Student Finance For Dummies, UK Edition

Phil Davis

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781119075851
• eBook ISBN: 9781119075868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Vie étudiante

Your guide to financing a university education

Navigating the intricacies of financing a UK education can make even the most composed parents and students lose their cool. Luckily, Student Financing For Dummies helps take some of the pain out of the struggle and offers everything you need—in one place—to put a money management plan in place and finance a university education. Packed with accessible guidance from authors throughout the UK who work with students and policy experts, it provides unique, sound and detailed financial advice to help students and their families manage money while at school.

Taking the guesswork out of the student-finance process and saving you countless hours of searching on the Internet, this friendly, plain-English guide helps you navigate applying for student finance, student loans and grants, makes sense of subject-specific income like the NHS, Teacher Training and Social Work and more. And after the money is in place, you'll discover how to establish a financial plan to make sure the money lasts—from term to term and through the entire time at uni.

• Covers student finance in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
• Provides all the options for obtaining finance, loans and more
• Gives students and parents tips on which credit options to watch out for
• Offers expert advice on ongoing student finance support, managing income and expenditure and working during study

Take the worry out of financing your education and focus on your studies with the help of Student Finance For Dummies.

Part I

Wading into the Funding Pool

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In this part …

Build your understanding of the basic features of the student finance system: the loans you have to pay back and the grants you don’t!

Discover the basics of how to make an effective application for student finance, and what to do if it goes wrong.

Get an introduction to how student finance looks in different parts of the UK.

Get prepared for your studies by planning your finances and identifying sources of income.

Get acquainted with the other sources of funding that might help you in your studies.

Chapter 1

Who Needs Student Finance?

In This Chapter

Introducing student finance

Learning some useful jargon

Finding sources of student finance

‘Student finance’ is a term which covers a wide variety of funding schemes across the UK. Student finance differs across the four nations of the UK, and describes a number of different models of funding, including grants, loans, bursaries and scholarships. In addition to the various items of funding available, ‘student finance’ also covers the notion of financial capability – or how you can look after your money so that it can work for you (and not against your studies). This includes making strategies for budgeting and looking after the money that you have, as well as being careful to make informed choices about credit.

In this chapter, I provide an introduction to the various forms student finance can take, along with suggestions for the next chapters to read depending on your personal interest in finance.

Paying for Your Education and Making It Pay

Your higher education study is likely to give you a truly transformational experience, opening your horizons to opportunities for life-enriching experiences in terms of your academic, social and personal development. Higher education can also be an opportunity to develop your financial capability, and for many higher education students, time spent studying a degree is also time spent learning to manage personal finances for the very first time.

The time you begin to consider higher education study is also the ideal time for you to begin considering the practicalities of the financial side of studying, and to begin making preparations for it if at all possible.

You may not have had any previous contact with the world of student finance, particularly if you’re the first in your family to enter higher education, so finding out how you can manage your money is really important. You also need to understand how you can afford to pay for the experience of taking your education to the next level.

The UK government introduced the concept of students paying towards the cost of their tuition fees in 1998. Since then, government-subsidised loan schemes have been available to meet the cost of tuition fees. The loan scheme allows students to defer the cost of their education, not needing to repay until they have both finished their time in higher education and have entered into employment earning a sufficient level for the loan to be repaid.

These basic principles of the funding system remain in place today, and although some other aspects of the system have been ‘tweaked’, you can still enter your studies safe in the knowledge that you haven’t a thing to repay whilst you’re studying, and usually only need to make repayments once your personal taxable income has reached a required threshold.

Whilst tuition fee loans have been around since 2006 (prior to that tuition fee contribution grants had been in place since 1998), student loans for maintenance (living costs) were introduced back in 1990. Since then they have become an increasingly major part of the student finance package – and now you may even find a student loan is the sole source of student finance available to you (particularly if you’re ordinarily resident in England).

Being aware of the student finance available to you, understanding it and accessing it is only part of the story when it comes to making your finances work for you during your studies. You also need to develop your capability in terms of ensuring that you make the most of what money is available to you, avoiding unnecessary costs and realising as many economies as you can. Every little saving you can identify is the best means towards safeguarding your financial situation during your studies (read Chapters 15 and 16 for more tips on looking after your money once you have it). You should also seek to maximise the opportunities for securing funds to help make managing your situation far easier.

Building Your Funding Vocabulary

The UK student finance system has terminology you may not have encountered until you come to use it.

If you get a chance, start reading some online resources which describe the student finance system – particularly for courses that you’re interested in studying. The more you read, the sooner you become familiar with the various phrases and terms used. Check out the sidebar, ‘Speaking the lingo’, to get off to a flying start.

Speaking the lingo

Here’s a quick checklist of terms to get you started:

• Bursary: Usually this is an amount of money your course provider pays to you if you meet eligibility requirements. The amount you receive varies between course providers and often between types of course as well. You need to check your course provider’s access agreement (in England) or website for more details of what is available and how to apply. Some courses have statutory bursary schemes (which are usually non-repayable) available to them, such as NHS courses and courses for Initial Teacher Education.
• Grant: Grants may be available to you depending on your circumstances. They can assist with general living costs, costs associated with caring for a child (including childcare), costs associated with having someone else financially dependent upon you, and additional costs associated with study if you have a disability.
• Income-assessed: Several items of student finance depend upon your household income situation – generally speaking, you’re likely to be eligible to receive more student finance if your household income is lower. The lower income threshold for maximum financial support varies among the UK nations. An alternative phrase is ‘means-tested’, which is applied to NHS funding and sometimes to welfare benefits.
• Maintenance Loan: An amount available to you during your study in order to help your general costs whilst you study, such as course materials, accommodation, household and other living costs. You may be required to repay the loan in part or in full once you have finished your time in education and once you’re earning at a sufficient level from employment.
• Non income-assessed: This phrase is usually associated with tuition fee support and grants for students with a disability – both of which require basic criteria to be met in order for the financial support to be paid to you. The phrase also refers to the basic package of support available to students whose household income is too high to be considered for additional income-assessed finan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Wading into the Funding Pool
• Part II: Applying for Government (Statutory) Funds
• Part III: Government Funds for Specific Students
• Part IV: Finding Financing from Other (Non-Statutory) Sources
• Part V: Managing Money and Maximising Income at University
• Part VI: The Part of Tens
• About the Author
• Cheat Sheet
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement