 Hello and a virtual welcome to SOAS. My name is John Hitchman and I'm the Student Advice Service Manager. The Student Advice Service provides advice of all the non-academic issues you might need help with before you come to SOAS, including immigration, accommodation and finance. So today we're talking all about student finance and the funding you might be able to get for your SOAS program, undergrad program starting in September 2022. So first of all we're going to have start with a bit of a quiz, a bit of a rhetorical one because it's just me here recording this so I'll give you the answers but the idea here is really to get you thinking about how much things cost, a little bit of budgeting and financial preparation before you come to university. So firstly there's a textbook, how much does that cost? Well if you buy a new, it's going to cost you £42. If you buy it at second hand on eBay it's going to cost £8.99. So kind of obvious but worth thinking about, you don't have to buy your books new, students have often used these books in the past and you can get them much cheaper online. So a packet of instant noodles, hopefully you don't have to eat these all the time but occasionally this is the kind of thing students may eat and again there's always going to be a variation in price. So if you go for the Ask the Smart price noodle that's going to cost you 14p but the more heavily branded super noodle is going to cost you 59p. So onto some more student related costs or student specific costs at SOAS. So how much do you think a zone one and two travel card would cost though? That would be something a lot of our students would use to get into university. So it's £37 for a week or £142.10 for a month but that's the standard adult rate. So actually as a student at SOAS you can get this travel for £25.80 per week or £99.10 per month and that's because you can apply for a 30% off 18 plus oyster card from Transport for London once you're enrolled and registered as a student at SOAS. So how about a pair of vans, whoops pressed the button too quickly for that. If you buy these in John Lewis they're going to cost you £50 and interestingly if you buy them from the Vans website they're actually going to be cheaper. So again we're always looking to shop around, get you the cheapest prices and really save money on the things that you can save money on. Some of your costs are fixed and one of the fixed costs is rent. So how much do you think halls will cost? So that's a picture of some halls that are very very close to SOAS maybe a five minute walk away but we have halls available all over London and we know we've done the commuting distance of SOAS. So there's a huge range there and it really depends how close you want to live to the campus but also of course all your budget is and the level of luxury that you want. You know if you want something if you have to live in amongst other students and that might be quite a nice experience then you can start off with one of our cheaper halls for £150 a week. So what sort of financial help can you get while you're studying at SOAS as an undergrad? So that's what we're going to be talking about the kind of bulk of this talk. So we're going to go into detail about the tuition fee loan and then support that you could get to help you with your living costs and additional types of support you may qualify for as a student perhaps other students with disabilities or student to parents who have other extra needs there's other support student finance can offer and then I'm going to tell you a little bit about the application process how and when to apply a little bit about the repayment of student loans and also some other tips at the end. So the tuition fee loan to give news about studying in higher education in the UK if you qualify is that you don't need to find the money for your fees up front you can take out a loan from student finance in England and that loan for your fees tuition fee loan that doesn't depend on your household income. So the fees for 22, 2023 are going to be 9,250 and you can apply for a loan to cover that full cost and you can apply for a loan for each year of your program and you should qualify for that each year. There are very very specific reasons why you might not and we'll cover those later but for most people if you've never been to university before you can qualify for a tuition fee loan for each year of your program at service and then you only pay back that tuition fee loan or any other loans that you take once you've graduated and once you start earning a certain amount of money as well which we'll cover in detail later on. Okay so click on to that slide. So living cost support so the maintenance loan for the academic year 2022, 23 and now some of this is based on household income so a proportion of this is how it is based on parental income so if you're under 25 your household income is the income of your parents and the maximum loan you can get based on their income is up to £12,667 per academic year and that's available to you if you live away from home. Okay now if you're maybe living in London and able to stay and carry on living with your parents which is in a lot of ways a great thing because you can save a lot of money that way then the amount of loan that you get is is unsurprisingly a little bit less so £8,171. Now proportional some of that amount some of both of those amounts is based on household income so if your parents income is a little higher you may get slightly less than those figures and then there's additional support as well on top of the maintenance loan for these other living cost supports so we have so as bursaries which is a standard thing we've been offering at service for some time so for 2022 2023 we have the bursary which is aimed at students from lower income households so the service bursary will provide £1,500 for each year of study unless you're going on a year abroad language year abroad but every other year of study is covered and that will be based on you receiving the maximum amount of that maintenance loan so that means you have a household income of £25,000 or less if you have a look at our web page there you can find out a little bit more about the bursary but to qualify for that when you start for your program you have to make sure that you've completed your means test and applied for student finance and it's all been agreed but we'll talk about that a little bit later on and then if you find out you've accessed all the funding that you're entitled to you've got your your maintenance loan and maybe a bursary if you qualify for one but you're still struggling a bit or you've budgeted for the year and you're finding that you're having problems then we have some hardship funds that are administered by my team and these are the ones that are probably most relevant the access to learning fund and a fund called the additional study support fund and these are both aimed to help students just as a bit of a safety net really if you have any financial issues while you're studying it's quite straightforward to apply for these it's a very simple online form that you complete and provide some supporting documents but hopefully you won't need to do that if you get all the funding in a title too and then there's additional support as I mentioned briefly for students with a disability there's something called disabled students allowance and we just we love acronyms at university so we refer to it as DSA and DSA is a grant to help you meet the extra costs that you may have as a disabled students so they just make studying make it that you can study on a more equal basis with with other students and anything you receive from DSA doesn't have to be repaid and the amount you get isn't based on household income it's really based specifically on the amount of extra support you will need in place and DSA can be used for a number of different things so specialist equipment that you might need like computer software perhaps to help you or even one-to-one support like studying skills tutoring or perhaps mentoring or maybe you have mobility issues and you need some help with travel costs and DSA can cover that sort of thing as well and then even things like photocopying and printing if you need those and they're related to your disability or specific learning difference DSA can help you with that so the SSA disability team will be able to provide you with more support about about DSA and you can find their details through our website now perhaps you're a European student coming to study at SSA so you'll be aware that as the UK's left the European Union the rules are a little bit more complicated but I'm going to run through them briefly here so if you're a European student and you have a status under the EU settlement scheme then you can qualify for support from student finance so to meet the requirements there it's fairly fairly complex but essentially you have settled status okay if you have settled status and that's been granted before you start programmed and the key date for all of these qualifying factors with higher education is the 1st of September of the year that you start so you're starting in September 2022 obviously from the 1st of September you have settled status and you're ordinarily resident in England so you live here and you've been here for the three years prior to the 1st of September and then if during that period you were here only for educational purposes if prior to that you had three years residence or prior to that you were resident in Gibraltar the EEA or Switzerland then you will qualify for tuition free loan and a maintenance loan okay so as I said in the recording you can you can read this back and just check the requirements there but essentially if you have settled status and you meet those requirements you can get the tuition free loan and the maintenance loan in a similar way to a UK national student now if you have pre-settled status under the EU settlement scheme the requirements are are similar so you're an E-National on the 1st of September 2022 you have pre-settled status by that date and you've been ordinarily resident in the UK EEA Switzerland or Gibraltar for the three year period leading up to the 1st of September 2022 and that residence was not wholly or mainly for the purpose of education and if that's the case then you should qualify for a tuition free loan okay so again please please pause the slide and reread that there's quite a lot of information there and then finally if you have pre-settled status under the EU settlement scheme and and you're an EU or Swiss national with pre-settled status and you qualify for the tuition free loan as in the previous slide and you're ordinarily resident in England on the 1st of September 2022 then you might also qualify for a maintenance loan if you are or you're the relevant family member of a worker in the UK so if it's based on your work you'll need to show student finance that evidence that you are employed and your worker status will allow you to get a maintenance loan as well as the tuition fee loan likewise if it's a family member you need to provide evidence to your family member is employed that could be things like p60s pay slips etc okay so moving on as I said at the start there's generally everybody's going to qualify for student finance but the only thing that might cause an issue is if you have studied higher education in the past so if you've already got higher education qualification that might be a problem or even if you've got previous years studying things like a BA, a BSC, perhaps an FDA foundation degree or an HND but there's things that aren't going to affect your entitlement which you may have studied so your A levels or foundation diploma or an access to HE diploma, GMVQs, ABC diplomas any of those kind of further education qualifications are fine but it's just degree level, previous degree level qualifications may impact your entitlement to funding but there may actually be ways that you could get applied for funding even if you do have some previous study as well so you could definitely look into that and and I'll give you details for you can contact us for advice if you need advice about that after this presentation so applying for student finance is really straightforward you just apply online there's there's a web link there unfortunately it's not it's not an active link so you're going to have to just google that but it's very simple to do you can register and then provide all your personal course information you can find the course titles that we have they're kind of generic titles you should get that from UCASP when when you've applied for your course but you can also find them on the server's website and it's very very simple to confirm your identity you just have to give SFE your UK passport number and your parents or partners national insurance number so if you're over 25 and you're cohabiting or living like you're married you'll need to provide evidence of your partner's income but yeah just providing the NI number to student finance is all you need to do normally so it's very very straightforward to provide that sort of detail and confirm your income and your identity and applications of student finance normally open around about February or March so look out for those but you can have a look at the website now just keep check your back until it's open so what about repayment of student loans well you become eligible to repay the loan in the April after you you leave or graduate from university and so before then you don't have to think about repaying it and and the good news is that repayments have automatically taken from your salary with your tax so essentially it's a sort of deducted thing that will come out of your your payslip before you before you see you don't have to arrange to pay it directly to student finance or the student loans company and so essentially it's added on like another tax and you don't start repaying anything until you're earning over £27,294 per year okay and then that's it in a monthly amount that's £2,274 per month but you do need to keep repaying it if you work overseas and and you know from experience salary students because of the reasons that we study they do like to often go and work overseas so it is important that if you're going to be doing that after your degree you stay in contact with student finance you let them know where you're going and confirm your earning details to them and then you pay 9% of anything over £27,294 that you earned so the repayments are never going to be really really difficult to afford so that to give you an idea is the sort of amount that you will be paying so once you hit that threshold then if you're earning for instance £29,500 you'd be paying back about £16 a month, £31,000 you'd be paying back £27 a month so as you earn more the repayments will go up but they're never going to be really really difficult to manage. So just some brief tips as we sort of come towards the end of the presentation how to make your money last budgeting you know as I've tried to sort of get in a little bit at the start of the presentation is a really useful thing you can get apps such as Money Dashboard that will allow you to budget also some banks now give you banking apps that you can use that you can really keep a check on how much money you're spending you can put little pots of money aside you know so try and save money on a regular basis. We'd always advise students or really anybody if possible to avoid credit cards, store cards and especially payday loans with their huge interest rates and once you're a student as soon as you're involved make sure you get yourself an NUS card and the Union Days card and these will give you loads of huge discounts everywhere even on things like shopping at groceries at some shops and chemists and you know certainly you can get really cheap cinema tickets restaurants all sorts of things really heavily reduced especially with things like restaurants if you're happy to go on a Monday which students you know often a bit more flexible about the days of the week they can go out then you could be saving like 20 30 40 percent really really good savings for because of your student status and then as mentioned in the presentation make sure you get yourself that student 18 plus oyster card if you're studying full-time and that's going to give you that 33 discount of traveling in London as well. So when should you apply so you can apply as soon as applications open in 2022 check the degree title on the service website as I mentioned and you don't need to have a firm place at so as you may just have so as to do first option but your your your place hasn't been confirmed you can still apply for student finance and put so as as your your destination university and then if you did end up going somewhere else you could always change this later with student finances quite easy to do so if you have any queries email us on advice so as to the UK and then I think this final slide is kind of a bit of a duplication of that so yeah please if you have any queries once you want to you know feel free to really watch this presentation especially if you need more complex details but I hope it's been useful I hope you find this up this online open day really useful as well and we look forward to seeing you so as in September thank you very much