My experience before I retired more or less aligns with yours, tho I only switched from dev to testing during one of the periodic recessions when all the dev work dried up. Then went contracting pronto tonto. I would say that for continuity of work, testing is a far superior option to being a...
These are a good call. Every project needs a standalone formal test team. Every hotshot dev always assumes that their code is always error-free. And maybe they're occasionally right. But link it up with other bits of code and the errors fairly tumble out. For a system/user acceptance tester, no...
Might well have changed since I were a lad, but when hiring back then a person with six months relevant experience usually trumped a graduate with no experience. So maybe think long and hard before committing to a huge burden of student debt
Or this lot seem to have a couple of junior roles locally
https://www.balticapprenticeships.com/vacancies/?programme=junior-software-developer-level-3&place=BN1&radius=50&latitude=50.876786&longitude=-0.1262901