Student visa in the UK

If you are considering to study in the UK and coming from a country out of EEA (European economic area) or Switzerland, you might have loads of questions about the type of VISA you need to get, Just like me when I was about to come to the UK almost 3 years ago. In this post I’m going to explain the different types of student visa and hopefully by the end of this post you will have a clear idea about this type of visa. Now let’s get on with it.

Other than the short-term study visa (STS), there are 2 kinds of student visa, the Tier 4 child visa, and the Tier 4 general visa.

Child student visa:

If you are aged between 4 and 17 and you have been offered a place on a course to study at an independent school in the UK you would need to apply for the Tier 4 Child visa.

There are several requirements for this type of visa, first you need to have consent of your parent or guardian as you are under 18. Furthermore, you would need to get Confirmation of Acceptance for studies (CAS) assigned by an independent school. You also need to check if you need a TB test which depends on the country that you are coming from (Check the list of countries here: https://www.gov.uk/tb-test-visa/countries-where-you-need-a-tb-test-to-enter-the-uk). finally, the financial requirements which is a bit high here in the UK. You need to present bank statements that indicates you can Pay the fees and meet the maintenance requirements.

Meeting the maintenance requirement basically means that you have enough money to pay the course fees and living costs. However, in boarding schools the board and course fees come together as school fees which is shown on the CAS.

click on the link below to find out more about Tier 4 child visa.

https://www.gov.uk/child-study-visa

General Student visa:

This is the type of visa that I’m holding right now, to be honest there isn’t much difference between general student visa and child student visa. For this type of visa you need to be 16 or over and offered a place on a course. You might be like why there is an overlap between these types of visa, well, for the students that are 16 or 17, it depends whether they are offered a place at an independent school or not, for instance, if you are 17 and offered a place at university you are required to get general student visa rather than child student visa.

click on the link below to find out more about Tier 4 general visa.

https://www.gov.uk/tier-4-general-visa

what you can and cannot do:

There are certain things that you are forbidden to do with Tier 4 visa, this includes getting public funds, taking full-time permanent job or being self-employed and studying at a local authority-funded school.

You can work only If you are 16 or over. Having child student visa only allows you to work up to 10 hours per week during term time, while you can work up to 20 hours per week with general student visa. It is worth noting that you can work full-time during vacations with either of these types of visa.

Before applying for visa make sure you have all the documents ready and double check that with experts, believe me it does even worth paying an expert to prepare your documents for you as getting rejected for once would have negative impact in all of your future visa applications.

In our future posts we are going to explain how you can extend your visa so please subscribe to be notified about our future posts.

Thanks,

Parham