Open uni.. advice please

[openunihelp]

I'm 26 and have no qualifications higher than GCSES. I work in research for the NHS part time whilst raising my kids. I'm at the highest band I can really get to without a degree, and am finding it difficult to find more senior roles and it keeps being mentioned in interviews (in and out of the nhs) that my downfall is competing with people who have degrees, or atleast a-levels.

I want to do a degree through the open uni, my heart says English literature and language but my head says business management or something more employable.

They also offer access courses, but it adds an extra year (ish) on to my studying and I'm not sure whether I should just go for it with the degree itself or if the access is beneficial? My fear is that I am in Wales, and the OU still costs £7000 here as opposed to £19000 in England, I'm worried if I do an access course for a year our costs could rise similarly to theirs?

Does anyone have any advice?

*write code

Thank you for your detailed reply @TractorAndHeadphones. I did learn some basic about a thousand years ago, and I can use html because essentially it's like using the early word processors. I managed a few teeny bits of SQL. However, I could not get my head around java at all, in any way. I've read up on R, and again I just can't grasp it.
My 10yo understands python and to him reading a page of it is simply like me reading a page of French- another language but one that makes sense with a little hard thinking.

BASIC... you're one of the originals, hats off to you ;)
It's quite normal to not grasp things on first reading. I plugged away at bits I understood, and one day it magically made sense. People say coding is logical but it also becomes 'unconscious' after a while - like when learning the alphabet, we don't spell out every single letter and can sense tone. The process I found similar to writing (I'm a good writer) rather than doing A-level mathematics in that there's a lot of intuition as well as logic, Some people get it quickly, some don't, some can do it up to certain degrees of complexity .

It does take a lot of effort though! R.e. my comment on OP not liking programming I didn't mean to say that she couldn't, but her post was mostly about needing a degree to progress and IT was a suggestion from her family, not her. Because 'women in tech are in demand', and OP hasn't done any programming on her own time, she just mentions writing. As she has already gotten decent jobs with only GCSE's she's already very capable. A career path in IT project management or similar would suit her perfectly and these people are even on the shortage occupation list. We need more people with all skills not just 'coding'. Software is 10% actual code and 90% deciding what to code, delivering it, getting people to use it etc. There's no need for her to start all over again.

Also as this isn't quite relevant I'll stop here. Feel free to DM me or start another thread if you want (there are quite a few on MN about this already as well)