Good evening everyone!

I know I can be on and off these forums at times and remain inactive for a while. 

So I thought I would give a bit of a success story but to help people that may read this understand the process of applying abit better. This is for a Full Time Course.

When you apply for Uni for Full-Time Courses this is done via UCAS. Unless it is a distance course where this might be different and Part-Time courses do not go through UCAS. I applied for several uni's. I got two offers. 

One offer was for PT as they would APL my previous study at OU for Year 1, and the other would allow me to gain entry for FT providing I pass the OU first year(Which is 1 module). I wrote a fantastic personal statement using the UCAS tool and showed my strengths if I am honest, and despite the lack of formal education what I would bring instead including experience and this went in my  favour. Waiting for offers can be very nerve-wracking, and you should understand the UCAS deadline for your application. Some more prestigious unis have differing deadlines on UCAS due to application volumes and other aspects. I would say use up all five choices to give yourself more options. If you submit on time, Universities have a set deadline they must reply to you by, and this is normally around May/June time. 

There are two deadlines generally, I was a day over the first one, so this pushed my responses back another month. If you apply after June this goes into 'clearing' and this is a totally different process entirely. 

Before you can accept a choice, you must wait until they have all responded. UCAS gives personal deadlines to you. If they have until 1st July to respond to you, and this is the date that all choices have come in, you get approx 7 days after that to confirm or reject them. You can only make two choices after this, which is "firm" or "insurance". Best advice for this, for the insurance choice make sure it has lower entry requirements. Some uni's because of Covid may accept lower grades within a proximity anyway.

So now the more daunting part - enrolment and disclosure. 

Now in fairness, I am yet to enrol, but this is generally a straight forward process, providing a photo, my ID, and choosing how to pay for the uni. Best thing todo is apply to Student Finance early. The uni will need your "CRN" and you are good togo.

Normally, as part of this process they should ask for disclosure, but I have done this abit differently, as I have already done my disclosures.

For the PT one, I had to search around the website abit to find the safeguaridng lead, I know convictions are generally handled this way. I sent them by convictions, disclosure letter etc. Had a teams meeting and they went off to discuss with PPU and Probation and got the green light to study. My course has no DBS so is a massive bonus, and I am not int he media which is a big plus. As this was one of the dicussions. 

The FT one was more "corporate" and it felt it. The Convictions policy was really useful as a starting point and went into detail about the process(As an ex TU rep this made my day). So, I filled the form in, and now I have the green light. This Uni is part of not asking students about convictions, and instead more around conditions of the sentence such as probation and how you will meet them during your study. This process felt like it took a long time. 

Generally as a rule of thumb, once you have disclosed, they should risk assess you, you could be involved in this, but sometimes you might not be. They will then go to a "safeguarding" meeting to discuss and then decide any appropriate ways to mitigate risk, and the risk to them if you are studying there too. As an example, Can we google this persons name and their offences appear?  But these meetings are not all doom and gloom, they can help with managing your risk at uni, and help you as well around "who to tell" about the disclosure and whether you want tutors or not to know. 

I was asked this question, and I said, if my name appeared in the media, then I would probably allow my course tutor to know, on the basis of, this will assist them in some activities on knowing if its appropriate for someone to google my name or not. 

I had the support of both the police and probation, and as I am at the end of my setence probation are more than happy with my choices of uni, and this is something I did state to both uni;s, is that by the time the programme of study starts, I will have less than 6 months on my sentence and that I do want to start building a new chapter and preparing to move on. 

It took me by surprise if I am honest, that I might get the Uni I want to go to. But I have to take credit to the PT one which is, they were honest with me, open and I felt like I was genuinely being listened to. I didn't feel judged either, and it felt like I had someone believe me when I said I wanted to change. 

I find out my module results on Tuesday and this will be it for me I think. I am more nervous now about that, than I should have been around disclosure. I found the process positive, and a great way to ask questions, and not afaird to let them ask me the difficult questions too. The disclosure statement really helped.