Asylum seekers like me can’t get student loans for university

I looked down at my phone and saw an unknown number was calling me.  

‘Hello?’, I nervously answered. 

It was someone from Nottingham Trent University ringing to tell me the news that my scholarship application had finally been accepted. It was 2017 and I had been waiting in a state of limbo to find out if I could go to university.

I was so overwhelmed with emotion that I even made the person on the phone swear to it. When I hung up, I couldn’t keep myself from crying with happiness.  

This was the day that changed my life.  

As an asylum seeker at the time, I wasn’t eligible to receive student finance, but with this scholarship, I didn’t have to suppress my yearning for education anymore.  

That’s just one of the restrictions imposed on me because of my immigration status – it’s why I’m so passionate about speaking out against it. 

My memories of life in my home country of Pakistan are cloudy because I was so young.  

From what I recall, my dad had a good job and we had regular holidays – including to the UK because we had family there.

My brother and I were massive cricket fans and would play every evening after school in our neighbourhood. There was a strong community and life was good.  

At school, I distinctly remember my teachers discouraging me from asking questions – especially involving religion. I do not know why this was. Maybe they did not have the answers to what I was asking.

Unfortunately, when we came to the UK in 2008 – when I was 12 years old – while on holiday, my dad started receiving death threats from a political party he was affiliated with.

We went to a solicitor in the UK to receive legal assistance. The solicitor spoke to my dad in Urdu and gave him reassurance. He asked for a large sum of money to submit an application for us and told us that we would have to wait seven years to get status in the UK. 

We had no reason to believe he wasn’t telling the truth. 

The years that followed were the most difficult and vulnerable of our lives. The solicitor lied to us and told us we weren’t eligible for any financial support, so we had to rely on friends and family.

Despite this, we remained resilient and after several years in the UK, I started to integrate and became more accustomed to the culture. 

The encouragement and freedom I had experienced in school made me hanker for university, so I decided to call the solicitor to figure out more information about our application and the procedure to access student finance, but he didn’t pick up.  

We visited his office and found that it had been shut down. He had lied to us and took advantage of my dad’s lack of knowledge in immigration law. 

He had taken our money and vanished, leaving us undocumented. It is important for people to understand that falling through the cracks like this is more common than you think. 

Once we realised we were undocumented, we had to submit an application for asylum. We were devastated to feel like we were at square one again.

On the day of my A-level results in 2013, I found that I’d performed exceptionally well – so well in fact that I got the grades required to attend my top choice of university.

But despite receiving unconditional offers from several Russell Group universities in the UK, I found out that I wasn’t eligible to receive student finance due to my status. I felt very angry and helpless. I lost myself and let go of my love of education and lost all my motivation.

During this time, I started volunteering with the Red Cross in a variety of roles – case working, internships, and safeguarding placements at events like Reading Festival. Alongside this, I was also doing advocacy work.

All hope wasn’t lost when it came to my education. Through networking in 2017, I found out about the sanctuary scholarship – which is a bursary that covers the university tuition fees for those seeking asylum and with no recourse to public funding.

The Red Cross wrote a reference for me, then I submitted my scholarship application.

Thankfully, it was eventually approved that same year, so I went to Nottingham Trent University to study and graduated with a first-class honour’s degree in philosophy and global studies.  

I was fortunate that I received this opportunity, but most young people stuck in the asylum system are not as lucky. Those who seek sanctuary want to build a new life for themselves in a safe place.  

They want education, they want to work, they want to support themselves and their families and they want to make a positive contribution to the UK. But our asylum system is structured in a way that further marginalises and isolates people.  

Stuck in this long process for years, many young people are simply unable to continue their education post A-levels – in the same way that many are not able to work.  

While sanctuary scholarships offer a solution, they are extremely competitive and limited. There is a lengthy and complicated application process, which is difficult to overcome without having the right support.  

I want to encourage universities to provide more of these opportunities and make the application process more accessible. Better still, allow those in the asylum system to access student finance.  

Surely this is a win-win solution. It allows the student to pay back the money post-graduation – boosting the economy – and provides for the widening of participation in higher education.  

This issue is not solely about asylum – it’s about humanity and equity of opportunity. Education is a basic right and it’s a holistic way of changing our society and amplifying integration of people who are new to the country.  

My journey to get my immigration status took over 12 years in total. The Home Office response to my asylum application took a long time, so I had to escalate this several times with my MP.  

In the end, I was approved to stay in the UK in 2020 – not through being granted asylum status – but because I’d already spent half my life in the UK. It’s called the Private Life route, which is applicable when you’ve spent at least half of your life in the UK.

I now work in the charity sector, where I support asylum seekers, victims of domestic abuse and modern slavery. I also use my first-hand experiences to to win regularisation – which is status for people who have been in this country for a long time and due to unfortunate circumstances like mine, they became undocumented. 

I have also co-produced an award-winning podcast series that delves into the asylum journey. I hope to dedicate my life to this cause, so others don’t have to go through the unnecessary suffering like me. 

I wonder how many of this year’s successful A-level students will be lost because of an unfair and unjust system?

They could be making a positive contribution to the lives of their communities and the country as a whole - they just need the opportunity to do it. 

Zain (@Zain_Hafeez7 on Twitter) is one of a number of people with lived experience supported by IMIX, a fully funded charity that works on behalf of the refugee and migrant sector to build communications capacity and to change the narrative on migration. You can find out more about their work on their website here.

Main picture credit: Harry Lawlor

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