Online psychology conversion courses and the UK Student route: what each provider states, in its own words, about studying its course on a visa

The cheapest BPS-accredited psychology conversion courses in the UK are delivered online, and several of them are part-time by design. The most expensive are full-time and on campus. If you have read our comparison of what conversion courses actually charge, the obvious move is to take the online one.

Before anyone does that on the assumption it also solves being in the UK: the providers themselves say otherwise, on their own course pages, and they say it in fairly blunt terms.

This page does two things and nothing else. It reproduces what GOV.UK publishes about which courses the Student route covers, and it reproduces what four named providers state about their own courses. It does not tell you which visa to apply for, whether you would qualify, or what to do about it — that is regulated immigration advice, we are not regulated to give it, and we will not.

What GOV.UK publishes

From the Student visa guidance, “Your course”:

“You must have an unconditional offer of a place on a course with a licensed student sponsor.”

“To prove this, your education provider will send you a reference number (called a Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies (CAS)) once they’ve offered you a place on the course. You need a CAS before you can apply for your visa.”

And the list of courses the route covers, verbatim:

“You can do one of the following courses:

• a full-time course leading to a qualification that’s below degree level (RQF level 3, 4 or 5) with at least 15 hours a week of organised daytime study
• a full-time course leading to a qualification that’s degree level or above (RQF level 6, 7 or 8)
• a full-time course at degree level or above (RQF level 6,7 or 8) that’s equivalent to a UK higher education course and is being delivered as part of a longer course overseas
• a part-time course leading to a qualification that’s above degree level (RQF level 7 or above)
• an English language course at level B2 or above in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages”

Two things follow from that list, and both are routinely misstated.

“Part-time” is not categorically excluded by the published list. A master’s is RQF level 7, and the list includes “a part-time course leading to a qualification that’s above degree level (RQF level 7 or above)”. Anyone telling you the Student route never covers part-time study is not quoting this page.

But the list is not the whole test. Nothing on it happens without a CAS, and a CAS comes from a licensed sponsor, for a specific course, at that sponsor’s discretion and under the sponsor’s own obligations. The gap between “the route covers courses of this shape” and “this provider will issue a CAS for this course” is where every real-world problem lives.

The register tells you less than people think

The Home Office publishes a “Register of licensed sponsors: students”. We downloaded the current file (dated 2 September 2026) and looked up the providers named on this page. UCL, the Open University and Walbrook Institute London all appear on it, each recorded as a Student Sponsor with a Track Record.

That does not mean every course each of them runs can be studied on the route. Walbrook is the clean illustration. It is on the register — and on its own international tuition page, the Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies appears only in the section about its on-campus master’s degrees (“Pay your full tuition in full before CAS issuance”; “Pay £10,000 before CAS issuance and the remaining balance at enrolment”). The only on-campus master’s degrees that page lists are MSc Business and Management and the MBA. Its MSc Psychology appears under “Online master’s degrees: tuition fees for international students”, where CAS is never mentioned and the only visa reference is a cost warning: “Your tuition fee does not cover visa-related costs, travel, or personal expenses.”

Being on the register is a fact about the institution. Being sponsorable is a fact about the course.

What four providers state, verbatim

Birkbeck, University of London — MSc Psychology (Conversion), which the BPS register records as Campus Based, accredited for all intakes from 2009/2010. Three separate statements on the course page:

“International students who require a Student visa should apply to study on our courses full-time as these qualify for Student visa sponsorship. If you are living in the UK on a Student visa, you will not be eligible to enrol to study part-time courses at Birkbeck (with the exception of some modules).”

“As a Student visa student, you should also apply to study on campus only, as online and flexible options of study (if they are available for your course) may affect the conditions of your visa.”

“Please note that international students who require a Student visa to study in the UK can only apply for full-time, on campus routes.”

Birkbeck is worth reading closely because most of its teaching is in the evening. Its own timetable note: “If you start in October, your timetable is evening study only with classes taking place in the evenings.” The full-time October route is “Four evenings a week, October to September.” So “full-time and on campus” does not necessarily mean daytime — it means what the provider registers it as.

University of Kent — MSc Psychology Conversion, which Kent delivers by distance learning and the BPS register records as Online, accredited for all intakes from 2023/2024:

“Due to visa restrictions, students who require a student visa to study cannot study part-time unless undertaking a distance or blended learning programme with no on-campus provision.”

That sentence is doing something specific, and it is the most useful sentence on this page. It is not saying the distance course is sponsorable. It is describing which part-time study is compatible with holding a Student visa — i.e. for someone already here on one — and the qualifying condition is that the programme has no on-campus provision at all.

University of Glasgow — MSc Psychology (conversion), online distance learning, BPS register: Online, accredited from 2018/2019. Glasgow does not frame this as a visa statement; it frames it as course structure, which amounts to the same thing:

“Please note this programme is only delivered part-time and cannot be completed in less than 3 academic sessions. Our only full-time conversion programmes are located on campus here in Glasgow.”

“This programme is delivered entirely online via asynchronous distance learning. You will never be required to visit Glasgow and there are no compulsory live sessions that you are required to attend.”

A course that never requires you to be in Glasgow, delivered part-time over a minimum of three years, is not the shape of thing anyone moves to the UK for. Glasgow’s full-time conversion routes — the ones with a campus, a September start and a twelve-month duration — are the two that carry the £33,210 International & EU fee.

London Metropolitan University — MSc Psychology (Conversion), campus-based. Its page raises the question rather than answering it, twice:

“If you require a Student visa and wish to study a postgraduate course on a part-time basis, please read our how to apply information for international students to ensure you have all the details you need about the application process.”

The shape of the thing, stated plainly

Put the three facts together and the structure is this. The published Student route list covers full-time degree-level courses and part-time courses above degree level. Providers of the cheap online conversion courses build them part-time, asynchronous, with no campus attendance — and the ones that comment directly, like Birkbeck, tell Student-visa applicants to apply full-time and on campus instead. The courses that providers describe as carrying sponsorship are the campus ones, and those are the ones with a separate, much higher international fee.

Which means the money saved by choosing an online conversion course is real if your plan is to study from where you already are, and is not a route into the UK. Those are two different products at two different prices, and the fee table only makes sense once you know which one you are buying.

What we could not verify

Whether any specific provider would issue a CAS for any specific online conversion course. Only the provider can say, for a named course and a named intake. We asked no provider and we publish no inference.

Whether any individual would be granted a visa. That is a Home Office decision. We do not predict decisions on this site, and immigration advice in the UK is regulated.

The current fee figures for Kent’s conversion MSc. The fee panel on Kent’s page did not render its numbers when we read it, so we quote only its text.

What each provider’s registered study mode is on the sponsor’s own record. The register we downloaded lists sponsors and routes, not courses.

Where to get an answer we cannot give you

• GOV.UK, Student visa — the published rules, including the course list quoted above: https://www.gov.uk/student-visa
• The provider’s international admissions team, about that named course, that named intake, and whether it issues a CAS for it. Ask in writing.
• A regulated immigration adviser. In the UK, giving immigration advice is a regulated activity. We are not an adviser, we are not regulated, and nothing on this page is advice about your circumstances.

What to do

1. Settle the visa question before the fee question, because it decides which fee applies to you.
2. Ask the provider, in writing, whether it issues a CAS for the specific course and mode you want. Sponsor-register membership is about the institution; the CAS is about the course.
3. Read the course page’s own visa paragraph. Birkbeck, Kent and London Met all have one. If a provider’s page is silent on visas for an online course, treat the silence as information.
4. If you are studying from outside the UK, the online price is your price — see what conversion courses actually charge.
5. Check the accreditation cohort either way. The BPS register’s Date Accredited field is per intake year — see what GBC is and is not.

We are not an immigration adviser and we do not assess visa eligibility. The Home Office does, on a CAS issued by a licensed sponsor. What this page does is put the published rule and the providers’ own sentences side by side, because the fee comparison is dangerous without them.