How to prepare a coursework portfolio for university or apprenticeship applications

Some applications ask for a portfolio explicitly — Art and Design, Architecture, Music, Drama, Computer Science at certain universities, Design and Engineering apprenticeships. Many more applications don’t ask for a portfolio at all, but quietly reward you for showing up to interview with one. A folder of your actual GCSE and A-level work — sketchbooks, code, lab reports, design drawings, performance recordings — is a category of evidence the personal statement can’t produce.

The catch: most students don’t assemble this until they need it, and by then their school Microsoft 365 account has been deactivated and the source files are gone.

This post is the practical how-to. What goes in a coursework portfolio, how to organise it for someone who has thirty seconds to look at it, and the steps to take now — while you still have access to your school OneDrive, OneNote and class notebooks.

What counts as a portfolio (and what doesn’t)

The word portfolio gets used loosely. Three useful definitions:

1. Your raw archive — the unedited dump of every coursework file from GCSE and A-level. This is what you should keep regardless of what you apply for, and is what you produce by downloading your school files via mydocs.school before you leave.
2. A targeted portfolio — a curated selection for a specific application. Art schools want sketchbooks; engineering apprenticeships want CAD drawings and a project write-up; Computer Science programmes want code on GitHub. The targeted portfolio comes out of the raw archive.
3. A web portfolio — a public site or PDF you link to from your CV. Optional. Useful for design-led courses and creative apprenticeships; less useful for academic university courses, where the personal statement does most of the work.

The mistake students make is jumping straight to (3) before doing (1). If your raw archive is incomplete because you didn’t download in time, no amount of polish on the web portfolio will recover the source files.

Do (1) first. Do (2) when you actually have an application. Do (3) only if the application format calls for it.

What to put in the raw archive

The principle: keep everything that has your effort in it, and let your future self decide what’s relevant. Specifically:

Coursework submitted for grading. Final drafts of every essay, NEA, EPQ, lab report, design brief, written response. Save the assessor’s feedback alongside it where you have it (often the marked PDF that came back, or comments embedded in the .docx).

Drafts and process work. Earlier versions of the same essays. Wrong-track sketches that didn’t make it into the final piece. Rejected ideas with a note about why you rejected them. Process work is what evidences that you can think; final pieces only evidence that you can polish.

Class notebooks. The OneNote class notebook for each subject is gold for engineering and Computer Science apprenticeships, who often ask competence questions that are easier to answer if you have your own notes from the lesson where it was covered. Class notebooks are stored separately from your OneDrive, and they vanish along with your account, so they need to come along when you download.

Photos of physical work. Whiteboard photos. Scanned sketchbooks. Workshop photos of physical models you built. These probably already live in your OneDrive (most school iPad/Surface workflows save to OneDrive automatically). Confirm they’re there before you leave.

Anything with a grade attached. Mocks, internal assessments, predicted-grade evidence. Useful for explaining a results-day surprise, useful for context in interview, useful for grade appeals.

Reading lists and bibliographies. A subtle one. The set of texts you engaged with deeply at A-level is a real signal — university tutors are checking whether you’ve read more than the syllabus. A clean bibliography you can show and talk about is worth its weight.

How to organise it for the person reading it

A portfolio reader has thirty seconds before they decide whether to keep going. Optimise for the thirty-second skim.

One folder per subject. One sub-folder per piece. Not chronological dumps. The reader wants to find your A-level Physics NEA fast, not page through Year 7 first.

Lead with the strongest piece in each subject. A 00_Headline_NEA_Final.pdf at the top of A-level_Physics/ makes the reader’s job easy. Number-prefix names work better than date-prefix names because the reader doesn’t care when you wrote it.

Caption everything. A 200-word _README.md in each subject folder, explaining what each file is and why it’s in there, is the difference between a portfolio that gets read and a portfolio that gets glanced at. Yes, even at apprenticeship level — assessors love it.

Convert anything weird. If you have .pub (Publisher) or .accdb (Access) files in there, convert them to PDF and CSV respectively before sending. Don’t make the assessor install software to read your portfolio. The Microsoft 365 file types guide lists which formats are likely to give an assessor friction.

Strip Information Rights Management. Some files in school accounts are protected by IRM and won’t open after your account closes. Those need to be opened now and saved as PDFs. If you send a portfolio with locked files, the assessor sees a permission error and not your work. They won’t email you back to ask.

A two-week assembly plan

If you’re reading this in May/June with results in August, you have time. Here’s the plan:

Week 1 — extract and organise. Sign in to mydocs.school (or use the manual OneDrive web download if your school isn’t on yet) and pull your full archive. Unzip it. Spend an evening sorting it into the per-subject / per-piece structure described above.

Week 2 — caption and convert. Write the per-subject READMEs. Convert any weird formats to PDF. Open each file you intend to include and confirm it actually opens on your personal laptop. This is also when you spot the IRM-locked files, so go back to your school account while you still have it and save unlocked copies.

Standing order: refresh per application. When an application comes in, copy the relevant subjects into a new folder named after the application, prune to the strongest 5–10 pieces, write a 100-word covering note specific to the application. Submit that — not the raw archive.

What about web portfolios

If your subject calls for one (Art, Architecture, Design Technology, Computer Science, music production), the easiest stack is:

• GitHub Pages — free, matches the convention assessors expect for tech-leaning applications, gives you a clean URL.
• A static-site generator like Jekyll, Eleventy or Astro — minimal moving parts, easy to keep edited as you produce more work.
• A subdomain on a custom name — your-name.com is a rounded thing to put at the top of a CV.

Don’t overbuild. The web portfolio exists to show specific pieces from your raw archive in context. The pieces themselves do the work.

What you’ll wish you’d kept

The thing alumni email back about, more than anything: their best class notes. The notebook from Year 12 Physics where the teacher worked through past-paper questions in the margin. The Maths exam-prep notes the class made together. These are not files you can recreate — they’re the residue of being in a particular classroom with a particular teacher. They live in OneNote class notebooks, which need the class-notebook download path to come along when you leave.

If you’re doing nothing else this week, do the class notebook download. That one is irreversible if you miss it.

Tooling and credit

The download flow for OneDrive plus personal and class OneNote scoped to your own section group is what mydocs.school does. You sign in with your school Microsoft account, click Download all, and walk away with one zip. If your school isn’t on yet, forward IT to /onboard — it takes about thirty seconds for them to add your tenant, and the first month is free.

Then do the two-week plan. Future-you will be grateful.