Background
The rules about who pays ‘home’ fees for higher education in England are set by England’s Department for Education (they are not set by UKCISA). They are set out in regulations, which the Department for Education amends over time. The regulations identify all the different ‘categories’ of student who can insist on paying at the ‘home’ rate.
In May 2022, the regulations were amended to add a new category of ‘home’ fee payer from August 2022: ‘Persons granted leave under the Ukraine Schemes’. The regulations were not quite right at first, so the Department for Education instructed fee assessors to operate some ‘special arrangements’ for the first year, which involved them being less strict about some of the requirements (for the period 1 August 2022 to 31 July 2023).
If you want to remind yourself about those ‘special arrangements’, you can read about them in the 23 September 2022 UKCISA news story Ukraine Schemes: important changes to ‘home’ fees for HE in England. We also described them in the information about the Persons granted leave under the Ukraine Schemes category on the UKCISA website.
Changes
The Department for Education has now published the regulations that determine who will qualify as a ‘home’ fee payer under this category for academic years that start on or after 1 August 2023. We have therefore divided up the information about the Ukraine Schemes category so that you can read separately about:
- fees for any academic year that starts on or after 1 August 2023 (category 11a)
- fees for any academic year that starts in the period 1 August 2022 to 31 July 2023 (category 11b)
If you are already on a course where you relied on the ‘special arrangements’ to make you a ‘home’ fee payer for the period August 2022 to July 2023, but you do not meet the requirements for category 11a, ask your institution if they will carry on charging you ‘home’ fees because of their own policy.
This table shows the ways in which the category is changing:
|
Fees for any academic year
that starts in the period
1 August 2022 to 31 July 2023 (category 11b)
|
Fees for any academic year
that starts on or after 1 August 2023 (category 11a)
|
| There is a ‘special arrangement’ that allows the Ukraine Scheme leave to start a little after the first day of the academic year in certain circumstances. |
The ‘special arrangement’ is gone.
Instead, Ukraine Scheme leave must start by the standardised ‘first day’ (1 September, 1 January, 1 April or 1 July) of whichever academic year the fees are for. But there is an exception: If the fees are for the first academic year of the course, Ukraine Scheme leave must start by the day on which the first term of the first academic year actually begins. |
| There is a ‘special arrangement’ that allows some people to ignore a requirement to be ordinarily resident in the UK on the standardised ‘first day’ (1 September, 1 January, 1 April or 1 July) of the first academic year of the course. |
The special arrangement is gone.
Instead, students must be ordinarily resident in the UK on the day on which the first term of the first academic year actually begins.
However, ‘ordinarily resident’ means something slightly different from usual here. Usually you do not count as ‘ordinarily resident’ in a place unless your residence there is lawful. But here the regulations deliberately say in relation to this particular requirement that if you (or your parent, spouse or civil partner) became a ‘person granted leave under one of the Ukraine Schemes’ after the day on which the first term of the first academic year actually began, you get special treatment. The special treatment means you are treated as though your residence was lawful, even if it was unlawful. The residence can therefore count as ‘ordinary residence’.
|
| The student has to have Ukraine Scheme leave. |
The student doesn’t have to be the one with Ukraine Scheme leave – the student can be a spouse, civil partner or child instead. |
Further reading
The table above provides a rough outline of what is changing. For a full explanation of all the requirements that need to be met to fall into the categories, see:
If you want to see the regulations that made the changes, they are the Education (Student Fees, Awards and Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2023 (S.I. 2023 No.74).
You can read about other changes made by the regulations in the following news stories on the UKCISA website:
