up a group of students to draft their statement…

  1. On your Personal Statement Builder dashboard, click the “Schedule Students” button to begin the process.
  2. Select the students you wish to complete their personal statement from the classes and groups you have set up in Indigo. (Note: if you wish to exclude a few students – for example if they are not applying to university — you can do so during this step).
  3. Select a teacher to support these students.
  4. Choose to use Indigo’s structured template or allow students to draft their statement freeform. (Note: you can also create your own custom structure if you wish)
  5. Set deadlines for first and final drafts.
  6. If you require a final level of sign-off (for example by the Head of Sixth or Principal) you can enter this in the final step.
  7. Click Confirm.

Creating a custom structure

With Indigo’s custom structure tool you can easily digitise your school’s personal statement format for use in Indigo. All the same tools and support, built around your framework.

From your Personal Statement teacher dashboard, you can view all the template structures available to you in the “Statement Structures” tab (to the left of your “Updates” tab).

  1. Click the “Create Structure” button.
  2. In the first panel you can give your custom structure a name and a brief description.
  3. Next you can choose to make your custom structure available just to colleagues within your school, or make it public and available to other schools within the Indigo community. (Note: you can change this setting at any time).
  4. Now you can build the sections of your Personal Statement structure. As an example, the default Indigo structure consists of three main parts, with three sub-sections in each. Your structure can have as many, or as few, parts and sub-sections as you wish. Your first part is created for you. Give this section a title for students –for example “Introduce Yourself”.
  5. Be sure to include a line or two of “help text” — to help your students understand what they need to focus on in this part of their statement.
  6. Next, add titles for this part’s sub-sections. This is your opportunity to break down the main “theme” of your first part. You can add or remove as many sub-sections as you need.
  7. Once you have completed the first part of your framework, you can click “Add Another Part”. Alternatively, if you only want one part, you can continue to the final step.
  8. Lastly, you can assign a word or character limit to each of your parts, as a guide for students to know how to weight each of the sections you have given them — and keep within UCAS’s 4000-character limit.

For any more information, please contact us using this form.