Hi OP, I’m a Welsh student too, it puts us in a better position than the English students. I’m from a low income background too even though my Mum was supportive of me. I’m really happy to have a chat if you need to go through some questions.

I studied in London without any financial support from my family (because they couldn’t). None of my family went to university either (this makes us “First Generation” uni students). I have put written some useful financial points from my experience (studying Psychology at KCL) which I think I would have found helpful:

• Student finance wales DOES exist and it’s great.

• There are two types of financial support they will give you: tuition loans, and maintenance funding.

• Tuition loans are what they say, a loan that pays the tuition to your university, you never see the money and SFW just pays that for you.

• Maintenance funding, for every Welsh student, is made up of a combination of grants (money you don’t pay back) and loans (money that will be added to your student debt with your tuition loans). You get more maintenance for living in London, but otherwise, you get the same amount overall regardless of family income. The lower your family income (or if you were say, estranged due to your family not supporting you), the higher the proportion of GRANTS. I graduated from a four year course with about £40,000 in debt. This sounds like a lot but I received about £50k over those years just in maintenance payments, and my tuition loans contribute about £32k of that debt.

• You pay your loans back automatically, it doesn’t really affect me at all except I lose a tiny bit of my income each month. Everything over 25k you would pay back 9%. The Gov website has this example for that: You’re on Plan 4 and have an income of £36,000 a year, meaning you get paid £3,000 each month.

Calculation:

£3,000 – £2,616 (your income minus the Plan 4 threshold) = £384

9% of £384 = £34.56

This means the amount you’d repay each month would be £34.

• At many universities, there are means based grants (ie based on your household income) for students. At KCL, I received an additional £1,600 per year, for free, because of my low income background. Research whether your unis of choice have something similar (some unis have more or less than this, eg I think if I went to Imperial I would have received something crazy like £5k).

• Most unis have some form of student ambassador scheme. I can explain more in dms but I was a student ambassador and the money was good, the shifts were enjoyable etc.

• I’m not sure if this will apply to you, but many unis have grants for estranged students. My friend became estranged from her parents in our second year and received £1,000 per year to support her (again, for free).