More than a third of 18-year-olds applying to university in 2018 received a form of unconditional offer before completing their qualifications.

New analysis from Ucas suggests that last academic year 87,540 applicants who were yet to complete school or college received an offer that could be considered unconditional.

It says this represents 34.4 per cent of 18-year-old applicants from England, Northern Ireland and Wales, and continues an annual upward trend that began in 2013.

For the first time, Ucas’ 2018 End of Cycle Report also looks at conditional unconditional offers - offers that are made as conditional, then updated to unconditional if the offer is accepted as the student’s first (firm) choice.

An unconditional offer means a student has a place on a degree course secured, regardless of the grades they achieve in their A levels or other qualifications.

The 87,540 figure takes into account both of these.

In 2018, 18 per cent of all offers recorded as unconditional were in creative arts and design, the report says, compared with 0.3 per cent for medicine and dentistry courses.

Unconditional offers ‘affect A level results’

According to the report, providers made 66,315 conditional unconditional offers - 6.9 per cent of all offers made to 18-year-olds from England, Northern Ireland, and Wales.

A survey of 6,000 18-year-old applicants from those countries found that more than 70 per cent felt positively about the practice.

But the increase in unconditional offer-making has sparked fears that they undermine students’ motivation and lead to poorer results.

In August, Tes reported on the case of a school in the North of England which had seen its A*-E grades dive from 74 per cent in 2017 to 14 per cent this year, at a time when 40 students had received unconditional offers from universities.

Earlier this month multi-academy (MAT) trust chief executives, university vice-chancellors and private school heads called for unconditional offers to be changed to cut their number and to stop students being “disadvantaged”.

The Ucas report says institutions are aware of the potential impact of unconditional offers, and that some offer additional incentives, such as a bursary or scholarship to students who go on to perform well in their exams after receiving an unconditional offer.

“However, it remains the case that applicants who hold an unconditional offer as their firm choice are more likely to miss their predicted A-level grades by two or more points, compared to those who are holding a conditional offer as their firm choice,” the report says.

Clare Marchant, Ucas’ chief executive, said: “It’s clear that the use of unconditional offers is not a binary issue.

“They’re used in a variety of ways to enable students to progress on to undergraduate courses, and while students are broadly supportive of them, the link with their A-level attainment can’t be ignored.”

Sir Peter Lampl, founder of the Sutton Trust education charity, said: “This year over a third of teenagers have received an unconditional offer. This is a serious problem for access.

“It means that universities are likely to put more weight on students’ predicted grades, which disadvantaged students are more likely to have underpredicted.

“Instead of increasing the rate of unconditional offers even more, we want to move to a post-qualification applications system where students apply only after they have received their A-level results.”

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “It is clear this practice is now completely out of control and is driven by market forces rather than by educational considerations.”

The Ucas report shows that a record 33 per cent of the 18-year-old population in the UK were accepted on to an undergraduate course, an increase of 0.4 percentage points on 2017.