How to provide your personal statement

Step 2: Applying

Think about the structure of your statement - it needs to look and sound good. A ill-presented statement can say a lot, so make sure you check spelling and grammar as well.

Your personal statement must be written in English. You can enter up to 4,000 characters (this includes spaces) or 47 lines (this includes blank lines of text), whichever comes first. When you click 'Save', the system will tell you how many characters are still available or by how many characters you have exceeded the set maximum.

We recommend that you prepare your personal statement offline using a word-processing package and copy and paste it into the Apply system. Whether you are typing your statement directly into the box, or amending a statement that you pasted in, you should click 'save' regularly because Apply will time-out after 35 minutes of inactivity and lose unsaved work. Typing in the personal statement box does not count as activity. The countdown on the screen displays how much time you have left before it times out.

The character and line count in Apply may be different to a word-processing package, such as Microsoft Word - this is because formatting characters, such as paragraphs and tabs, are counted in Apply but may be ignored in Word. Please use the size as specified in Apply as the guide.

Please note that you cannot use italics, bold or underlining in your personal statement - these will be removed when you click 'Save'. This will not disadvantage your application.

You can enter some European characters that are not in the English alphabet in some fields in your application including your personal statement. Not all universities and colleges can view these characters correectly, so a version with substituted English characters is also made available to them. If you enter a European character that does not have a valid substitution, we will insert the character '#'. If you enter a European character in Apply, a warning message will appear on the screen and you will need to view and agree to the substituted characters version of each section in which you've entered European characters. View a full list of European characters we will allow and the substituted English characters we will use.

Once you are happy with the information you have entered tick 'Section Completed' and click 'Save' at the bottom of the screen.

If you prepared your personal statement using a word-processing package and pasted it into Apply, you may find that any paragraph spacing that you included is not displayed. Don't worry - your chosen conservatoires will receive the original formatted version.