Undergraduate-rate student finance for pre-registration postgraduate (MSc/PGDip) courses

What it is

This is the single most misunderstood point in AHP student funding. If you take a designated pre-registration postgraduate healthcare course in England, you are funded through the undergraduate student finance system, not the Postgraduate Master's Loan, even though the award is an MSc or PGDip. That means a tuition fee loan and a maintenance loan at undergraduate rates, plus eligibility for the NHS Learning Support Fund, rather than a single combined Master's loan.

The elements below are separate awards under one scheme, and they are conditional in different ways. Some are flat payments made to everyone on an eligible course; some are assessed against household income; some reimburse costs you have already incurred and are worth nothing to you unless you incur them. Reading the scheme as a single headline figure is the mistake that leads people to budget for money they will never see.

Adding every element that carries a published figure gives £23,925 per academic year . Treat that as a ceiling rather than an expectation: it is what the scheme pays somebody who satisfies every condition attached to every element at once, which very few students do. The arithmetic is set out line by line below so you can strike out the elements that do not apply to you.

This is arithmetic on the scheme’s own published figures, and nothing else. Elements published on the same basis — here, per academic year — are added together. Where the scheme publishes more than one rate for the same payment, only the highest is counted, because you can only receive one of them. Elements published on a different basis are listed separately below and not added, because adding a per-claim reimbursement to an annual grant would produce a number that means nothing.

A total appears only where every element in the group carries a published figure. If one does not, the components that exist are still shown and the total is left uncomputed. That is the honest position: an incomplete sum presented as a total is worse than no total at all, because you would budget against it.

GOV.UK states plainly that you cannot get a Postgraduate Master's Loan if you are starting a full-time postgraduate pre-registration healthcare course on or after 1 August 2018. Instead you get the standard undergraduate package - a Tuition Fee Loan plus a Maintenance Loan at undergraduate rates - and you can claim the NHS Learning Support Fund on top, which Master's Loan students cannot. Having a previous degree does not disqualify you, provided you are not already registered in the profession you are training for.

This is the part applicants most often get wrong, and getting it wrong is expensive: apply for the wrong student finance product and you can end up with less money, no entitlement to the scheme on this page, and a course already under way. Check which product your specific course is designated for with the university before you submit anything, because designation is set course by course rather than by the award name.