Reading the BPS accredited conversion course register: the intake-year rule, the pathway condition on the results page, and the two credit sizes with different entry rules

The British Psychological Society’s accredited-course register answers one question, and it is not the question most people ask it.

It does not tell you whether a course is accredited. It tells you whether a course was accredited for the year you started. The BPS’s instruction to applicants is exactly that: check whether your degree was “accredited for your intake year”. A course accredited today is no help to someone who enrolled three years ago, and a course whose accreditation lapsed last year is still good for the cohort that started before it did.

And even a clean result on the right year does not settle eligibility, because three further conditions sit outside the accreditation flag.

A note on how this page is written. The BPS’s website terms restrict republication of its material and our site is commercial, so we paraphrase the BPS’s rules in our own words and link to each page rather than reproducing its text at length. Where a short phrase is the point, we quote it. The general problem — an open register whose terms are not open — is discussed in when the licence says open but the terms say no.

What the register is for: Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership

Accreditation exists to route people to one outcome: eligibility for Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership. The BPS describes GBC as a society standard in psychology, demonstrating knowledge of core psychology subjects at a level not below a UK bachelor honours lower second class, and as the basis for progressing to society-accredited postgraduate professional training.

Two things follow that catch people out.

GBC is not conferred by graduating. The BPS will only confirm GBC for someone who is a current Graduate member; if you are not a member, you apply for Graduate membership and the society assesses your qualifications and determines eligibility. Graduation is the evidence; membership is the mechanism. What GBC is and is not is set out in Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership explained.

GBC is not registration. It is a membership standard of a learned society. The legally protected practitioner titles in the UK are held by the statutory regulator, and the BPS says plainly that anyone using one of them must be registered with it. Chartered Psychologist is a separate, BPS-held title. Two systems, two words, and only one of them is a licence.

The four conditions, only one of which the register shows

To gain eligibility for GBC through an accredited award, the BPS’s own conditions are:

1. The award is accredited — for your intake year.
2. You followed any specified pathway shown on the results page of the accreditation search. This is the condition almost nobody reads. On joint, combined and major/minor degrees, accreditation frequently attaches to a route through the degree rather than to the degree title, and the results page is where that route is named.
3. You achieved a 2:2 or above, if you started from September 2006 onwards.
4. You passed the psychology project. A single component, and it is load-bearing.

The 2:2 rule has a hard edge the BPS states directly: someone who started from 2006 onwards and obtained a third would not be eligible for GBC and would need a conversion course. That is the most common route into the conversion register that has nothing to do with having studied a different subject.

There is also a route in from Ireland: under a memorandum of cooperation, those eligible for graduate membership of the Psychological Society of Ireland on the strength of a PSI-accredited award are also eligible for GBC. That reciprocity is examined in PSI and BPS mutual recognition.

Two sizes of conversion course, two different entry rules

This is the most useful structural fact in the register, and it is not a field in the record — it is in the credit total.

A conversion course normally runs at least one full year, around 45 weeks full-time or the part-time equivalent, and typically carries either 120 or 180 credits. The entry rule differs:

• 180 credits. The only entry requirement the BPS itself sets is that you hold a degree at any level that the society has not accredited — in psychology or in any other subject. Individual providers may add their own requirements.
• 120 credits. You must already have studied the equivalent of at least 60 undergraduate credits of psychology. If you have not, the BPS points to a bridging or access course, often a certificate in psychology, first.

So a shorter, cheaper-looking conversion course can be the one you are not eligible for. Anyone with no prior psychology should be filtering for the 180-credit version, and anyone with a partly-psychology first degree should check the 60-credit threshold before assuming the 120-credit route is open.

One more wrinkle: a small number of conversion providers also welcome applicants who already hold an accredited award and therefore already have GBC, offering more specialist content. “Conversion course” on the register is therefore not a reliable proxy for “designed for people without a psychology degree”.

The choice between a conversion master’s and starting again on a bachelor’s is compared in conversion MSc versus a second BSc.

What the register does not explain, and we could not find explained anywhere

We looked for two things on the BPS’s site and did not find them. We are recording that rather than guessing.

There is no published guide to the record fields. The register at portal.bps.org.uk/Accredited-Courses returned HTTP 200 without a login when we fetched it on 3 September 2026, but its records are rendered client-side, and we found no BPS page defining what its status values, dates or flags mean. The only field the BPS names in prose is the specified pathway on the results page.

There is no published rule for what happens if accreditation lapses mid-course. The intake-year rule implies your cohort is protected, but we could not find that stated. If it matters to you — and it should if you are choosing between a course under review and one that is not — that question goes to the BPS in writing, not to a forum.

The BPS is also explicit that it will not rank accredited courses against each other, saying it is only able to indicate that accredited programmes have met its minimum standards. That single sentence disposes of every “best accredited conversion course” ranking you will meet, including the ones with a table.

Three different situations get called “studying abroad”

The BPS treats these as three distinct categories, and conflating them produces the wrong answer:

A UK award delivered outside the UK. The BPS extended its standards to transnational education — programmes delivered by UK institutions outside the UK — with accreditation limited to UK providers that have already graduated at least one cohort of UK students, and to provision delivered in English. Its own wording dates this to 2014/15. This is a real category and it has been open for a decade.

A degree awarded by a non-UK institution. The BPS does not accredit these at all. They are assessed individually on application for Graduate membership, against published criteria: the institution must be recognised (the society uses the World Higher Education Database), psychology must be at least half the qualification, the standard must be equivalent to a UK second class honours (assessed with UK ENIC guidance), and eight named core areas must be covered with the required breadth and depth. That process is set out in an overseas psychology degree at the BPS.

Studying part of an accredited UK programme abroad. The BPS’s standards allow up to one-third of the credits of an accredited programme to be taken outside the UK, subject to the provider’s own arrangements and curriculum-coverage checks — so it may not be available on every course.

The middle category is the one people misdescribe. A degree from a foreign university is not “an unaccredited course” in the register’s sense; it is outside the register’s scope, and it goes down a different road with a different standard. The distinction between where a degree is taught and who awards it is in awarded by versus taught by.

What the register does not carry

No fees. Not domestic, not international. The BPS tells applicants to contact the institution directly for entry requirements, fees, funding and duration, and that is the correct instruction. The reason published conversion fees vary so widely is discussed in why conversion course fees differ so much.

No delivery mode, reliably. The BPS notes that some institutions may allow online study, but the register is not where that is recorded.

No student sponsorship information. Whether a provider can sponsor an international student is a separate government register, and a course being BPS-accredited says nothing about it. See online conversion courses and the student route.

What to do

1. Search on your intake year, not the current year.
2. Open the results page and read the specified pathway. If one is named, the degree title alone will not carry you.
3. Check the credit total before the price. 120 and 180 credit conversions are not interchangeable and the shorter one has a prerequisite.
4. If you started from September 2006 and hold a third, plan on a conversion course — the accreditation of your original degree does not help.
5. Apply for Graduate membership to get GBC confirmed. Nobody else’s confirmation counts, including your university’s.
6. If your degree was awarded by a non-UK institution, do not use this register at all. Use the individual assessment route.
7. Take fees, mode and sponsorship from the provider and from the government’s sponsor register, dated.

What this page does not do

We do not reproduce the BPS’s register or list accredited courses, and we cannot tell you whether a particular course was accredited in a particular year. Only the BPS’s search can, and only the BPS can confirm GBC. Nothing here predicts an admission or a membership decision.