Researching the university clearing process

What is Clearing?

Most people in the UK make their university applications in January. Depending on where they get accepted or rejected, they’ll make a decision about where they want to go. But most acceptance offers are conditional on A Level exam or BTEC results. When results day rolls around, your first choice might fall through. You might also have had a change of heart on where you’d like to go. That’s where Clearing comes in.

2023 saw a record number of students being accepted through Clearing, showing just how crucial this application window is.

Clearing is how universities fill the places they still have available on courses. If you change your mind on your first choice, Clearing is an opportunity to apply somewhere else. As you can imagine, it gets pretty hectic when those results come out! A Level results day for universities is like Black Friday for e-commerce retailers.

The number of spaces available through Clearing varies from university to university but it is a busy recruiting period for most universities.

How much research is enough?

We began this project by collaboratively filling in a research canvas to make sure we understood what the client wanted to get out of the research.

Recruitment of participants was relatively straightforward. Anglia Ruskin University could contact people who had applied through Clearing. Many of those applicants, but not all, went on to study at ARU.

We ended up talking to fourteen different people, a good representative sample size. The majority were A Level students, but we also talked to some mature students. That turned out to be really useful. Those two groups had very different experiences.

The interviews were conducted remotely, with one facilitator and one scribe taking notes. Each interview was between 45 and 60 minutes long. We spent most of the time asking about their past experience, but we also asked them for feedback on the current website and advertising campaigns relating to Clearing.

How do you map a range of experiences?

We had some preconceptions about what the experience of clearing was like. We imagined it was a stressful time for most people. But in fact, there was a wide range of experiences. For mature students, Clearing was simply application time. For most A Level students, it was indeed a stressful time. Often the stress was as much about finding student accommodation as finding a place on a course.

There were a range of different reasons why people ended up applying through clearing, and it was important to understand and capture these.

We mapped out people’s states of mind. There were broadly two categories of applicants: preppers and panickers. The preppers did plenty of research in advance and knew what they were doing. The panickers were the people who needed help reducing their stressful experience.

By mapping out these different mind states, we were able to formulate a pragmatic design proposition: how might we reduce the number of panickers and increase the number of preppers?

If a list of Clearing courses was made available before results day, that would be very useful. I know for many students, having the clarity to know what courses are available in Clearing relieves so much stress.

How do you play back your research findings effectively?

We synthesised our findings into their key points, distilling down the similarities and differences across all the interviews. We also made sure to refer back to the research canvas from the start of the project to ensure we were delivering what the client needed. We did one big playback to people from the web team, admissions, academics, and more.

So what was the verdict on the website?

Did it need to be overhauled to make it more useful and effective for Clearing? No, but there was room for improvement.

We provided recommendations for Anglia Ruskin University around how they could help people be less reactive, encouraging more prepping and less panicking. We recommended that they publish early and often to dispel myths about clearing. Clearing isn’t just about missing your first place and it’s not just the ‘leftovers’. It’s also important that the website clearly covers the process behind Clearing and includes encouraging testimonials from students who went through the process themselves.

It was useful to explore the motivations and assumptions prospective students have around Clearing, or even their awareness of it. A level results day is very important, but understanding students helped us see beyond the university’s perspective. This led us to make substantive content changes and informed our planning over the whole Clearing period. We believe this helped our recruitment figures year on year in what was a challenging market.

Approaches and attitudes towards clearing are changing. In 2023, the largest group of Clearing applicants were those who had changed their minds about where to attend rather than those not getting the grades that they needed for their first choice. Nearly 22,000 applicants declined their original firm choice and secured a place elsewhere through clearing last year, so there is a sizeable opportunity to convince prospective students that your university is the right fit for them.