How the Student Loans Company is quietly denying people a Higher Education.

By Elana Pearson

Thu 12 Jun 2025 14:37 BST

I had spent six years of my life in Uganda, and another six in England, before I found myself moving back out of the UK at twelve. My dad, who was British, passed away from cancer which we didn’t know he had, leaving my mum, Ugandan, to raise two children by herself. Perhaps inevitably, she reached a point, years on, where she could not afford to keep paying for her visa. The rest is bitter-sweet history.

 

Throughout the time I was abroad, university was my dream, both literally and figuratively. I started choosing universities at fifteen. I picked Spain for my year abroad. I thought up my personal statement years in advance. I was even looking at accommodation before starting my A Levels. I know I sound slightly insane, but I mean this in complete seriousness. There was never anything else. It was my plan.

 

I can’t go to university, because I can’t get a loan. And that’s because of the time I spent abroad as a minor.

“Even though I have a British passport, I can’t do my life like anyone else would.”

 The Student Loans Company (SLC), the not-for-profit, government-owned organisation that awards loans to students at UK universities, requires British applicants to have been living in the UK for at least three years, continuously, before the start of their course. This rule, termed ‘three-year residency’, is used to assess whether someone is ‘ordinarily resident’ in the UK; is their normal way of life is here or elsewhere? This has never been defined in any Act of Parliament.

 

“Like most policies that revolve around immigration, we have policies in place that stop immigration increasing out of control… It’s been around a long time,” says Adam Thompson, Labour MP for Erewash and Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary University Group, “I wasn’t in the debates when they brought in that piece of legislation, but my assumption would be that they were doing it in such a way that they were saying, ‘Right, we’ve got to put some limitation on this somehow, and this feels like an appropriate length of time.’”

As he says, the rule is far from new. Student loans for Higher Education can be traced back to 1990, when the government replaced maintenance grants with borrowing. Three-year residency has been a requirement from their very inception. Now, many Britons who want to go to university will receive a loan for both tuition and maintenance, without having to be concerned about their eligibility, because we don’t typically move beyond our own borders: in 2024, only 79,000 UK citizens, of the roughly 69 million people in the country, emigrated.

 

But what happens when people live abroad, not by choice, but by mere circumstance?

 

GRACE’S STORY

 Grace’s family moved to China, where her parents taught English as a Foreign Language, when she was two months old. She spent her childhood, up to the age of sixteen, doing a mix of Chinese and American schooling, before her family decided to move back to the UK.

“You’ve got somebody coming back, willing to give all of that into the UK education system, and you’re like, ‘No, I don’t want it’. It’s really crazy.”

From Grace’s perspective, she was caught in a Catch-22. She wasn’t Chinese. When it came to the UK, despite her British passport, she was seen as different to everyone else because of living abroad. ‘Two-tier’ citizenship, as she describes it.

“Obviously, as a kid, I can’t not live with my parents. So, of course I’m going to be with them wherever they are. And because they chose to have a life outside of the UK, it means that, when I come back, even though I have a British passport, I can’t do my life like anyone else would.”

“[The rule] meant that I couldn’t go straight to university, so I was like, ‘I’ll take a gap year’… But obviously, because I have to be in the UK, I just ended up working at Tesco. It does kind of feel like I’m delaying my life”.

Grace, who is taking a gap year because of the three-year residency rule

According to a Public First poll, commissioned by the All-Party Parliamentary University Group, 81 per cent of parents want their children to go to university. Though her studies are clearly supported by her parents, for Grace herself, not going was never an option: she wants to get into Psychology. She needs a degree.

Joy, Grace’s mother, shared with me what she believes the broader implications of the rule are, after her school was denied funding for her to do a teaching apprenticeship.

“You’re also discouraging young people from going abroad for a few years. Say you trained to teach English as a second language, like me, and then you go overseas for five years, and then you think, ‘I’m going to come back to England and work’. You’ve got somebody coming back, willing to give all of that into the UK education system, and you’re like, ‘No, I don’t want it’. It’s really crazy.”

“What you’ve described there, from my perspective, doesn’t feel like a system that’s working.”

Most importantly, Grace’s retelling of her story reveals a sticking point with the rule: how can a child, who legally doesn’t have the capacity or right to make such important decisions, be expected to deal with the long-term negative consequences of choices made on their behalf, even as an adult?

I asked Adam Thompson MP his thoughts.

“That must have been hard, and obviously she’s a British citizen. Equally, I can see the other side of the story where, if people are living abroad for, in Grace’s case, I think, probably most of her life, there is an argument that if her family has been abroad for all of that time and aren’t contributing in the same way to the British economy, you can understand how some people might feel that it wasn’t fair to necessarily support her through Home fees.”

In response to hearing about the last few years of my life, he tells me, “It’s a really difficult situation that you’re in there. It’s not really one I’ve come across before, because it’s quite unique. And I really do feel for you. It’s certainly something that we could continue to look into as a government, because what you’ve described there, from my perspective, doesn’t feel like a system that’s working.”

And that is the heart of the issue – a system that isn’t built for discretion.

Although it’s clear that Grace feels a sense of injustice, in meeting her I could also feel optimism. Aside from her self-described nervous laughter, she was warm, smiley and open. She was there with her fiancé and seemed keen on what she would be studying come next year. I wasn’t speaking to someone embittered, but someone who wanted to share her story.

As young people, it is harder, in several ways, for us to prosper than it was for our parents. We are significantly less likely to be able to buy a home than previous generations, for example. Data shows that people who have a Higher Education, generally speaking, have greater earning potential – and it therefore seems counterintuitive to delay the education of those who are already set back.

This is not a call for the rule to be eradicated. Like Adam Thompson MP said, it exists for a reason. The impact of three-year residency, like most things, exists on a spectrum, and the situations that fall subject to it are not all the same.

It should be reconsidered whether a child should be ineligible for a loan without having chosen where they live. It should also be considered whether the current system stops the abuse of public funds, or just stops progress for a minority.

Grace says it best:

“I understand that they have their reasons for why they have it, so I’d say modify it. As I said before, they’re trying to fit everyone into one singular box, but there are so many exceptions.”

“You can’t just put every single person in the same box.”

The Student Loans Company was contacted for an interview, with no response.