Resources · Starting out
Writing a statement of purpose that is yours.
It is the first document anybody reads about your service and the one most often bought as a template. A reader who assesses these for a living can tell within a paragraph, and once they can tell, they start checking everything else more carefully.
It is a promise, not a brochure
Everything you write in it becomes something you can be measured against. That is the whole point of it, and it is why the generic version is worse than useless.
A templated statement says the service is person-centred, promotes dignity and independence, and delivers high-quality care tailored to individual needs. All of that is true of every service that has ever been registered, which means it distinguishes nothing and commits to nothing. It also tells the reader that the person who wrote it did not want to write it.
A real one says who you are for, who you are not for, what you will do when things go wrong, and what a person can expect on an ordinary Tuesday. It is shorter than the template, not longer, because it contains only things that are actually true about you.
The test is simple. Read a paragraph aloud and ask whether it could appear, word for word, in the statement of a service that does something completely different. If it could, it is not doing any work.
Check it against everything else
The readiness check looks at whether your statement, your activities and your staffing describe the same service. They frequently do not.
The three tells of a bought template
Recognisable at speed, and all three are avoidable.
It describes a building it has not seen
Generic references to communal areas, gardens and en-suite facilities that do not match your actual location. If the description of the place would surprise somebody standing in it, it was not written about your place.
Nobody is excluded
Templates say who the service is for. They almost never say who it is not for, because the template does not know. A statement with no boundary tells the reader you have not thought about admissions, which is where most avoidable harm starts.
The aims are adjectives
Caring, compassionate, responsive, safe. These are words about how you would like to be described rather than statements of what you will do. Replace each one with a sentence containing a verb and somebody who does it.
How to write it in an afternoon
Write it badly first, in your own words, then tidy it. Do not start from anybody else's.
Who the service is for, and who it is not. Ages, needs, circumstances. Then the boundary: the needs you are not equipped to meet, and what you will do when somebody presents with them. This paragraph does more to protect you than any other.
What you will actually do. The ordinary day, described concretely. If a sentence could be printed on a leaflet, rewrite it until it could not.
Where, and what that place is like. Your building, your area, honestly described. Constraints included — a reader trusts a document that admits a limitation far more than one that does not.
Who is accountable. The named people, what each is responsible for, and how somebody raises a concern about any of them.
Then read it next to your application and your policies. If the three documents describe three different services, fix the statement last — it is usually the honest one, and the other two are where the copying happened.
The required contents are published
What a statement of purpose must contain is set out by the regulator, and the required headings are not optional. Take the list from there rather than from a supplier's template, and keep the headings even where your answer under one of them is short.
Everything in this guide is about the writing, not the requirements. Meet the published list first, then make the words yours.
Ring us before it is urgent. It is a much shorter conversation.
Thirty minutes, no charge, no obligation. Send the statement you have and we will tell you which paragraphs are yours and which came with the template.
Text or WhatsApp
07426 919823If it is easier to write it down than say it out loud, send a message.