Use this material to examine your own work. Confirm current requirements, forms and dates with ICE before applying.
It can be difficult to explain judgement once you remember only the conclusion. Reconstruct the reasoning behind one decision to make that account clearer.
Two years on, a decision that took a fortnight of argument has become four words: "we used piles". The alternatives are still in your memory. So is the constraint that killed one of them, and the person who had to sign it off. None of it made it into the sentence, and a reviewer reading that sentence has nothing to work with.
This asks for the decision in pieces (problem, context, options, constraints, risk, your recommendation, your authority, the outcome, what you would change) and then reads what came back.
The options are the point
Most people arrive with one option, which is the one they took. The act of being asked what else was on the table is frequently the moment a description becomes a decision, because judgement is visible in what you rejected and nowhere else.
Official sources
Selected publisher pages were rechecked in September 2026. Other source records were last checked in July 2026. Open the latest official document before relying on a requirement.