If you have spent time in care or do not have contact with your parents, we can provide practical advice, information and support. Please note that any support listed with a * is for undergraduate students, and applies if you are under 25 and are a home student (not EU or international). All other support listed is for all students.
We encourage you to indicate any care experience or your estrangement in your application form to the University and ensure that you select the UCAS tick box to indicate these circumstances. You can also put this information in your personal statement or have your applicant referee include this in your reference. Alternatively, you can contact our Admissions team. This enables us to provide you with the support outlined below. If you let us know at the point of online enrolment, we will contact you to share what support you can access.
Do you qualify as care experienced? What documents do you need to provide?
We recognise that any time spent in local authority care or, with kinship carers, under a special guardianship order, or being privately fostered can have an impact on educational opportunities, so we will provide support to you.
You will need to provide evidence for any of the above circumstances. This evidence could be a letter from your local council, care authority, a copy of your Adoption Order or Special Guardianship Order or from Student Finance. If your circumstances mean you do not have this evidence, please get in touch with us via the wellbeing email addresses at the bottom of this page and we can advise on alternatives.
Do you qualify as estranged? What documents do you need to provide?
You are classed as an estranged student if you are between 18 and 24 years old and have not had verbal or written contact with both of your biological, adoptive parents or only living parent and this circumstance will not change. If you are unsure if this applies to you, take a look at the Stand Alone .
Once you have accepted your place at 69传媒, you will need to provide evidence that you are estranged. The easiest way to do this is to fill in the confirmation of estrangement form. You can get this form on your student finance account once you’ve submitted your application.
Otherwise, you can send a letter from your social worker, a doctor or teacher that knows your situation, or from a ‘person of good standing in the community’ (for example a solicitor, religious leader or counsellor) or provide a police report showing any related incidents.
You will only need to provide evidence once, and we encourage you to get this to us as early as possible so we can provide support as soon as we can. Our services can only be provided after receipt of evidence and cannot be back-dated.
If you think or know that you will be unable to provide this evidence, please contact our wellbeing team at your intended campus of study as soon as possible to discuss your individual circumstances.
If these are your circumstances, you can find advice and support .
Support we offer
We are committed in supporting you before the start of your course, to achieve on your course and to progress onto your employment of choice. We are therefore able to offer the below practical advice, information and support.
Lower grade requirements*
We understand that personal circumstances may have an impact on your grades at school or college and may not reflect your true potential.
Therefore, we have lower grade requirements called a contextual offer, where you will be asked to achieve DDD at A Level or equivalent.
This applies to all our undergraduate courses (excluding our foundation degrees and apprenticeships) and is lower than the typical offer shown on the course pages on our website or in our prospectus.
Please indicate any care experience or your estrangement in your application form to the University and ensure that you select the UCAS tick box to indicate these circumstances. You can also put this information in your personal statement or have your applicant referee include this in your reference. Alternatively, you can contact our Admissions team.
Before starting with us
We will provide you with a named contact to speak to at the University. You can contact them before you join us and during your studies
You are invited to visit your chosen campus for a personalised 1-2-1 experience. To arrange this and discuss what you would like to see, please contact [email protected] and specify your chosen campus
Wellbeing support
Our dedicated Wellbeing teams are there to support you if you need advice or guidance. We provide guaranteed appointments with our Wellbeing Service within the first month of your course start date, covering information about support with study skills, libraries and disability and inclusion.
We have a Student Assistance Programme where you can access 24/7 support, counselling services in different languages and with counsellors from a range of cultural backgrounds, and other wellbeing resources.
Current students can contact the Wellbeing Team - simply complete our selecting "Student Wellbeing" as your enquiry type for further information on our support.
If you are a prospective student and would like to speak to us before you apply, please contact the Wellbeing team at your campus for further information on our support. You can email them at wellbeing-*your campus*@law.ac.uk. For example, if you are studying at Bristol email [email protected].
Employability support
We can offer a priority appointment with our Employability Service within 6 weeks of your course start date. You can also access this service before you start your course, by contacting [email protected]
Accommodation support
You can access our accommodation team for support in seeking accommodation for 52 weeks of the year if needed. You can contact the team by emailing [email protected]
Financial support from us*
We will provide a bursary of £2000 per progressive academic year for full-time students (as long as you have been given independent status by your UK national student funding provider – i.e. Student Finance England/Wales/Northen Ireland/Student Awards Agency Scotland - on the grounds that you are a care-leaver or estranged). Visit the University’s scholarships and bursaries web page for further information and other University scholarship and bursaries
You can access advice from the Money & Housing Advice team about student finance and budgeting, and you will be offered an individual budgeting session (if you would like one) once you’ve started at the University. You can contact the team by emailing [email protected]
You will automatically qualify for financial help with graduation costs, this includes free gown hire, free guest tickets (maximum of 2 per graduand) and a contribution towards travel costs of up to £75.
Visit this to view external additional support you are entitled to.
For more information about support whilst doing an apprenticeship visit this page on .
“Thank you very much and I appreciate all the support from yourself and student services. It really keeps me going to know I can come there when I’m overwhelmed. Thank you so much.”
Lawyers Who Care
"How can we effectively be a voice for care-experienced clients and share their stories in court if we do not yet understand, or give visibility to, care experience? For care-experienced people, access to the profession is access to justice." – Lucy Barnes, Bar Council, 14th June 2024
Lawyers Who Care (LWC) provide long-term mentorship and community and/or paid work experience opportunities for care-experienced aspiring lawyers. For more on LWC visit their
Lucy Barnes created Lawyers Who Care alongside Kate Aubrey-Johnson of Garden Court Chambers and, later on, Gemma Creamer, an incredible care-experienced aspiring barrister. Gemma and Lucy knew the barriers of being care-experienced, and Kate had seen the institutional barriers from her professional practice as a barrister, so they teamed up to create Lawyers Who Care. Lawyers Who Care is ran 90% by care-experienced volunteers. They are built and led by care-experienced talent, and living proof of what care-experienced excellence looks like.
If you are a care-experienced person (18+ currently but we do intend to extend to 16+ when we have the resources) and aspire for a career in law, please visit the website. They offer long-term mentoring (2+ year, 1 hour per month) from legal professionals, who have mandatory bespoke ‘Care Aware’ and ‘Trauma-Informed’ training to understand care experience. They also build community by hosting inclusive networking events and webinars, always free for care-experienced people.
Our organisation was recently described by an anonymous care-experienced mentee as “a home for the care-experienced community in the legal sector.”
If you do not have parents or carers who have attended university, you can find out information about being a first generation student.
Find out more about our support for commuter students, BAME students and mature students.