Written for the careers lead, head of sixth form or form tutor supporting applicants, not for the students themselves. Every medicine, dentistry and veterinary guide on this site, mapped to the school year: deciding and work experience in Year 12, the UCAT that summer, UCAS and the personal statement in the autumn, interviews over winter, then results day and clearing. Free and open, with no account needed.
Written by Dr Akash Gandhi, NHS GP and founder of TheUKCATPeople. Updated 16 September 2026.
In short
Medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine run on a different timetable from the rest of UCAS, with an earlier deadline, an admissions test and interviews that most subjects do not have. These four pages give you the whole picture before you go anywhere near the year-by-year map below.
If you have just picked up medicine, dentistry and veterinary applications, read these four in order. They are written for a non-medic and assume nothing.
This is the term where a vague interest becomes a plan, or is honestly set aside. Two jobs: help the student work out whether they actually want the career, and get them started on work experience and wider reading early enough that it counts. Almost every weak application traces back to a student who left both of these until Year 13.
Hand these to a student who says they are interested, before they commit. They describe the training, the grades and the money honestly.
The part students find hardest and the part that most needs a teacher. Start in Year 12: placements take months to arrange and reflection matters more than prestige.
What a student does with their own time, and how they talk about it, is what separates applicants at interview. All of the courses below are free.
The UCAT is sat in the summer between Year 12 and Year 13, and registration opens in the spring. It is the single biggest sorting mechanism in the process, and the one most schools have no in-house expertise in. Your job is timing and realism: make sure they register, make sure they book a date that leaves room to prepare, and make sure they understand what their score means before they choose universities.
Read these yourself once. The test changed in 2025, so anything a student finds on an old forum is likely to be wrong.
One guide per subtest. Useful for a student who is stuck on one section, and for you when you need to know what they are complaining about.
Results arrive before UCAS choices are made. This is where a careers lead adds the most value: turning a number into a sensible list of four.
No account needed for the guides below. The skills trainer is a separate free tool on our UCAT subdomain.
The medicine, dentistry and veterinary deadline is in mid October, weeks before the main UCAS deadline, and it catches schools out every year. Four courses, not five. This term you are checking choices are strategically sensible, supporting a personal statement in its new three-question format, and writing the reference.
The personal statement changed format for 2026 entry. Anything a student finds from before then, including old exemplars, is structured the wrong way.
The single highest-value hour you will spend with an applicant. A strong student with four badly chosen courses gets four rejections.
Two jobs that are yours rather than the student's.
Invitations arrive from late November through to March, often with two weeks' notice. Most UK medical and dental schools use an MMI: a circuit of short timed stations rather than one long conversation. A school that runs even one mock circuit gives its applicants a real advantage, and you do not need to be a clinician to run one.
Start with the format, then the question banks. A student who has never seen an MMI station is at a disadvantage that has nothing to do with how good they would be as a doctor.
The two areas where students are most often caught out, and where a non-medic teacher can coach effectively once they know the frameworks.
Interviewers ask what is in the news. These are refreshed through the year, so send students to the pages rather than to notes you wrote last season.
Everything you need to run a circuit in school, without a clinician in the room.
Running a mock interview day or a MedSoc is evidence toward Gatsby Benchmarks 4 and 7.
Offers and rejections land from January. Because only four courses can be chosen, a rejection from all four is a real and common outcome, including for strong students, and it is not evidence that the student was wrong about medicine. Have these ready before results day rather than on it.
The conversations that most need a prepared adult in the room.
Medicine and dentistry clearing places exist but are few and go within hours. A student who has read the process the night before does far better than one reading it at nine in the morning.
Worth knowing all year, but this is when they matter most. Several are genuine routes rather than consolation prizes.
Parents are the other half of the support a student gets, and they usually have less information than you do. These pages are written for them, so you can send a link rather than explain the process again at every appointment.
Share these directly. They assume no knowledge of medical admissions.
Editable decks so you can present an information evening without building one from scratch. One per subject, because the requirements and the career differ.
If you take one thing from this map, take these. The two checklists set out term by term what should be happening and when, so nothing is discovered late, and the tracker keeps the cohort on one screen.
One checklist per year group, printable and written so a colleague covering for you could follow them, plus a spreadsheet for the cohort.
Everything above is free and needs nothing from us. If you want a day delivered for your whole cohort, or a doctor to speak to your applicants, these are the three things a school can book. Two are paid and priced per cohort; the talk is free.
A doctor-led day for your whole cohort, in person at your school or live online, covering every subtest with a repeatable method and a timing strategy. Every pupil also gets the free skills trainer to keep practising afterwards.
See the UCAT schools courseA one-day medicine and dentistry interview course for your applicants: a real MMI circuit, panel practice, ethics and NHS hot topics, and live feedback from doctors and dentists who interview. Run your own mock day first with the free packs, then bring us in for the real rehearsal.
See the interview schools courseOne of our doctors or dentists speaks to your Year 12 or 13 applicants over video: what the route actually involves, what admissions tutors look for, and honest answers to their questions. No cost and nothing to buy; subject to availability, so send us a few dates.
Request a talkPrefer to talk it through first? Message us on WhatsApp or use the contact page, and say which year group and how many students.
If it is useful, we will send you one short email a term with the dates, deadlines and changes worth knowing about. Nothing on this page depends on it, and you can stop it at any time.
No. Every guide, tool and profile linked from this page is open on the website with nothing to sign in to and nothing to pay.
The only thing that asks for an email address is the optional termly update, which is one short email a term. Everything works without it.
It is a map, not a course. This site has several hundred guides for applicants, and a careers lead usually needs one of them at a particular point in the year rather than all of them at once.
So the sections below follow the school year, from a Year 12 student deciding whether medicine is right for them through to results day. Each link says why a teacher would open it, and what it is: a guide to read, a page to print, a file to download or a tool to use.
Yes. Share the links freely, put them in your careers materials, project them in a lesson or print a page for a noticeboard. There is a share control at the top and foot of this page if it is easier to send the whole map to a colleague.
The parents' pages in particular are written to be sent straight to families, so you do not have to explain the whole process at every appointment.
Yes, and the four pages in the Start here section are written for exactly that. The parts of this process a teacher influences most, timing, realistic university choices, the reference and a mock interview circuit, need organisation rather than clinical knowledge.
Where clinical detail genuinely matters, such as ethics frameworks or NHS structure, the guides linked below explain it from scratch.
Practising NHS doctors, dentists and vets, led by Dr Akash Gandhi, an NHS GP and the founder of TheUKCATPeople. We have supported 2,700+ applicants since 2012, and the guides are reviewed each cycle as requirements change.
Spotted something out of date, or want a guide that is not here? Tell us on the contact page and we will fix it for the next cycle.
Everything here is free and open, so it can be forwarded to another school, put in a careers bulletin or added to a shared drive without asking us.
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Ultimate Package students from our 2025/26 cycle, with their UCAT scores and offers, who trained with us for the UCAT, personal statements and interviews.
“Harry got my UCAT up to 2,590, working through the sections I kept dropping marks on week by week. Gemma then ran my interview practice so the MMI stations didn't catch me out, and Dr Akash mentored me the whole way through. I'm off to King's for Medicine.”
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