University maintence of £11,500 as mentioned by ML

Hi looking for some guidance what to do here, my daughter starts University in UCA Rochester this September doing an Art degree. She is brilliant at what she does but is useless with money and figures. She doesn’t spend too much on the whole but she just doesn’t understand the finance part and is a bit too relaxed about money sometimes I feel.


Anyway so I had to step in and I have programmed everything in my diary for her so that we applied for everything on time. We have applied for the accommodation that is tied with the university which will work out a fraction under £5,000 per year and includes all bills, not food obviously. The rooms are really nicely equipped and so they are the favoured/most popular choice to stay while studying there.


I have applied with her for her loans and apparently what we have been granted is the maximum which is £9,250 for the course which will go straight to the university and £8,793 for maintenance, £5,000 of which will be eaten up by the accommodation.


This leaves her £3,793 for food, kitchen utensils, linen, study supplies and travel plus they advised her that she should buy a laptop in the first year. This seems like she is going to struggle. She will get a part time job but will be limited by the amount of homework she has to do, I think they suggest a maximum of 15 hours per week for a part time job not to interfere with studies.


We are on low income of £11,000 which my wife brings in working as a caterer at a local school. As well as my 18 year old daughter we have a 12 year old boy so on top of the income we get child and working tax credits and child benefit. This will reduce in September when my daughter leaves to live near the university (over 50 miles from us, we’re in Surrey and she will be in Kent). I am starting to make some income by growing some investments as this will become our income, however the income is currently very small and is taken via ISA’s and SIPP’s and so does not factor in when doing income calculations although currently it would have little effect anyway if it did, as I need to grow things a bit if this is to succeed.


Martin Lewis was on TV recently and kept mentioning that students could get up to £11,500 for maintenance costs so I followed this up realising that first we needed to get her basic loans sorted so that we know what she has first, well this has been done. Next I followed the instructions and went to the Gov.uk site and it said to ask your university who may offer bursaries and things of that nature. I did this and the university said unfortunately they don’t do anything like that except in extreme case and that she would almost certainly fail with any claim as it was her first year (I gave them all our details so they could gauge what we could do).


So is there anything else we can do to get my daughters maintenance figure up from £8793 to £11,500?


How is this usually achieved?


Any help/guidance appreciated.