Evidence to support your application

As part of your application for Financial Support, you will be asked to provide supporting evidence to prove your eligibility for support.

Some of our Financial Support funds and bursaries require more supporting evidence than others and the specific evidence that we ask for will be dependent on the information you provide in your application form and your individual circumstances.

You may be asked to upload the supporting evidence as part of the application process or contacted after you have submitted your application to tell you what evidence you will need to supply to progress your application for support.

If you are asked to send any evidence by email, we ask that you provide good quality, scanned copies of your documents. Where you do not have access to a scanner, we will accept photo screenshots, but they must be good quality and capture all of the requested information. You can download the TinyScanner app for free which allows you to use your smartphone as a scanner. Please see Adobe's guide on how to convert and combine PDF's.

We reserve the right to reject evidence that is not good quality, or where the requested information is not clear and legible.

We will always give you a 2 week period of time in which to supply the evidence that is needed for your application. This is a flexible timeframe and can be extended upon request. Failure to supply the evidence requested in the time frame provided may affect the outcome of your application and can result in your application being closed.

If you are not able to scan your evidence because of a disability, long term condition or another specific reason, please contact us so that we can advise you on the best way to get your evidence to us.

Our Guide to providing supporting evidence gives a more detailed overview on what evidence is required for each of the below types of Financial Support and how you can go about providing that evidence to us.

If you are eligible for one of our bursaries, you will be asked to provide supporting evidence of your eligibility. Please click on the type of fund or bursary you are applying for to see a list of evidence that you will need to provide.  

• Carers Bursary
• Dependants Bursary
• Estranged Student/Vulnerable Young Person Bursary
• Hardship Fund
• Short term Loan

Carers Bursary

In order for us to assess whether you are eligible for the Carers bursary, we will need you to provide supporting evidence as part of your application. You will need to upload just one of the following pieces of evidence with your initial application in order to prove your eligibility:

• Copy of a Local Authority Carers Assessment/Outcome letter.
• Letter from DWP with regards to prior entitlement to Carers Allowance (as a student, you will no longer be entitled to claim Carers Allowance).
• Supporting evidence from a professional supporting you or the person you care for.
• Supporting medical evidence from another medical professional (consultant). It must be clearly stated that the person that you care for requires care.
• Copies of Personal Independent Payment (PIP)/Disability Living Allowance (DLA) entitlement for the personal you care for, along with a supporting statement detailing your role as the carer and the impact that this has on your life. 

Dependants Bursary

In order for us to assess whether you are eligible for the Dependants bursary, we will need you to provide supporting evidence as part of your application. You will need to upload the following evidence with your initial application in order to prove your eligibility;

• ALL pages of your most recent Universal Credits/Tax Credits notification (this document must contain information about any deductions that have been made to your final payment due to income as this will impact on your eligibility for the Dependants Bursary)
• Proof of ID for each of your children (this is usually a scanned copy of their passport or birth certificate) 

Estranged Student/Vulnerable Young Person Bursary

In order for us to assess whether you are eligible for the Estranged Student/VYP Bursary, we will need you to provide supporting evidence as part of your application. You will need to upload the following evidence with your initial application in order to prove your eligibility:

• Correspondence from Student Finance England (or an equivalent finding body) stating that you have been assessed for your student funding as an ‘independent’ student

Hardship Fund

In order for us to assess whether we can support you financially, we will need you to provide supporting evidence as part of your application to the Hardship Fund. You will not need to provide any evidence with your initial application and will receive a bespoke list of evidence required by email when an assessor has started to process your application.

The list you receive will include mandatory evidence which you must provide in order to continue with your application and optional evidence which you are not obligated to provide. It is important to be aware that not providing the optional evidence may affect whether you receive an award or how much you ultimately receive.

Please view our Guide to providing evidence to see the most common types of evidence that we request and examples of what the documents look like. This is not an exhaustive list and some of the evidence that we ask for may depend on your personal or household financial circumstances.

If you have dependent children in Childcare, we will also need you to complete a Childcare costs form which will help us work out how much you are paying towards childcare during the academic year. 

You will usually be given 2 weeks to provide the evidence requested, however, we can extend this deadline if you are struggling to access any of the evidence. Please keep in touch with us to let us know if this is the case as we will close any applications where the mandatory evidence required has not been received in the given timescale.

Applications are processed in the order in which they are received and any delays in providing the requested evidence will result in a delay in your application being assessed.

If you are applying for non-standard or emergency support from the Hardship Fund, you will be told what evidence that you need to provide by one of our assessors. This will be evidence to prove your situation and any costs that you have incurred. All evidence provided for non-standard support will be reviewed by a panel of assessors.

Short Term Loan

In order for us to assess whether we are able to offer you a short term loan, we will need you to provide supporting evidence. You will be asked to upload this evidence as part of your application:

• 1 months' worth of banking transactions including the current available balance (for all accounts you hold) e.g. bank statements or screen shots of your online banking account (please note excel downloads and screen shots from phone apps cannot be accepted).
• If you have not received your first instalment of funding from the Student Loans Company, we also need to see proof you have applied for a maintenance loan/NHS bursary e.g. screen shots from your online Student Finance account or any entitlement letters received.
• We may also ask for additional evidence and/or explanations of transactions we see on your bank statements to help us to assess whether we can support you.