Is there any extra financial support for those that wouldn't ordinarily qualify for any assistance for the maintenance grant, is there some kind of 'London weighting'?

The amount of student loan they can take out is higher. Whether they get the basic amount of student loan or more will still depend on parental income.

This gives the amounts for 2020-2021 year
https://www.gov.uk/student-finance/new- ... e-students

Some students will also qualify for addition bursaries from the university, but this varies from uni to uni. I suspect the uni websites would say.

The parents I know who have children studying in London, basically laughed at the student loan weighting. It does not, apparently, cover the higher rents and/or increased cost of living - and let’s be honest, the loan anywhere else also doesn’t cover rent/cost of living - so parental contribution is definitely higher in London. However, opportunities for students to work alongside their degree are possibly higher in London.

It was one of the things that (thankfully) has put both our sons off London for uni (one reason of many!!)

What were the other reasons KCG?

I think its accommodation costs that would make it expensive.

If a student was living at home with parents in the London area it would probably work out cheaper than living somewhere else in rented accommodation.

Ah, those are their own personal ones Catseye, which I will not go into on here because I certainly don't want to get into a "no you are wrong" type discussion with people! Suffice it to say, the same sort of assessments we would encourage parents to consider when thinking about secondary schools are the sort of decisions my boys have made when choosing where to go - or not go, asin this case!

When DD was looking at a London uni we looked at the finance.
The accommodation was a shocker. The halls nearest the college were £8,376 self catered but only held 80 odd from a course intake of 250 with priority for international or those coming from a long way from London. The other one they offered was £10,403 self catered. A full london maintenance loan is £12,010 so that would have left her just £1600 a year for food, books, travel, social, everything else. The bank of Mum and Dad was already in the game to the tune of £6,198 based on our income but there is no way that we wouldn't have had to give her more.
I was not overly disappointed that she is not going there

DD was never interested in London Unis either. She wanted a campus uni. I think she likes/needs some wide open space.

It does look like she is going to end up at one of the most expensive unis outside London though.

For those of you that haven’t been told by your DCs, they can now start their applications for student finance. DD did hers last weekend and got the letter through a couple of days ago.

DS wanted and got unis in London, but still struggling with the idea of gap year.