The "STAR" Approach to providing evidence in Supporting Statements

The acronymSTARstands for

  • Situation
  • Task
  • Action
  • Result.

It is a universally recognised communication technique designed to enable you to provide meaningful and complete answers to questions asking for examples and to complete supporting statements for application forms. Using the STAR approach ensures that you provide evidenced statements for each of the essential criteria.

Step 1 – Situation

Describe the context i.e what needed to change and why. Make it concise and informative. Don’t get bogged down in the details. Choose whole school examples where possible if you are applying for senior leadership posts. The context information will be about the issues for the school as a whole e.g following an Ofsted inspection. You might also be asked to describe a situation where you dealt successfully with a difficult person, explain who the person was (parent, colleague etc), the nature of your contact with that person and what in their behaviour caused them to be seen as difficult.

Step 2: Your Task

State what your task or role was and who you worked with. Balance leading and being part of a team as appropriate. For leadership roles you must demonstrate strong team leadership in your examples.

Step 3 – Action: what you did why and how

This examples needs to be able to showcasekey skills, knowledge and personal attributes from the person specification. Now that you have set the context of your story, you need to explain what you did and how. Make reference to tasks and processes. Explain thinking behind your key actions. In doing so, you will need to remember the following:

  • Be personal, i.e. talk about you and how you led or influenced the team.
  • Go into some detail. Do not assume that they will guess what you mean.
  • Steer clear of technical information, unless it is crucial to your story.
  • Explain what you did, how you did it, and why you did it.

Step 4 – Result

This is the most important aspect of the STAR framework. Here you describe the impact of your actions. Use data wherever possible e.g. pupil achievement in English at Key Stage 4 went from 45% A* - C to 68%. Balance qualitative and quantative data where you can e.g. following whole staff INSET which you delivered, teachers may report increased levels of confidence in assessing learning as well as levels of skill. Also, use this opportunity to describe what you learnt from that situation and what you might do differently next time.