I had five drafts of a personal statement that all said the same thing. My adviser made me cut the first two paragraphs and write about the lab placement instead. That version got the interview.
The research proposal support was the useful part. Ten weeks of turning a vague idea about supply chains into a two-page proposal with a method section I could actually defend in the interview.
Honestly the most valuable thing was being told that two of my five choices were unrealistic. Nobody at school wanted to say it. I replaced them and got an offer from one of the replacements.
We brought Aston in to moderate assessment on two new modules. The report was blunt about our rubric wording, which is exactly what we paid for, and the rewrite went through validation without conditions.
Worked examples
At the start: BBB predicted, a choice list built from a league table, statement opening with a childhood anecdote.
What we did: rebuilt the shortlist around tariff points and contextual offers, found two courses with foundation-year entry, restructured the statement around a Year 12 work placement.
Then: three offers, including one above the original predicted grades on a contextual basis.
At the start: a strong 2:1 in economics, an interesting question about freight pricing, and eight pages that were all literature.
What we did: eight weeks on research methods, cut the proposal to two pages, identified four possible supervisors and drafted the approach emails.
Then: two supervisors responded, one interview, MRes offer with a route to transfer to PhD.
At the start: a provider validating two Level 5 modules, with assessment criteria that repeated the learning outcomes back at students.
What we did: moderated a 40-script sample, rewrote the rubric bands against the outcomes, trained four markers over a half day.
Then: validation passed without conditions and marker disagreement on the next cohort fell noticeably.