Leicester Medical School is a large, patient-focused medical school in the East Midlands, known for teaching anatomy through full body dissection and for its clinical partnerships across the region. Leicester is ranked 6th in the UK for Medicine in the Complete University Guide 2027 (up from 12th in 2026), and 10th out of 40 in the Guardian University Guide 2027, where 94% of students said they were satisfied with their teaching.
Leicester Medical School offers a patient-focused, integrated curriculum, with early patient contact. The programme includes a range of active learning opportunities, working within a small group for practical cadaveric dissection sessions and practical skills sessions.
You'll undertake clinical attachments in each year of the course; during Phase 1 – Year 1 and Year 2 – these will be in the form of 'early clinical attachments'. Alongside this, Phase 1 covers the integrated teaching of molecular and cellular science and systems of the body, infection, pharmacology and therapeutics, and the social, behavioural and population sciences.
During Phase 2 – Years 3–5 – you’ll undertake the following clinical placements:
Throughout both phases, your learning is tied together by longitudinal themes including empathic patient-centred care; equality, diversity and inclusion; clinical reasoning; patient safety and quality improvement; and inter-professional team working. You’ll be assessed through written papers and Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) that build towards readiness to practise as a Foundation doctor.
Leicester is one of the few UK medical schools still teaching anatomy through full body dissection on cadavers, in a dissecting room equipped with Apple TVs and video recording facilities. You’ll also learn in the £42 million George Davies Centre and in the Clinical Skills Unit, which houses mock hospital wards and ICU units with interactive manikins (iStan® and SimMan®), plus actors employed as patients.
You’ll find a full breakdown of the curriculum here.
From Phase 2 onwards you’ll be based full-time in hospital, general practice and community placements. Leicester offers a wide range of placements across the region, including Leicester’s big city hospitals and district centres across the Midlands, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, so you’ll see everything from large tertiary centres to smaller district general hospitals.
The medical school highlights its partnerships with “outstanding clinicians at leading medical centres”, including Leicester’s Glenfield Hospital, which has a world-renowned reputation for cardiac and respiratory health.
Those partnerships also shape where graduates end up: the university reported that around 41% of its 2026 medical graduates took up posts in Leicester, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Rutland.
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During ‘Phase 2’ you’ll undertake student selected components, which will give you the opportunity to explore an area of clinical or non-clinical medicine that is of interest to you. There’s an SSC in Year 3 to support your career aspirations and professional development, with further SSC opportunities in Year 5.
In your final year, you’ll also have the opportunity to undertake an elective, exploring any branch of medicine of your choice, either within the UK or abroad.
In addition to this, Leicester Medical School also provides the opportunity to study an optional intercalated degree, giving you the option to pause your MBChB course for one year to study for an additional degree. Options include an iBSc in Psychology, an iMSc in Medical Research, an iMSc in Clinical Education and an iLLM in Health Law; you can find out more about their intercalated degrees here.
Away from the curriculum, students at Leicester Medical School get free membership of the Leicester Medical Society, founded in 1800 and one of the oldest medical societies in the country, which runs a programme of lectures open to students and doctors of all specialities.
Leicester offers Medicine with Foundation Year, which provides applicants who do not meet the entry requirements for the course an alternative route. Successful completion of the Foundation Year allows you to progress on to the standard five-year MBChB programme. You can find more information about this option here.
Other selling points you could mention at interview include:
The typical entry requirements for 2027 entry are:
You must be 18 years old by 1 September of your year of entry, because you’ll have patient contact from Semester 1. A single Level 3 BTEC Subsidiary Diploma or National Award is considered at Distinction* alongside A Levels at A*A in the required subjects, and the Access to HE Diploma (Medicine) is considered for mature applicants (22 or over at registration) with 45 graded Level 3 credits at distinction and five years’ paid employment, including at least a year in a caring role. Leicester doesn’t set a minimum work experience requirement – it’s more interested in what you’ve learnt from your experiences. International places are capped: for 2026 entry there were 293 A100 places, of which 18 were for overseas fee-paying students. You can check the full details on the course entry requirements page, and compare schools using our guide to medicine entry requirements.
Widening access: Leicester makes contextual offers of AAA to applicants who have completed the Realising Opportunities Programme, Access Leicester: Medicine or a recognised Sutton Trust Pathways to Medicine programme, and to applicants from an IMD quintile 1 area who also receive the UCAT or 16-19 bursary, have had free school meals for over six months, or have spent three months or more in local authority care. Realising Opportunities and Sutton Trust completers are guaranteed an interview if they meet the minimum GCSE requirements at first sit, are predicted or have achieved at least AAA without resits, and have a UCAT score in the top 7 deciles with an SJT band of 1–3. For 2027 entry only, applicants in their first gap year who completed a UKWPMED programme in 2025–26 are guaranteed an interview on ABB, on the same UCAT terms. If you’re in the borderline group after scoring, contextual markers – such as a UCAT bursary, free school meals, time in care, being a carer, refugee status or attending a lower-attaining school – can work in your favour.
Leicester Medical School uses the Multiple Mini Interview (MMI) format for its interview, combined with a numeracy test. The whole thing lasts about an hour and consists of 7 stations of around 10 minutes each, one of which is the numeracy station – this is mostly mental arithmetic, needs no calculator or medical knowledge, and has its own pass mark.
Home applicants are interviewed face to face at the George Davies Centre in Leicester, where you’ll also get a campus tour with a current student; international applicants are interviewed online using Blackboard Collaborate. Interview invitations are sent by email in batches from late November, so check your junk folder.
The MMI stations are aimed to assess a wide variety of areas, such as:
Each station is scored and you’re ranked on your total score; where applicants are equally ranked, other aspects of your application may be used as a tie-breaker. Offers are made from February onwards and can continue until mid-May, with offer holder days in March and April.
For 2027 entry, interviews run in December 2026 and January 2027 for home applicants, with international applicants interviewed online in February 2027. You can find more information about Leicester’s MMI and an extensive list of what is assessed here.
For most UK medical schools you’ll be required to pass an admissions exam before you’ll be selected for interview.
Admissions exam for Leicester: University Clinical Aptitude Test (UCAT)
The UCAT assesses your skills, characteristics and professional behaviours against those required for medical school, and doesn’t contain any curriculum or science content. The exam is separated into 4 sections: Verbal Reasoning, Decision Making, Quantitative Reasoning and Situational Judgement (SJT). Abstract Reasoning has been removed from the test.
For 2027 entry, the UCAT is being held between 13 July and 24 September 2026.
Leicester uses your UCAT score alongside your academic record to score and rank you in comparison to other candidates to determine if you’ll be selected for interview, with the UCAT worth 50% of the pre-interview score. If you apply with predicted A Levels your academic score comes from eight GCSEs (out of 48 points); graduates are scored on three A Levels plus their degree. Your total UCAT score is converted into up to 48 points – for 2026 entry, above 2400 scored the maximum 48 points, with points falling in 50-point bands below that – and candidates in the bottom two UCAT deciles are not considered. Leicester also specifies that you must achieve a minimum of band 3 in the SJT, as applicants with SJT band 4 are automatically rejected pre-interview. Therefore, it’s essential that you perform well in the SJT section and achieve a competitive total UCAT score.
There’s no fixed cut-off, but Leicester publishes the scores that guaranteed an interview each year. For 2026 entry, it received 2,622 A100 applications and interviewed 1,638 applicants for 293 places:
| Applicant group | Minimum combined score to be guaranteed an interview (out of 96) |
|---|---|
| Home, predicted A Levels | 79 |
| Home, achieved A Levels | 86, or automatic invite if in the top 5 UCAT deciles and requirements met at first sit |
| Home, graduates | 68 predicted / 70 achieved |
| International, predicted A Levels | 88 |
| International, achieved A Levels | Automatic invite if in the top 3 UCAT deciles and requirements met at first sit |
| International, graduates | 79 predicted / 82 achieved |
Source: A100 and A199 admissions statistics, 2026 entry.
Our adaptive UCAT question bank will help you to prepare effectively with questions personalised to your learning needs. Using artificial intelligence, our algorithm automatically assesses your strengths and weaknesses, and ensures that you’re focusing on the areas which you need to develop to improve your UCAT score.
The question bank dashboard (below) also makes it easy for you to see how you’re performing in each of the sections with your calculated skill level, response time and the number of questions you’ve answered correctly.
If you’re applying to Leicester and need to achieve a minimum band 3 in SJT, you can see at a glance if you’re meeting this requirement, or if you need to dedicate more time to it. Likewise, you can see any area in which you’re not performing as well, which could potentially pull down your total UCAT score, which is also used by Leicester for interview selection.
For more information about the UCAT, including UCAT dates and fees, scoring and decile ranking, visit our UCAT page.
You can also see how other medical schools use the test in our guide to UCAT universities.
Tuition fees for 2027/28 haven’t been confirmed yet. The fees for students who started in 2026/27 were:
If you’re resident outside the UK and the Republic of Ireland you’ll also need to pay a deposit to secure your place. Check the tuition fees page for the latest information.
Good luck with your application to Leicester Medical School! For more help, take a look at our guides to applying to medical school and the best medical schools in the UK.
