Academic integrity policy.

1. The one principle

The work you submit has to be yours. Not mostly yours. Not yours after someone tidied it. Yours — written by you, argued by you, and defensible by you in a room with an examiner who asks why you chose that method.

Everything else on this page follows from that sentence. We are tutors and coaches. We teach, question, challenge and give feedback. We do not produce the thing you hand in, and we will not, however the request is phrased and however tight the deadline has become.

That is not caution for its own sake. A dissertation is assessed as evidence that you can design a study, read a literature, handle data and defend a conclusion. Work bought from someone else is evidence of nothing, and it does not survive a viva.

2. What we do

Our mentors work with you on the thinking and the craft. In practice that means:

• Shaping the question. Testing whether your research question is answerable in the time, the word count and the access you actually have.
• Methodology guidance. Talking through design choices, sampling, validity, ethics applications, and the trade-offs between approaches — so that you can justify the one you pick.
• Literature review support. Teaching you to search systematically, to read critically rather than summarise, and to build a review that argues rather than lists.
• Feedback on your drafts. Written and spoken commentary on work you have written: what the argument is doing, where it loses the thread, which claims are unsupported, where the structure fights the reader.
• Data analysis coaching. Walking you through cleaning, running and — the part that actually matters — interpreting your own analysis in SPSS, R, Stata, Python, NVivo, MATLAB or SAS, so you can write and defend the results chapter yourself.
• Originality and citation review. Showing you where your referencing is incomplete, where paraphrase has stayed too close to the source, and how to fix it by citing properly and rewriting in your own voice.
• Viva and defence preparation. Mock vivas, hostile questions, and rehearsal of the answers you will need to give about decisions you made.
• Working with your supervisor, not around them. Helping you prepare for supervisions, interpret the feedback you have been given, and ask better questions next time.

None of that is unusual or hidden. Universities expect students to use tutors, writing centres, study-skills services, statistics clinics and peer review. Our role is the same kind of role, bought privately and delivered one to one.

3. What we will not do

This list is deliberately specific, because vagueness here is how students get hurt.

Providing, arranging or advertising a cheating service for payment to students at a post-16 institution in England has been a criminal offence since the Skills and Post-16 Education Act came into force in April 2022. We mention this not because the law is our reason — the paragraphs above would be our position regardless — but because students are entitled to know that an "essay service" offering to write their dissertation is, in England, selling them something illegal.

4. Where the line actually falls

Most students are not trying to cheat. They are tired, behind, and genuinely unsure whether what they are about to ask for is allowed. So here is the test we use internally, and you can use it too:

A second way to see the same line:

• Mentorship changes what you can do. After a good session you understand the method better, you can see why your chapter two was descriptive, and you can fix it. The capability moves to you.
• Ghostwriting changes what you have. You end up holding a document. Nothing about you has changed, and at the viva that becomes obvious very quickly.

The Office for Students, which regulates higher education in England, defines academic misconduct as any action that may result in a student gaining an unfair academic advantage in an assessment, and names submitting work that is not your own — including work from an essay mill — as falling inside it. Nothing we do is designed to give you an unfair advantage. It is designed to make you better at the work, which is a different thing and is permitted everywhere.

5. Declaring the support you have received

Transparency is the whole defence. A student who can describe their support has nothing to explain; a student who concealed it has a problem even when the support itself was legitimate. We ask every student we work with to be open about it.

Tell your supervisor

Early, and in plain terms: that you are working with an external academic mentor, roughly how often, and on what. Most supervisors react to this with mild interest and nothing more. Some will have a view about scope, which is useful to know at the start rather than at submission.

Acknowledge it in the work

Where your institution's format allows an acknowledgements section, say so there. A sentence is enough. For example:

Adapt it to what is true for you. Do not use that wording if it overstates or understates the support you had.

Follow any declaration your institution requires

Many UK institutions require a specific declaration where a third party has proofread or edited a submission, and some ask you to name the third party. If yours does, complete it accurately. If you are unsure whether what we did counts, ask your institution — and tell them what actually happened rather than guessing at the category.

Keep your drafts

Keep your version history: outlines, drafts, notes, data files, analysis scripts. It costs nothing and it is the single most effective answer to any question about authorship. We retain our feedback records too, and will release them to you on request.

6. Your institution's rules come first — always

Nothing on this page overrides your university's regulations. UK institutions are autonomous: they set and enforce their own academic-integrity policies, and those policies differ in real ways — particularly around third-party proofreading and editing, where one institution's routine practice is another's misconduct.

If this policy and your institution's policy ever disagree, your institution wins. If you tell us your regulations prohibit something we would otherwise do, we will not do it, and you do not have to argue the point with us.

Before you start, find and read:

1. Your institution's academic integrity or academic misconduct regulations — usually in the student handbook or on the registry pages.
2. Its proofreading and third-party editing policy, if it has a separate one.
3. Your department's or programme's handbook, which can add subject-specific rules, especially for dissertations and theses.
4. Any guidance your institution has issued on generative AI, which has been changing year to year.

If you cannot find them, your personal tutor, supervisor, programme administrator or students' union advice service can point you at them. Students' union advisers are independent of the academic department and are usually the easiest people to ask an awkward question.

7. Generative AI

We do not use generative AI to produce work, text or analysis that is passed to you as material for submission. Where a mentor uses an AI tool as part of their own preparation — for instance to locate literature they then read and verify themselves — it does not go into your document.

Your institution's rules on AI apply to you in full, and they are genuinely varied: some programmes permit AI for brainstorming and language support with declaration, others prohibit it outright for assessed work. We will coach you on using these tools within your institution's rules. We will not help you present AI-generated text as your own, which is the same principle as the rest of this page applied to a newer tool.

8. Our sample projects

The sample projects on this site are reference exemplars. They exist to show what a well-structured chapter or methodology section looks like, in the way a worked example in a textbook does.

They are not for submission, in whole or in part, and submitting any portion of one would be plagiarism in exactly the same way as copying from a journal article. If a sample is useful to you, use it the way you would use any published source: read it, learn from its structure, and cite it if you draw on it.

9. What happens if you ask us for something we will not do

We will tell you, directly and without lecturing. Then we will describe the legitimate version of what you were reaching for, because there usually is one: a student asking for a chapter to be written is usually a student who cannot see how to start it, and that is a solvable problem.

If a request is repeated after we have explained the position, we will end the engagement. We would rather lose the work than be the reason a student is in front of a misconduct panel.

There is no penalty for asking a question you were unsure about. Asking is how the line gets clear.

10. Sources and further reading

The UK framework this policy sits inside, if you want to read the primary material rather than take our word for it. Every link was checked on 2 October 2026.