Smart guy - While I remember, did you get my PM?
The student loan bit is new. It's through the Pilot's Higher Apprenticeship scheme, which aimed to bring more talented people into the industry (rather than those who had £100k burning a hole in their pocket).
The first course starts in September with CTC (I don't know if ay of the other training companies are doing anything with it yet) and the course is exactly the same. All that's happened is that someone's been through the CTC course and said that it meets the requirements for a degree, so when you do a CTC course you can opt into the degree.
Because there's now a degree involved, it's classed as education and so you're eligible for the student funding (including maintenance grants etc) for three years (two for the main CTC course and one for the type rating).
So that's basically the degree thing - £42k on student finance (best loan you'll ever have - suck on that BBVA
), getting a degree and all without doing anything extra.
I notice there's very little on this forum about it - maybe somebody needs to make a sticky about it to raise awareness. When the Higher Apprenticeship people were at CTC the room was nearly empty, even though the scheme could help you massively.