Supervisor letters for an Ophthalmology ST1 portfolio

Obtaining supervisor letters is the easiest thing you can do to improve your portfolio score. It needs no new work, only a request, and gives confirming evidence to remove any ambiguity as to whether your experience meets all criteria of the evidence folder.

It is also the thing most often wasted. Ask a supervisor for a letter and what usually comes back is warm and general: a pleasure to work with, showed real enthusiasm. That is a reference. An assessor cannot award points against it.

What the letter is actually for

An assessor awards points against an evidence type. They read your item, they check it against the stated conditions of that evidence type, and they decide whether one meets the other. Where the fit is obvious the letter adds nothing: a PubMed-cited paper needs nobody to vouch for it.

Where the fit is not obvious, the letter is the whole difference. Teaching you delivered without anyone issuing a certificate. An audit where your role was real but unclear on paper. A taster week nobody documented. The work happened, but you don't have the evidence to back it up.

What a letter cannot supply is the result. For quality improvement or audit, the 2027 guidance says a supervisor's letter "stating measurable changes/ improvements were made from your audit or QIP is not enough evidence for 4 or 5 points, please include data demonstrating this." The letter still confirms your role, which the guidance asks for on every quality improvement or audit claim and which decides whether you count as the project's lead. But 4 points needs the improvement to practice shown in data, and 5 needs a peer-reviewed journal or guidelines implemented supra-regionally "with clear evidence of impact".

So the letter has one job: to state, in terms an assessor does not have to interpret, how the work meets the evidence type. Our general rule for presenting any item is to make it effortless for an assessor to award the points, and a letter from your supervisor does exactly that.

Put the title inside the letter

Rule 8 of the fourteen portfolio tips says to have your supervisor title the letter with the domain and evidence type it supports. That way it's the first thing read by the assessor and makes their job very easy.

Where one supervisor can speak to two items in different domains, ask for two letters. Each letter will be submitted in the evidence folder alongside any other evidence you have for that evidence item.

What it has to say

Four things, and the first is the one that gets left out.

1. How the work meets the evidence type. Not that the work was 'good', but that it satisfies the conditions of the specific evidence type it counts against.
2. What you actually did. Your role, specifically. "Contributed to" is the phrase to watch for, because an assessor cannot tell from it whether you led the project or sat in the meetings.
3. Dates, setting and duration. The rules ask for these on most clinical and project claims, and a letter without them sends an assessor looking for a second document.
4. Who is writing, and in what capacity. Their role, their relationship to the work, and a signature. Third-party evidence is only third-party if the third party is identifiable.

A template to send

Do not ask a supervisor to write this from nothing. Send a skeleton with the facts already in it, so that what is left for them is the part only they can supply.

Square brackets mark the slots. Fill in the ones you can verify yourself before you send it: names, dates, setting, what you did. The last two slots are not yours.

[Domain, as the evidence folder names it]: [the item, in a few words]

I am [supervisor name], [supervisor role] at [institution]. I supervised [your name] in [capacity] between [start date] and [end date].

[Your name] [what you did, in plain terms: designed, delivered, led, collected, analysed, presented]. This took place at [setting] and involved [duration, or how often and over how long].

[Supervisor to complete: how this work meets the requirements of the evidence type named in the title]

[Supervisor to complete: name, role, signature, date]

Tell your supervisor which evidence type you are claiming and send its exact wording, then let them write the confirmation, change what you have put above it, or decline.

How to ask

Send an email and include these three things: the filled-in template, the evidence type's wording, and the date you need it by. The middle one is what gets left out, and it is why letters come back vague. Nobody can confirm a requirement they have not been shown.

Ask early. A letter requested three days before the deadline is a letter written in a hurry as a favour, and it reads that way. Ask while there is still room to go back a second time.

What not to do

Do not chase a letter for work that will not score anyway. No letter makes an item meet an evidence type it does not meet, and carrying the item costs you something either way: what goes in and what stays out has the published version of that.

Do not settle for the warm one. If the letter comes back general, go back and be specific about what is missing: which evidence type you are claiming, and what about the work you need them to address. That is a smaller request than the first one was.

Where to go next

The fourteen portfolio tips put letters in the context of everything else: rule 4 on borderline work, rules 8 and 9 on titling and wording. What changed in the 2027 evidence folder has the rest of this round's new conditions, including the limit on letters for quality improvement and audit. For the evidence rules a letter has to satisfy, see what the Ophthalmology ST1 portfolio actually requires.