Apatites are a large group of chemically and structurally flexible functional materials with important applications as solid electrolytes. The majority of known apatite materials are hexagonal, while others adopt related monoclinic or triclinic structures.The true symmetry is very important for apatite solid electrolytes: symmetry lowering results in defect trapping and decreased conductivity. Understanding what drives symmetry lowering will therefore help guide the chemical optimisation of these promising materials. Symmetry distortion mode refinements, which have not been reported for apatite-type materials to-date, together with local structure determination, will provide this insight.We request 3 days of POLARIS beam time for neutron total scattering experiments on a series of apatite materials, which adopt triclinic, hexagonal and monoclinic structures.