Inside Track #2: How to Read a Prospectus (From Someone Who Helps Make Them)

The Insider knows UK creative admissions from the inside. They write this column anonymously so they can tell you what the prospectus will not. Names, institutions and identifying details are always changed or generalised.

Here is a fact about me that should change how you read everything your chosen universities send you: people in jobs like mine review the words before they reach you. Not to insert lies, because the sector stopped lying in print around the time regulators started writing letters. What we do is more interesting. We select. And once you know what gets selected, you can read a prospectus the way we write them: backwards.

Rule one: the photography is the argument

Nobody fact-checks a photograph. That is precisely why the strongest claims in any prospectus are made by images: the sunlit studio with four students in it, the theatre mid-show, the workshop where every machine is free. All genuine photographs of genuine facilities. The argument they are making, that this is what a Tuesday looks like, is the part nobody had to substantiate.

The decoding question is always about ratio and access: how many students share this room, and what did it look like at 11am in week eight? Ask exactly that at an open day and watch whether the answer comes back as a number or as another photograph in verbal form.

Rule two: certain phrases are doing heavy lifting

A field guide to the vocabulary, translated from the original marketing:

• “Industry-standard facilities” means we bought the right kit at some point. It does not say how much of it, how old, or how long the induction waiting list runs. The load-bearing word is “standard”, which is doing the work “plentiful” could not legally do.
• “Links with industry” is the sector’s favourite unfalsifiable claim. A guest lecture in 2023 is a link. So is a partnership that changes your life. The phrase cannot tell you which, so the question becomes: “name the three most recent things this link produced for students”.
• “Taught by practising professionals” ranges from “your tutors exhibit internationally” to “we hire a lot of hourly-paid staff”. Both can be good; they are different products. Ask who specifically teaches first years.
• “Up to” (as in “up to 20 hours of studio access a day”) is a ceiling wearing a floor’s clothing.
• “Top 10 for student satisfaction” requires only a creative choice of subject grouping, year and survey. Every institution in Britain is top ten for something; finding the something is a marketing job, and I promise you it was somebody’s Tuesday.

Rule three: notice what is missing

The loudest information in any prospectus is the number that is not there. Courses proud of their contact hours print them; courses proud of graduate outcomes name names and employers. Where you find adjectives instead (“intensive”, “immersive”, “career-focused”), you have found the gap. My professional habit, offered to you: read a course page with a pencil and circle every number. Two circles per page is a confident course. A page of uncircled adjectives is a page that had nothing it wanted to count.

The other reliable absence: money. Materials costs, printing, studio fees, compulsory trips. Creative degrees carry running costs, the sector knows it, and the prospectus mentions it roughly never. The course handbook, which is an academic document rather than a marketing one, usually tells the truth here; asking for it is both useful and quietly diagnostic.

Rule four: trust the channels we do not control

Some information survives marketing because marketing cannot reach it. Degree shows, physical or archived online, show you what three years there actually produces; no art director curates a weak cohort into a strong one. Graduate destinations with names attached resist inflation. Current students, asked questions away from the tour, are the sector’s least managed communications channel and everyone in my job knows it. And the module list for all three years, read closely, tells you what the course believes when nobody is selling: a course whose final year is one long professional project believes something different from one that ends in essays.

The two-minute red flag check

Before any course survives onto your shortlist: circle the numbers (fewer than a handful is a flag), find the year-three modules (vagueness there means the course is front-loaded), search the staff list against reality (do the named tutors still practise?), and ask the department one specific costed question by email. The content of the reply matters less than its speed and specificity, because how a department treats a question from an applicant is the best available preview of how it treats a question from a student.

None of this is cynicism, by the way. Most courses are decent and some are wonderful; the prospectus just cannot tell you which is which, because every prospectus is written by people paid to be enthusiastic and reviewed by people paid to be careful. The good news is that the truth is available. It is simply kept in different documents.

Next time

What happens in the meeting after interview day: how borderline candidates get discussed, and the one sentence tutors say about applicants that decides more places than any grade.

Something you want the Inside Track to cover? Ask anonymously. No question is too basic; the basics are where the process is least honest.