Studying while you wait

Rights to study open up not by status but by how long you have waited. Enter the month when you made your asylum claim and we will work out what is available today and when the rest opens. Nothing is sent anywhere: the calculation happens in your browser.

The 6-month rule only concerns what the state pays for. Classes run by charities, churches and community centres work outside that system: they take you from day one and do not ask for an ARC. The level there is usually from zero to Entry 3 — exactly where you need to start.

Levels, exams and the road to IELTS in detail — in from zero English to IELTS. The list of providers — the ESOL database.

The most common misconception — ours and the colleges' — is that after 6 months an asylum seeker is only entitled to ESOL. The rules say otherwise. §1.4 is about the right to Adult Skills Fund funding in general, not about a particular subject. What is actually free is decided by the fund's general rules.

Courses like Access to HE are already Level 3: their own logic and their own money. The breakdown is on the Access to HE page.

You can apply and be offered a place without status — a university may enrol you. Everything comes down to money, and there are two separate problems here: government student finance is not available until there is a decision, and each university sets your tuition rate itself — most treat asylum seekers as “overseas”, the most expensive category.

So there is really one route — a scholarship from the university itself. They are called Sanctuary Scholarships and they were created for people in exactly your position. In our database 128 schemes explicitly accept asylum seekers: 116 of them give money (the rest help with applying), 85 add living costs, 23 add housing.

You cannot work while there is no decision. It is important to understand this before you choose a course: apprenticeships and any NVQ that needs a workplace are closed to you — an apprenticeship is legally employment, not study. Choose programmes where the practical part is not arranged as a job.

Volunteering is not “work for food”: reimbursing travel and lunch is allowed, a wage is not. More on work rules and what changes with status — on the page work in the UK.

There are no waiting thresholds for children. A child of compulsory school age (5–16) must be in education, and the local council allocates the school place. If local schools are full and the year has already started, children of asylum seekers and refugees are placed through the Fair Access Protocol: they are named in the School Admissions Code 2021, para 3.17(i), among the groups the protocol must place. College at 16–18 is state-funded, and asylum seekers are among the groups that funding covers (16 to 19 funding rules for 2026/27).

If a teenager is close to 18, plan early: from 19 the adult rules in §01 of this page apply. A separate case is a child who arrived without adults (UASC): they are in council care, the council must support their education, and at many universities such students get the home fee rate and a care leaver bursary. Details are on the page for teenagers.

1. Work out how long you have waited in the calculator above and write down the date when it will be 6 months.
2. Find an English class near you — the ESOL database. Call or come in: almost everywhere you can enrol without documents.
3. Gather your education documents: degrees, certificates, work record. Photograph them and save them to the cloud — originals get lost when you are moved between hostels.
4. Look at the schemes in your region — the scholarship database. Even if it is too early to apply, you will know the dates a year ahead.
5. Find volunteering — at an organisation that helps migrants, in a charity shop, at a community centre. It is allowed and it gives you a referee.