Use this material to examine your own work. Confirm current requirements, forms and dates with ICE before applying.
Plan your report by section, with a word budget and the attribute areas each section supports. Keep track of what still needs resolving.
Reviewing your own draft
Some checks are worth running on a finished draft, and most of them you can do yourself in ten minutes:
- Count the instances of "we". For each, decide whether you mean I.
- Highlight every sentence containing a decision. If a page has none, that page is background.
- Check each attribute area appears somewhere, and that no area is carried by a single sentence.
- Check that every claim of responsibility is one you could defend for ten minutes.
- Check the report against your CV for dates, roles and scale.
- Check every appendix is referenced from the text, and every reference points somewhere useful.
- Check nothing confidential or security-sensitive has crept in.
Where feedback is given on writing (by a mentor, by a sponsor, or by any software tool) it should identify problems in your text rather than replace your text. Anything that writes substantial passages for you crosses a line that ICE takes seriously.
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.