A Grade 6 or Grade 7 personal statement should make it easy for the assessor to match your experience to each essential criterion. Get the Grade 6 and Grade 7 personal statement guide before you start the final draft so the structure and senior-level evidence are right from the first section.
Question
“How should I structure a Grade 6 or Grade 7 personal statement when the advert lists several essential criteria?”
What Is Being Looked For
The statement is assessed on your experience and how well that evidence reflects the requirements of the role. Start with a short summary of relevant senior experience, then move quickly into the criteria. The guide’s core rule is “one section, one example.” Giving each criterion its own section makes the evidence easier to find and score.
Begin each section with one or two sentences showing your high-level relevance. Follow that with a streamlined STAR example. Keep the situation short. Explain your responsibility, then spend most of the section on the decisions you made and how you led the work. End with the outcome and why it mattered at organisational level.
Do not name behaviours or finish with claims about what the example proves. Show leadership, judgement and influence through the actions. Grade 6 and Grade 7 evidence should normally show scale, complexity and work across boundaries. It should also make your personal role clear, particularly where several teams or senior stakeholders were involved.
The example below responds to one criterion. A full statement would repeat the same pattern for each remaining criterion, using separate evidence where possible.
Example Answer
Essential criterion: “Proven experience of leading delivery across organisational boundaries where priorities and accountabilities differ.”
I have led complex delivery involving operational, policy and technical teams that reported through separate senior structures. I build alignment by making the outcome clear, using evidence to resolve disagreement and establishing ownership for each decision.
On a national service transformation programme, I inherited a delayed release that depended on four business areas. Each area had its own plan, and no team accepted responsibility for resolving a critical data issue. The delay was beginning to affect operational readiness and supplier costs.
I was accountable for recovering the plan and giving the programme board a credible route to release. I reviewed the open issues and grouped them by customer impact, delivery dependency and decision owner. I found that the main delay came from conflicting assumptions about how customer records would be transferred. I brought the operational and technical leads together with the relevant policy owner and presented the evidence from testing. I challenged each team to confirm its assumptions and agree what would be accepted as proof that the issue was resolved.
I then created a single recovery plan with named owners, decision dates and escalation points. I held focused checkpoints with the people responsible for the critical path and gave the board short written updates that separated confirmed facts from unresolved risks. When one team could not meet its date, I secured temporary support from another area and adjusted the sequence without weakening the assurance activity.
The critical issue was resolved, the release moved through governance and the service launched within the revised window. The ownership model was retained for later releases because it reduced duplicated discussion and gave senior leaders a clearer view of delivery risk.
Build each section around the exact wording in the advert and use evidence from your own career. Use the Grade 6 and Grade 7 personal statement guide before your deadline to check every criterion, rather than discovering after submission that one area was buried inside a broad example.
