I’ve looked online and found an old thread but wanted to post if anyone has any up-to-date experience regarding UK postgraduate loans for Masters courses after returning from living and working in Japan.
The loan eligibility says you need to have lived in the UK for the three years before the start of your course.
Has anyone started a masters program soon after finishing JET/living and working in Japan and successfully gotten the loan?
Did you have to submit documents to show that your time in Japan was only temporary? Like bank statements, visas and so on.
I plan to apply for a Masters course soon but the postgraduate loan application doesn’t open until May/June.
Thanks in advance to anyone who has any knowledge or experience of this
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I did and had to submit some documents iirc, I had some bank statements which had my UK address on them and they were fine with it. It was a bit of a pain to sort out but you should definitely be eligible for it.
I am on JET this year and returning to do a masters so I looked into this a lot. Interested to see what other people say.
I’ve found various information online about it. They seem to class either a gap year or working abroad ‘temporarily’ as not causing a break in your ordinary residence… but supposedly they do it case by case.
Evidence they may ask for seems to be documents with your UK address, like bank statements. A copy of your work contract that states the dates. I live in BOE housing and they’ve given me a contract to say it is temporary housing. Copy of your return flight details to show you came back before 1st September. I’ve also read about showing ‘ties to the UK’ so I have email copies of contact with my work and volunteering that I do in the uk that I stopped and will carry on with when I back. I looked on the student room website and there seemed to be various advice on there from the Student finance advisor people.
There’s a copy of the student loans guidance to themselves and in it it lists temporary work abroad and gap years as being fine. There’s also another website or two I found where they talk about ordinary residence and various case studies. I had to search quite a lot to find them but the info is there.
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I had to provide a copy of my JET contract (which showed I was only employed on a ‘temporary’ basis.) I also had to request my BOE to provide a statement to confirm that I was only employed on a rolling 1 year contract, to a *maximum* of 5 years.
Once SLC were able to confirm that everything to do with me working abroad was temporary, they were able to process my application in full.
I had to call a couple of times to find someone who was willing to jump through the hoops with me, though – I don’t think it’s a situation which comes up often, so I had a couple of call centre representatives just decline my application out of hand to begin with. It all worked out okay in the end!