DS has just firmed Manchester and insured Birmingham. At last!
@SouthCoastShell DS has just applied for accommodation at both. We trawled through their websites, found the accommodation types he preferred and applied online. Manchester allowed 5 preferences which they all weighted equally (unfortunately) whereas Birmingham allowed 6 preferences which he could rank 1-6. They both guarantee some uni accommodation for firm but don’t guarantee for insurance, but still worth applying as they don’t allocate until your application becomes unconditional. ie after results.
I know Southampton uni have lots of uni accommodation so it’s generally fine even if it’s your insurance. Southampton was DS’s 3rd favourite. My friend’s DS is at Portsmouth and is enjoying it there.
Student finance is fairly easy to apply for. If you know you won’t be eligible for more than the minimum maintenance loan of around £4000 you don’t need to supply your financial information. Not sure what the cut off is, but there’s a calculator on the website. Then there’s a sliding scale up to the maximum maintenance loan of nearly £9000 dependant on the household income. This includes all taxable income of the parents or if single/divorced the resident parent and any live in partner/spouse of the resident parent. Taxable means similar to filling in a tax return, salary from P60, taxable savings, dividends, taxable rental income etc. This is from last year’s tax year. So April 2018 - April 2019 for 2020 start.
Your child fills in their details with the SLC and gives your contact details as supporting their application. You then get emailed to register with SLC and have an online form to fill in. If you need to provide any supporting information by post they should email to ask, but IME it’s a good idea to check your log in from time to time in case they don’t email and some piece of required information is holding up the application.
I’ll check out some links.