FOI reference: FOI-2026-3740
You asked
Please provide copies of current practical materials used by ONS/UK Statistics Authority for Civil Service promotion or internal selection, and where readily available equivalent materials used in the last three years, covering:
Candidate guidance for applications/personal statements, Success Profiles/behaviours/strengths, interviews, presentations, written exercises or assessment centres.
Assessor guidance, scoring descriptors, marking matrices/rubrics, interview guidance and moderation/calibration materials.
Sample or retired questions/exercises and associated marking guidance.
Example applications, statements, interview answers or other candidate responses used to train candidates or assessors, including scores/comments where held.
Materials used in positive-action, talent or development schemes to help staff prepare for promotion/selection, including workbooks, slides, coaching/mentoring guides, mock exercises and example answers.
I am not requesting personal data or live secure question banks. Where current material cannot be disclosed, please provide retired/sample equivalents if held. Redaction is preferable to withholding whole documents.
We said
Thank you for your request.
We note your request focuses on the process for promotion and internal selection at our organisation. To clarify, the process for filing a vacancy at the ONS primarily involves recruitment via a formal recruitment campaign, advertised on Civil Service Jobs. In addition to formal recruitment campaigns, vacancies can be filled by Expressions of Interest (EOIs) and lateral managed moves, where appropriate. All vacancies are subject to and governed by the Civil Service recruitment principles.
The Cabinet Office publishes numerous materials to assist candidates on the dedicated Civil Service Careers website. This covers information on government departments, the different professions, entry routes and application guidance. The application guidance section provides information on the application process, writing your CV and personal statement, Civil Service success profiles and behaviours, and tips for assessments and interviews. This provides much of the information you are looking for in parts 1 and 2 of your request.
Vacancies advertised on Civil Service Jobs detail what will be assessed throughout the application process and provide links to the relevant guidance to assist candidates.
In addition to the extensive publicly available information listed in this response, we may hold some further information on our systems in scope of your request, as this encompasses a wide range of material. However, if we were to conduct comprehensive searches to locate every piece of information potentially in scope, this would exceed the appropriate limit for actioning FOI requests.
Materials such as assessor guidance, scoring descriptors and marking matrices often vary depending on the specific role and profession. This means we would need to interrogate materials for every recruitment campaign conducted between September 2023 and September 2026, covering approximately 1,750 campaigns.
We also do not centrally hold sample or retired questions and exercises, and associated marking guidance, nor do we hold example applications, statements, or interview answers. However, we cannot rule out that business areas hold this information locally to assist with running their campaigns. This means we would additionally need to conduct searches across every business area in the ONS to ensure our searches are comprehensive.
Given the volume of recruitment campaigns in scope, the distributed nature of the records, and the searches required across multiple business areas, we estimate that determining whether the information is held, and locating, retrieving and extracting it, would exceed the appropriate cost limit for FOI requests, which is 24 working hours for one person to locate material in scope. Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) therefore applies.
Much of the information that would be assistance to prospective candidates is available online in the links provided at the beginning of this response. However, if you are looking for further information and would like to resubmit your request with narrower parameters, you may wish to focus on information held centrally by our strategic resourcing team, such as assessor guidance and training materials.