Preparing for the UG 2026 Degree Finder update cycle
School editors of undergraduate degree profiles will be encountering our new content model soon, as we prepare for entry 2026 content development. We have new training and guidance, and a longer lead in to give everyone enough time to prepare.
New system, new processes
For the last few years the Prospective Student Web Content Team has been working on the future of our degree profiles for undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. The software will be ready later in 2024, meaning that in 2025 school and college-based colleagues will begin to use it.
The web content we publish in 2025 will serve students seeking to start study with us in 2026.
This will be the first edition where we publicise our degrees using the new content model (that is, the new set of components that make up a degree profile page). Many colleagues from schools around the University have been involved in shaping what the new profiles will look like, culminating last September in the beta preview pages for Veterinary Medicine, French and English Literature, and Chemistry.
Previewing the future degree profile: our beta launches
Building on what we learnt from the beta previews, usability testing, and further development, we will soon be providing information, training, preview and advice sessions for all school editors involved in the undergraduate degree profile update cycle.
Key information for undergraduate degree programme editors
- Gather Content: Content gathering, editing, and previewing for schools will again use Content Workflow (the new name for Gather Content). This will help to minimise the impact of change on our editorial group. So we’ll have a new content structure, but the software will be familiar. It also gives us more time to improve the editorial user experience before we expect everyone to use it.
- Content migration: Subject to School preference (see below about the option of early access), our team are available to translate the UG 2025 content into the 2026 model, so this should help support the transition from one template to another.
- Mandatory training: We plan to run mandatory training sessions for the content model and Content Workflow template this year. In previous years these were only run on request, but given the substantial changes to the way we are collecting and presenting content this year, it’s important that all school editors involved in the process get some training this cycle.
- New guidance materials: We are completely overhauling the undergraduate guidance materials and will be releasing these ahead of training sessions.
- Timelines: We aren’t quite ready to set a date for opening the degree programmes for entry 2026, but as with recent years this will be as early as possible in early summer.
- Early access: We know some schools may prefer to edit their content themselves. We’ve emailed all editors to raise awareness of this and invited them to get in touch if they’d like early access.
What about the postgraduate degree programme editors?
We’ll release the new content model and software for postgraduate entry 2026, too. This means school editors will get access to the new system and guidance in early summer 2025 ahead of a launch for students in October 2025.
This means we have one further postgraduate content cycle using the old system, and we’ll kick this off in July 2024.
