@ofteninaspin There was a very long thread last year on Durham and one of the staff at Durham did explain in brief the process.
There was an excellent post from Phphion ** see below which basically explained that Uni's tend to look at applications in a certain order and I think the DD getting the super offer yesterday was on the Uniq scheme which probably means she would receive an early reduced offer of up to two grades below the standard offer. Durham has then offered a further reduced offer if firmed because they feel she ticks a few more boxes.
**I don't know how my colleague is organising things this year, but based on previous experience the order we work through applications is something like: Decisions on 1) applicants coming through special programmes, 2) applicants we need to interview, 3) applicants to be considered for contextual offers based on formal criteria, 4) applicants flagged as being from target groups but who are not under consideration for contextual offers, (3/4 applicants for joint courses that are moving quicker than us), 5) applicants who are definitely not going to be accepted for our main degree but whose profile could make them suitable for our less popular degree, 6) definite rejections, 7) all others.
Even though the 'all others' group are the biggest group, being essentially comprised of good students from good schools, making decisions about the applicants in groups 1 to 5 takes up more time because we have to be very careful and very sure that they will be able to cope with the demands of the course.
Applicants from the 'all other' group ultimately receive around 70% of our offers and, aside from the special programmes group, they have the highest chance of receiving an offer. Sometimes we might skip ahead and make some offers to people from the 'all other' group, in part to get an idea of our likely acceptance rate, but a lot of our offers to people in that group come at the end of the cycle.