Scholarships reward students for being brilliant at sport, music, public speaking, writing virtually anything you can think of. Even academic work.

When Push says brilliant’, in fact you only need to be better than or even only as good as anyone else who applies. Indeed it may well not even be an open competition, in which case the word competition’ would be something of an overstatement.

Like special bursaries , apart from being good at something, you’ll normally have to fulfil various random criteria. You may need to be under 18 on the third Sunday in August, the orphaned second daughter of a doctor or an ex-student of a certain school in Bognor and the proud owner of a pet rabbit called Chuckles.

Some scholarships aren’t fussy about how you spend the money and some are just for tuition costs. But others can get very particular about what they will and won’t fund. For example, they may be for travel costs only or to study abroad, to fund some research, even to buy a musical instrument or sports kit. There are even scholarships that only cough up in book tokens (what do they think this is? Blue Peter?).

As you’ll have probably already realised, a lot of the nuts and bolts of bursaries can be screwed equally on to scholarships and, if they can’t, you can be pretty sure that the sponsorships toolkit will work.

There are three fountains of funds when it comes to scholarships:

• Institutional aid
• Private financial aid
• Philanthropic aid

• Money for nothing

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