You can usually only get full financial support from Student Finance England for their first undergraduate higher-education qualification, even if your previous course was self-funded. You may be entitled to the maintenance loan but not the tuition fee loan.

However, full financial support is available for students who already hold a degree but will be starting an Initial Teacher Training course, not exceeding two years and don’t hold qualified teacher status.

You may be entitled to an additional year of tuition fee support from by applying for Compelling Personal Reason with Student Finance England if you were unable to progress to the next year of your course or had to leave due to personal reasons. The most common reasons being:

• mental health
• illness
• bereavement
• pregnancy
• a caring responsibility

Please contact Student Finance England on 0300 100 0607 to discuss this directly. Please note, if your application is rejected for compelling personal reasons you will be required to self-fund your course.

The College has a limited amount of grant funding available to assist students who have exhausted all their means of funding and are in financial difficulty. Please enquire with the HE Student Finance team for grant funding applications and eligibility criteria. Further details can be found in the College’s Money to help you study guide.

The College completes an upload every working day to confirm registration and attendance with Student Finance England. If you have done all that is required (refer to the question above), you will be automatically confirmed. You will not have been included in the upload if:

You are not registered on a current course code.

Your personal details differ between your Student Finance account and the College system i.e. spelling of your name.

Most things can be updated with Student Finance England by the College. Please contact HE Student Finance and the team will submit and electronic ‘Change of Circumstance’ on your behalf to Student Finance England. If you need to do anything to get the changes done we will contact you.

Students that are ‘defer’ are not entitled to their Student Finance funding as you would not be officially registered/enrolled for the academic year and are exam only with no tuition fees attached.

Only under exceptional circumstances and under our discretion we would look at confirming your registration to release the maintenance loan, i.e. you are on placement which is over 60 days.

There can be a number of reasons why maintenance payments are delayed. Please ensure that you have done all of the following:

• Applied to Student Finance England for this academic year.
• Received an approval letter from Student Finance England detailing the amounts you are entitled to for this academic year.
• Officially register on a course with the College.
• Your personal details such as the spelling of your name are the same on your Student Finance account as they are on the College system.

If you have completed all of the above steps please allow at least 10 working days from when you registered on your course and if your money has not been received please contact HE Student Finance for your account to be investigated.