Accredited in which year? A conversion course's accreditation dates, not its reputation, decide whether your cohort counts

Accreditation does not attach to a course. It attaches to a cohort. A conversion course that was accredited when a friend enrolled may not be accredited for your intake, and a course that is accredited for your intake may stop being accredited before the person who asks you for advice next year enrols.

The British Psychological Society says this to students in one sentence, on its own page for students:

“If you’re unsure whether your degree will give you eligibility for Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership, you need to check whether your degree was accredited for your intake year.”

Almost nothing else on the open internet explains what that means in practice, or what the register actually shows you when you go and look. This page does.

What “cohort” means in the accreditor’s own contract

The BPS’s terms and conditions of accreditation — the document providers sign up to — defines the unit:

“‘Cohort’: A group of learners who share a common learning experience; for example, because they entered the same programme delivered by the same provider in the same academic year or at the same enrolment point.”

And it defines the academic year as “The 12 month period, starting on 1 September and ending on 31 August each year, during which programme delivery takes place.”

Accreditation is then granted for a period, and the period is not standard. From the same document:

“Where programmes are accredited with no conditions, the duration of ongoing accreditation will also be detailed and may vary from programme to programme to reflect the society’s view on the maturity of the programme and potential for risks to the standards to arise. For example accreditation may be granted for three cohorts; one year; six years, or a period deemed appropriate to safeguard standards.”

Three cohorts. One year. Six years. Those are the accreditor’s own examples. “Is it accredited?” is not a question with a yes/no answer detached from a date.

What the register actually shows

The BPS’s accredited-courses register is a search tool rather than a set of citable pages, so here is what a programme record contains once you open one. These are the field names as the register prints them, with real records read on 3 September 2026.

A currently accredited conversion programme — University of Aberdeen, MSc Psychological Studies:

Accreditation Status: Accredited Date Accredited: 2015/16 Accredited Information: “This programme is accredited for all intakes from 2015/2016 and confers eligibility for the Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership.”

A programme that stopped — Abertay University, MSc Psychology:

Accreditation Status: Previously Accredited Programmes Date Accredited: 2011/12 Accredited Information: “This programme was accredited for all intakes from 2011/2012 to 2018/2019 and confers eligibility for the Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership.”

Read that second record slowly. It is not saying the qualification was withdrawn from the people who hold it. It is saying the window of intakes that carries GBC ran from 2011/12 to 2018/19. Someone who enrolled on that course name in 2019/20 is outside the window. The course existed; the accreditation did not follow it.

A third record, BPP University’s MSc Psychology, records a window of 2016/17 to 2023/24. There is a second BPP record for an online variant of the same award name, which is where the register gets genuinely difficult.

The register’s own text does not always agree with its own status field

That second BPP record reads:

Accreditation Status: Previously Accredited Programmes Discontinued Accreditation Date: 2022/23 Accredited Information: “This programme is accredited for all intakes from 2018/2019 and confers eligibility for the Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership.”

Present tense, no end year, on a record whose status field says previously accredited and whose discontinued date is 2022/23. The same conflict appears on other lapsed records, which carry a “Discontinued Accreditation Date” while the free-text sentence still says the programme “is accredited for all intakes from” a start year, open-ended.

So: read the structured fields, not the sentence. Accreditation Status, Date Accredited and Discontinued Accreditation Date are the fields that carry the answer. The narrative line is prose, and on the records we read it had not always been rewritten when the status changed.

The BPS’s terms make clear whose job the underlying data is: “We will ensure that accurate information regarding your accredited programmes is captured on our CRM system and published on our website. Publication of accurate information is dependent upon you updating us regarding any changes to the programme(s) in question.”

What happens to students already enrolled when accreditation ends

This is the part people assume the worst about, and the terms are more reassuring than the rumour — with one reservation that is stated twice.

If a provider chooses to stop:

“You may cancel your accreditation with effect from the next academic year by advising us in writing. At this point your course will no longer be shown as accredited on our website and future cohorts recruited beyond this date will not be eligible for the Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership.”

If the Society withdraws it:

“Any decision to withdraw accreditation will not usually affect those cohorts who have already enrolled on the programme concerned.”

And the reservation, stated in two separate clauses:

“This will normally affect future cohorts from the point of withdrawal on, but BPS reserves the right to withdraw accreditation from existing cohorts, should there be serious concerns over shortcomings in relation to accreditation standards and/or BPS Code of Ethics and Conduct.”

The terms also require the provider to tell you. Where accreditation is withdrawn or cancelled the provider “shall remove any reference to your provision being accredited… and communicate our decision to all applicants to whom an offer has been made, and all those who have accepted offers on the programme”, and must notify “any potential learners of the situation who were planning to enrol onto an accredited programme at the next intake”, with the programme then in “teach out”.

Two more clauses matter to an applicant.

Accreditation can be granted backwards. “Where new programmes have been submitted for accreditation at an academic unit and/or level at which an accredited programme has not previously been offered, and where it is requested that accreditation be backdated to cover existing or previous Cohorts, the provider will be charged a separate Fee at the current rate for each Cohort to which accreditation applies.” So an unaccredited intake is not necessarily an unaccreditable one — but backdating is a thing the provider has to apply and pay for, not something that happens by default.

The Society is not your counterparty. “The society accepts no liability to the provider’s learners under contract law or otherwise; applicants’ and learners’ contracts are with the provider, not with the society… You are responsible for ensuring that applicants are able to make decisions on any offers made to them on the basis of accurate information regarding the accreditation status of the programme to which they have applied.” If the information you relied on was wrong, your argument is with the university.

“Seeking accreditation” is a real status, and it is not accreditation

The terms permit a specific phrase and forbid its cousins:

“Once you have submitted your application for accreditation, you may advertise your programme as currently seeking accreditation with The British Psychological Society. Any inference that a programme is accredited before accreditation is confirmed by the society is misleading and may have legal consequences for the provider should accreditation not be conferred.”

If a prospectus says seeking accreditation, the decision has not been made. The BPS aims “to give initial feedback on your application within three months of receipt, and to have agreed an initial outcome no later than six months following receipt” — which can be after your course has started.

The standards themselves change on a cohort boundary

The BPS publishes when a new version of its standards bites, and it does so in cohort terms. Its current standards for undergraduate, conversion and integrated MSc programmes carry the note: “These standards are for implementation for all new programmes from November 2024. This version of the accreditation standards must be implemented for student cohorts starting the 2026/27 session.”

Providers are also told to notify changes “prior to enrolment of the cohort to which their introduction will apply.” The whole system is indexed on the year you walked in.

Ireland publishes the same thing more plainly, and the same trap appears

The Psychological Society of Ireland puts its accredited undergraduate and conversion courses in an open HTML table with the dates in the third column. Entries read “Accredited from 2023 to 2028”, “Accredited until Mar-2030”, “Accredited until Sept-29”. On the day we read it, several rows carried end dates already in the past.

An end date in the past on a public list does not by itself mean a course has lost accreditation — a renewal may be in progress and the table not yet updated. It does mean the table cannot answer the question for a 2026/27 applicant, and that the answer has to come from PSI in writing.

The mechanism is not confined to psychology. The Engineering Council runs the same rule and states it for degrees: “if you were given exemption from one or more years of a programme, their intake year is the year they would have started, if they had joined at the beginning of the programme,” and its accord-recognition guidance tells you to “first check that the year you started your degree falls within the accreditation period stated.”

What we could not verify

Whether any particular lapsed record has since been renewed. We report what the registers said on 3 September 2026. Registers lag.

Why the BPS register’s narrative sentence contradicts its own status field on some records. We observed the contradiction on more than one record. We do not know whether it is a data-migration artefact or an editing backlog, and we have not asked the Society.

What a provider’s obligations are worth in practice when a course loses accreditation mid-cohort. The terms describe notification and teach-out duties. We found no published enforcement record and do not assume one exists.

What to do

1. Search the register for your exact programme and open the record. Read Accreditation Status, Date Accredited and Discontinued Accreditation Date. Treat the sentence underneath as commentary.
2. Screenshot it, with the date visible, on the day you accept the offer. The register is a live system with no version history you can cite later.
3. Ask the provider, in writing, one question: Is this programme accredited for the intake I am joining, and until which intake year does that accreditation currently run? A course page saying “BPS accredited” is not an answer to that question.
4. Watch for “seeking accreditation”. It is a permitted advertising phrase for a decision that has not been made.
5. If your intake sits outside a window, ask about backdating. The Society’s terms allow a provider to apply for accreditation to be backdated to previous cohorts, at a fee per cohort. It is the provider’s application to make.
6. Check the pathway condition too. The BPS ties eligibility to “any specified pathway detailed on the results page of the search”, a 2:2 or above for anyone who started after September 2006, and passing the psychology project.

We do not accredit anything and we cannot tell you whether your cohort counts. The British Psychological Society and the Psychological Society of Ireland decide that, and both publish the dates. What this page does is show you which field on their pages is actually load-bearing.