Sports Therapy help! Massage qualification with a dipHe?

Hi, looking for some advice really! Unfortunately I failed my resit of one exam in the second year of my Bsc Sports Therapy course. I was withdrawn from the course and awarded with a Diploma of higher education in sports therapy. As I’m not fully qualified I’m wondering where to go now as I cannot go into sports massage (what I really love to do) unfortunately I no longer have any student finance available as I resat my second year twice. Any advice would be greatly appreciated - feeling very stuck

I'm not sure where you have got your information from, but it's perhaps a bit worrying after a couple of years of studying you think you can't go into sports massage! Last time I checked, 'sports therapist' isn't a protected title.

http://www.hcpc-uk.co.uk/aboutregistration/protectedtitles/

What this means is that although it might lead someone to get in trouble with advertising standards etc, your auntie Mavis could wake up tomorrow and tell you she is a sports therapist and there is very little you can do about it. It's the same deal with massage. There is nothing stopping you tomorrow from waking up, buying a table and going to people's houses to give massages. You won't get insurance should something go wrong, but let's face it, you would have to make a real effort to badly injure someone giving them a massage. I did it for 7 years during / after training / qualifying as a physio and the worst thing that happened was I made someone's skin a bit red.

If you want to do massage then go enrol on a massage course - loads out there such as premier. Although this is going to sound a bit harsh on those who have done sports therapy degrees, it pretty much leads you nowhere. Sure, a handful of people are probably earning six figures somewhere running a sports science institute or something, but everyone I have known who has done the degree ends up working in a gym for a few years on minimum wage, and then either going to get a job completely unrelated, or doing the Physiotherapy Msc so they can work in the NHS.

In essence, even as a 'qualified' sports therapist you would have been unlikely to get a better paying job than a personal trainer who had done a year or so study along with a massage course and built up a 30 - 40 clients a week base in a gym. Infact, speaking from experience of earning £50 an hour doing just that 10 or so years ago, you would have been earning significantly less and have a load of student debt to boot.

Guess none of this helps with the debt you're in, but I wouldn't lose any sleep over the degree.