Changing from English to Welsh Student Finance advice please

TamsinC

So, we are in the recess of buying a house in Wales - should complete in a month or so (fingers crossed). Both my son and daughter are due to start uni in September. At the moment we live in England and the deadline for applications for student finance is tomorrow so they are obviously applying. When we move to Wales they will come under Welsh Student Finance and their cut off date is the first week of May.

Has any one had any experience of changing from the English to Welsh system? Is it easy? When we decided to buy the house we had no idea about the differences in the two systems.

sheramber

I would suggest you phone the Welsh Student Finance for advice

TamsinC

I did that first - they were next to useless - every fact out of the guys mouth was then turned around in the next sentence.

Starrystarrynight1

Try again. You should get a different operator. Only SFW can tell you if your children will be accepted by them.

sheramber

Try asking on the facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/SFWales/

tyllwyd

When you say that the deadline for the English student finance is tomorrow that's not completely accurate - it's the deadline for them to guarantee that the money will be available on time in September. My daughter went to uni through clearing in September 2017 but we hadn't applied for finance because she had originally planned a gap year. We ended up applying at the start of September, which I guess was probably after the rush because the loan only took a week or two to be approved (we didn't bother with proving parental income, which made things simpler). My understanding is that you have about nine months after the start of the course to apply for a loan.

It depends on your financial circumstances and whether you can cover accommodation fees etc if the loan is late, but if so, it won't be a disaster if you delay applying until your house move has gone through.

Taiko

If they'd already started, I would have said they'd stay with SFE. As it is though, I think they'd be considered ordinarily resident in Wales, so should be under SFW. It's a bit of a grey area, but there are probably more benefits to the students that way. I'm a bit out of the loop on SFW though.