 Hi, my name is John Hitchman, I'm the Student Advice Service Manager and this is introducing the SOAS Student Advice Service. So introducing my team and what we do at SOAS. So the Student Advice Service is part of the Student Advice and Wellbeing team. That larger team also includes the Disability and Neurodiversity team that can provide support for students with health conditions or disabilities or anything like that that has an impact on your studies. You need some adjustments being made or some support there in place. My colleagues in the Wellbeing and Mental Health Support Team can help with any mental health related issues including those of the students who have issues when they start. There are studies or any issues that occurred during these studies and the Multiface Support Team can help students with any faith related issues or finding places of worship locally or any support activities. They also run a lot of things throughout the year to really try and engage students with what they're doing. They're fantastic. The Student Advice Service is us, we help with the really practical side of stuff. So really functional things to help you get on your program, stay on your program and I'll explain a bit more about those. So we have accommodation advice for you. Anything to do with your student housing. So where you're going to be living while you're studying. Immigration advice is predominantly to do visas but also about the conditions of your visa, that sort of thing. And then funding advice will be to do with support with any sort of funding or finance that you need while you're studying so as. And then we have some other areas of advice as well that I will cover shortly. So Jo Hogan, she's our Residential Operations Manager and Student Housing Advisor. It's a very long job title. It's very descriptive and she manages all our accommodation at SOAS and she can provide you with advice and information about finding the best property for you or the best place for you to live while you're studying at SOAS. She also allocates all those places to live and she works with our private partners so currently Sanctuary and Urban Nest but we're having some new partners in the new year that will be announced. We also have some halls that are part of the University of London's intercollegiate halls so they're all located quite locally to SOAS. And then if you're a student with a disability who needs to get some sort of special accommodation then Jo you can help you with that request as well. And then any sort of housing advice you might need during your stay. Jo can help you with that. And also if we sometimes have students who need emergency housing, if they become homeless or perhaps students who are estranged from their parents or at risk in some way. And Jo has a lot of experience in helping students in that situation and we work quite closely as a team to support students who may be facing some serious problems like that. And then if you need something very legal to do with your housing so for instance if you're moving into a private rented accommodation and you need your contract checking or some sort of legal advice the University of London housing services can provide that support for you and we will refer and work very closely with them as well. So as a student of SOAS you can access their legal advice as well. So the immigration advice is the rest of the team provide that. And we as I said this is mostly advice about visas. So the previous visa system that we had we did the tier four visas was replaced by the student visa system on the 5th of October 2020. We can provide advice about the old type of visas and the new ones as well as some people who are studying in the UK now will still have a tier four visa. So when you start your studies we can give you advice about your student visa conditions relating to work, police registration you may have to do that and other legal requirements of the visa as well. So anything the duration of the visa all sorts of other stuff. If there's any errors for instance the duration so if your visa isn't as long as it should be we can help you get that corrected and then we can provide support with visa applications. So if you're extending your your visa in the United Kingdom while you're studying we may be to offer you a one-to-one appointment but if perhaps you're going to be on a pre-sessional program then we'll do some sort of group sessions for you to help you make that visa application and help you check documents and we can also provide support for applications from family members who are known visa dependents. Now we get quite heavily involved with complex visa issues so sometimes you know very very unusually but sometimes people's visa applications are refused. If that happens we're able to help with that and and advise students about the potential for making I think or an administrative review where you challenged that refusal decision and then we can give advice about post-study work visas so I'm sure you're aware of you're an international student that the graduate route started in 2021 and that's carrying on in the future so that's a two or three year post-study work visa we can give you a lot of support with that we record webinars not for other sorts of sessions about graduate route and other post-study work visas and then other study related visas so sometimes for those coming on a short course or people needing to repeat little pieces of work they'll come and study on the standard visa to visa and there may be other visas relating to study that we can provide advice about. So the finance advice side I would say a bulk of this is to do with the the UK's student finance system so there's student finance available for undergraduates postgraduate tour and postgraduate research students and we can help you with the more complex side of those things so if you need to repeat a year of your studies perhaps then we can give you advice about your eligibility for funding maybe you need to take time out of your studies and again that could have an impact on your funding we can advise you there some people will be changing mode of study maybe from full time to part time or vice versa we can give you some advice about that and then EU students we can talk to you about your qualification for funding following Brexit and following that that sort of change of rules there and then as I've mentioned before we work quite closely with their strange students as students who maybe they start university and they live with their parents or they have a close relationship with their family and then they they lose that relationship they become quite disconnected for one reason or another and that has the student finance implication that we can support students with amongst the other kind of support we can offer those students and then student finance may make a decision that that you're not happy with that that we can argue with sometimes we can make an appeal if it's within student finance regulations so we can support you with those those things too so student hardship funds we have funds for all sorts of types of hardship but essentially students who've arrived at university and have budgeted their money have money in place but then something goes wrong then we have funding in place to help those students various different funds aimed at students from different groups we have some funding specifically for students from blowing on backgrounds kind of students who would also qualify for a bursary and then we have funding if we if we have students who are suddenly in a financial emergency we can help with that sort of thing as well and then welfare benefits we have a member of the team who has experience of advising students and their entitlement to benefits such as universal credit or for instance disability benefits so we can provide you that advice maybe before you start your course or during your program as well and then from time to time we offer money management courses so once a year we have national student money week which we like to try and run an event for and during welcome week but really anytime a student needs some assistance with things like budgeting how to manage their finances a bit better how to save money as well how to really reduce your expenditure because you know anything you can save money on you can spend that money doing something you enjoy more so there's a quick overview of the kind of funding that's available to home students so if you're a home student you'd be in charge of those different figures there i'm not going to read them all out but as you can see there's a loan for master's research and undergrad students and then there's a maintenance loan as well as a tuition fee loan for undergrads and there's the service bursary that i mentioned so if you've got a household income of below 25 000 pounds then you should automatically be qualifying for that 1500 pound bursary as long as you've been means tested by student finance so as long as your parents income has been provided to student finance and then on top of the loans there you can see that there's also some support for students who enter higher education and their parents at the child care grant there we can give you some support towards cost of child care there's a parent learning allowance for student parents maybe you have someone who's a dependent adult who you're supporting and there's funding though the adult dependents grant the disabled students allowance is something that disability neurodiversity team can help you with but that really provides funding for all those reasonable adjustments and to get support in place that you might need as a disabled student or somebody with an ongoing health issue while they study and then something that's really nice to find out about is the travel grant for the language year abroad so for students not not with a 25 000 pound cut up it's a little bit higher than that but from a lower income background you can get a lot of the costs of your year abroad covered so return flights to your university destination overseas and also the costs of visas and inoculations and other sort of travel related costs so we can give you advice about all of those things and then other areas of advice so these will be probably situations that would be less usual but you know we're here to help so if students find themselves homeless you know Joe can help them quite quickly get into accommodation but if students having trouble with funding and finance that's related to homelessness we can help with that as well then I've mentioned the strange students a little bit but you know if your relationship with your family suddenly breaks down and you realize you don't have somewhere to live or you realize you don't have money to live on then this is the kind of thing that we can help you with and then student parents and carers if you come to university and you're already a parent or you're caring for an adult you know you need a lot of support and you may need some support to manage your studies but also some support financially or at least make sure you're accessing all the funding you're entitled to so we can help you with that sort of things and then for disabled students we provide support to help with the specific learning difference assessment so that would be an assessment to see if somebody is perhaps dyslexic or dis-practic I'll say that properly and also some financial support towards laptops for those students so some of that support is uncovered by the disabled students allowance and then from time to time we get students coming to CRT have quite complex requirements I'd say particularly with immigration who need an external referral so we'll find the right direction to refer them into a professional external immigration advisor or or lawyer or barrister where we're relevant so that's really the end of the presentation so for accommodation you've got my colleague Jo Hogan and she's available on the accommodation at SOAS email address and then the rest of the team that do the funding and immigration advice is Catherine Smart, Carrie McMinn and Mae John Hichman and you can reach us on advice at soas.ac.uk so thanks very much for listening and we look forward to seeing you at SOAS