Every sixth-former now has a box they have to fill. Some of yours have nothing to put in it.

From 2026 entry the UCAS personal statement is three questions, each with a minimum length. The third asks what a student has done outside education — and for the ones without contacts, transport or a free Saturday, that is the hard one.

Sidelore works there hardest, and feeds the other two along the way: what a student argued with becomes their answer to why this subject, and what connected to their A-levels becomes how your studies prepared you.

No staff accounts. No data entry. Nothing for your team to administer.

The cohort problem

The format made the gap visible.

A well-written personal statement used to hide a thin extracurricular record. With a minimum length on each question, it can’t. The students who were always going to struggle with question three now have a conspicuously empty box, and you can predict which ones they are.

They’re the students without family contacts, without transport, with a term-time job, with caring responsibilities. The ones for whom “get some work experience” has never been useful advice.

What we actually do for those students

The things that don’t need a network.

Free programmes most families have never heard of. Nuffield Research Placements, UNIQ, Sutton Trust summer schools, Speakers for Schools. Real opportunities, free, aimed precisely at under-represented students — and largely unknown outside the schools that already know about them.
Essay prizes and olympiads. Free to enter, genuinely distinctive, and barely contested relative to the applicant pool — Oxford and Cambridge colleges run open essay competitions with cash awards that attract a tiny fraction of the students eligible for them. For a humanities student, almost nothing else is as distinctive for as few hours’ work — and the main reason they don’t enter is that nobody ever told them it existed.
Things they can do inside your building. Running a club, starting one that doesn’t exist, taking on something small and making it theirs. It’s the only category available to every student regardless of money, transport or contacts — and the distance between attending a society and running one is bigger than most students realise.
And the things they’re already doing. Most students discount their Saturday job and their caring responsibilities entirely, because it isn’t school so they assume it doesn’t count. It does, and for some courses it counts for more than a placement would.

A habit, not a tactic

Watch this, then go and find what’s behind it.

Where a suggestion is something to watch or read, it rarely stops there. Kurzgesagt publish sources for every video; almost no student opens them.

That move, from “I watched something” to “I followed it up and formed a view”, is the difference between a student who consumed content and one who engaged with it. It’s also just how independent enquiry works, and it transfers — long after the UCAS form is filed.

Reflection, not accumulation

What matters is how well they reflect on it.

The Medical Schools Council is explicit that clinical work experience is not required for a medicine application — a change made so that students without contacts aren’t disadvantaged. Paid care work counts. Volunteering counts. What matters, in their words, is how well the applicant reflects on what they learned.

That’s true well beyond medicine, and it’s the part students get no help with. Sidelore’s actual output isn’t a list of activities — it’s a dated record of what a student thought at the time, in their own words.

What actually distinguishes an application is not the list but the connections between the entries: a course in November that turns out to be the same problem as something in a Maths lesson in February; a talk in April that explains something they notice on a hospital ward in July. A student makes those themselves, months apart, and only if the earlier entry is still there to come back to. They cannot be written the night before the deadline — which is precisely why they are worth something.

What it costs your team

No overheads. At all.

No teacher logins. No verification. No sign-off. No reporting to chase. Nobody on your staff enters a single piece of data — the student is the only person who writes anything, and the parent gets a weekly email.

It should give you time back rather than ask for more of it. When a student comes to fill in their activity log it is already laid out — what they did, when, and what they made of it — so you are editing rather than extracting. The same record is what they hand you when they want a reference: dated, specific, and in their own words rather than reconstructed from a tutor-group memory.

We know what happens to tools that need staff time.

Alongside what you already have

If you have Unifrog, keep it.

Unifrog is a good record, and recording isn’t the problem. The problem is that a record waits to be filled in — and a student who has never come across anything worth doing has nothing to fill it with. Most reach Year 13 and write it up from memory the week before the deadline, because nothing ever put anything interesting in front of them.

That’s the gap Sidelore works in. Every week it puts one specific, argued-for thing in front of a student — a course, an essay prize, a free placement scheme, a club they could start — chosen for what interests them rather than what they’re studying. Alongside it — separately, so it never competes with the week’s pick — anything genuinely open to that student right now. Then it captures what they thought while it’s fresh.

If Sidelore works, your students arrive at Unifrog with something to put in it.

The self-driven ones

Some of your students are already doing this by themselves.

Sidelore doesn’t get in their way, and it doesn’t pretend they need managing. For them it’s the record and the supply — harder things, further on, and somewhere to keep what they made of it.

It also counts what they found themselves above anything we sent them. That’s deliberate: a student who stops needing our suggestions is the outcome we’re aiming at, not a lapsed user.

Safeguarding

We never broker a placement.

We never put a student in contact with an adult. We provide information, templates and signposting; placements are arranged by you, the family and the employer, as they always were.

Organisations only appear in our suggestions if they publish a safeguarding policy and state their under-18 provision. Our curation gate is documented and we’ll send it to you before you ask.

Access

Funded places for Pupil Premium students, priced in from the start.

Not an afterthought and not a discount — the students who benefit most from this are the ones least likely to be able to pay for it, and a version of this product that only reaches the others isn’t worth building.

A school or trust can fund places directly. A parent subscribing is one route, not the only one, and in an intake where four pounds a month is the barrier it is the wrong one. If the direct model wouldn’t reach your students, that is useful to us rather than a no — tell us what a funded block would have to look like to be buyable, and we’ll start there.

Talk to us.

We’d rather show you it working for one of your hardest cases than send you a brochure.

No cohort has finished yet, so what we can offer is a pilot rather than a case study. We would rather say that than dress up an example as a result.

Email us