BritBound confirmed a recent announcement regarding changes to the UK Tier 1 visa policy:
This week The British High Commission has announced that from the 1st of April it will change the Tier 1 Highly Skilled Migrant program to restrict new applications to individuals that hold a Masters degree qualification.
This means that people who currently only have a bachelors degree and qualify under the current points matrix will be no longer eligible for the Tier 1 General visa (previously the HSMP) after the 1st of April – unless they have a Masters degree qualification.
For those of you that do not have a Masters degree and were thinking of applying for the first time have now only approximately 5 weeks in order to make your application for it to be successful.
Unfortunately for those of you already in the UK on a working holiday maker visa have a very short time to arrange this process.. In practice if you are wishing to switch to the Tier 1 visa, then you will need to: prepare an application, book flights, book and attend a biometrics test in their country of legal residence and apply prior to the cut off date. Please note that you will need to already hold at least 8 weeks evidence of available funds of £2800 to meet the minimum maintenance requirements.
We expect that flights and more importantly biometrics appointments, will book up fast and that this will be the main restricting factor in successfully lodging an application before the 1st April cutoff.
We recommend you apply immediately if you were considering the Tier 1 Highly skilled Migrants visa and don’t have a Masters degree.
I had a couple of small problems upgrading to 2.7.1.
Firstly, I am using automatic upgrade (which is usually magic) and it encountered an error with a function being previously defined. So I had to do a manual upgrade, which doesn’t appear anywhere near as professional.
After the manual upgrade, I had a problem with the appearance of this blog. Looking at the output HTML I discovered an error was drawn into the class attribute of the body element. The function join was being called with the wrong parameters. After some googling and grep searches for information about which functions are part of the PHP and Wordpress APIs, it appears that the functionality of the Wordpress function attribute_escape or the hook body_class doesn’t exist anymore.
To fix (though I imagine I’ll need to address this next time I upgrade) I edited function k2_body_class in k2/app/include/info.php so the attribute_join is called with the output of join as the argument, not vice versa as it was previously:
$c = attribute_escape( join( " ", apply_filters('body_class', $c) ) );
Perhaps an upgrade of K2 is a better idea?
It appears I was reading the wrong points breakdown when I originally posted on this topic. Here is what it appears to be for my project:
- General considerations: how easy is your code to maintain (100).
- Documentation: instructions, javadoc tool and comments (70).
- Object-oriented Design: Structure of classes and use of variables and methods (30).
- User Interface: how well does it match the specification and how easy is it to use (40).
- Locking: how does your locking scheme adhere to the locking documentation (80).
- Data class (40).
- Server (40).
The total is still 400 and you are required to score 320 points to pass. It is also a little concerning that unknown automatic failures will terminate the marking process and fail the assignment.
My project appears to work correctly, so now just tidying it up and making sure that I have got everything required to submit it.
