Still no money from SFE - will son have to leave uni?

mustmakealist

My son is a first year student at Uni and put his application in months ago. His SFE loan is based on his father's income (we are divorced) and his sister is still at uni. His loan has still not come through.


He phoned up almost in tears as he has had a letter from his uni accommodation saying that he has got 7 working days to pay the full year's fees or they will throw him out and take him to court to recover the amount he owes. His course fees have also not been paid.


He has been onto student finance at least a dozen times since he got to uni to find out what is going on (or in this case not going on) and has been told different things almost every time he phones. He was promised the his loan would come through by 21st November (if didn't). He has phoned and promised that someone would call back but they didn't. He asked to speak to a manager but they wouldn't take his call.


He has kept records of the dates/times that he has called them. I have suggested that tomorrow he speaks to the accommodation office, the uni finance, student union finance people, his tutor and anyone else that he can find until someone can help him get to the bottom of this. He is desperately worried now. Is there anything else that he can do to sort it out?


I have said that I might be able to pay his accommodation costs by using credit cards, but I doubt if I could fund the £4.5 k that they want for the full years plus the £9k tuition fees so that he can stay.


Can anyone offer any advice?

Voyager2002

Contact your MP: they should not have given him a firm payment date if they could not keep to it.

Before going to university, did he live for most of the time with you, or with his father? Because it is possible that the reason for the delay is that SFE have not received the necessary supporting documents from his sponsoring parent. And this might not be his father's fault: assuming that he is also the sister's sponsoring parent, he may have provided full documentation in relation to her grant/loan and not realised that this is not visible to the team processing the son's finance. If a parent is supporting two students and provides one form giving financial details, then this shows up on some SFE systems but not others, causing enormous confusion (the parent thinks that he has already done what is needed; the telephone teams at SFE will confirm that the document has been received; yet the people processing your son's finance will be unable to make progress for lack of the document).

[Deleted User]

Dont stress. I was sent a bill for £9000 for my fees. Its just the uni process. So long as they know he has applied & is doing everything he can they will wait.

Has he signed and sent back his form to student finance?

Keep logging in daily to sf to check the application and see if anything is needed.

Take screen shots of the application page & online letters or print them and take or email them to the uni finance/accomodation office so they can see whats going on.

Once sf get his signed form back they will ask uni if he has been attending & he will be paid a few days later.

They've had my form a week now & online status now says I'll be paid 27th, changed from 20th.

Fingers crossed we both get it soon.

amiehall

I only received my money on Friday. My university had been sending me rude sounding letters about being thrown out for non-payment of fees but they also have a process for stopping these once the student provides proof that a student loan has been applied for.

What exactly does it say on his online account? What is under the Payments section? Are the payment dates on there and what description do they have?

How far has his application progressed? He has been provided with a payment schedule?

Taiko

Get him to phone them from his university finance office. They'll have a direct line through to assessments who can tell what is actually happening, whereas those in the call centre give the impression they just want the call to end.

TurnUpForTheBooks_2

Taiko's suggestion is of course worth a try as a soft start.

I am very sorry to read this story, but I am not surprised. All parents and students in the current system would do well to read it and consider how they would deal with it or one like it that could easily directly involve them at some point.

There but for the grace ... and all that ...

Here we see the true face of higher education support in the UK unmasked. It is not some cuddly "you may never pay/debt collectors will never call" government funded system. It is run by the same type of kind grannies and grandads that run Wonga, in other words, by other types entirely - ruthless people with clumsy people doing their bidding.

And to think the establishment sending out those nasty threatening demands to a first year student holds concessionary charitable status in this big bad world. It is a sick joke.

Totally sick (and that is the old version of sick) especially when this student, like all others a month or two into their courses, will have enough stress trying to find his feet in the new regime of university life without receiving debt collector's letters.

It sounds OP, like your own financial situation is far from immune to setbacks of this magnitude. Is your ex-husband's financial situation any better or worse?

Voyager2002 may have hit the nail on the head with a guess at the sort of c¤ck up that has occurred, but that is hardly the fault of anyone other than SFE and the university. They should never have allowed threats like that to be aimed at any student, let alone a fresher.

Why has it become the norm for serious threatening letters to be issued at all without a senior level investigation first ? Which faceless individuals / senior administrators within SFE and the university are accountable for the fact this money has now been demanded with menaces from a young person in their care ? I'd like to know.

Might it be better for the OP's son now to claim that, QED, he has no significant financial support connection with either parent? His SFE support arrangements that the OP says have been officially connected to his father's economy are clearly in disarray. His mother simply cannot afford to pick up the pieces.

He is of course financially independent like almost all university students who do not live at home.

Complaining to an MP might help, but it depends on the MP of course.

Running a campaign against the university and SFE on MSE might be a better bet.

They really don't like that and it makes them squirm, but they deserve it.

It is a bloody disgrace to read about such things first thing on a Monday morning, or at all.

Charities my a$$. Their true financial affairs are all hidden from public view by Royal Charter status. The best we get is voluntarily published "financial statements" containing the usual illusory devices. Another example of organisations that exist solely for the benefit of those have clawed their way to the top of the payroll (or should I say multi-billion pound pension pots?) within them.

Perhaps the Charities Commissioner and even HM The Queen should be reminded of how low things have sunk in their names.

Taiko

Are you done being a useless !!!!wit yet? Provide solutions, and stop inventing problems.

TurnUpForTheBooks_2

Hopefully Taiko, as someone who knows who exactly some of these faceless but accountable individuals are within the universities and SFE, and as one who has a toolbelt full of likely antedote, that's just your way of saying "Bear with me, I am working on it as hard as I can as a special case via PM with the OP" so I shall naturally forgive the raw outburst

Voyager2002

TurnUpForTheBooks wrote: »

Taiko's suggestion is of course worth a try as a soft start.

I am very sorry to read this story, but I am not surprised. All parents and students in the current system would do well to read it and consider how they would deal with it or one like it that could easily directly involve them at some point.

There but for the grace ... and all that ...

Naive rant snipped.

What matters is finding a solution rather than fault-finding. Starting a campaign on MSE is unlikely to achieve anything.

TurnUpForTheBooks_2

SFE is unfit for purpose as the extremely bad behaviour reported in the thread topic shows. SFEs purpose was shameful to begin with.

Why would a campaign on MSE against this extremely bad thing be wrong?

You guessed at what sort of c*ck-up had occurred and said "contact your MP" - it might achieve something, but since MPs do not exactly cover themselves in glory when it comes to fielding complaints about civil servants or pseudo-civil servants, it isn't an obviously hopeful solution to the OPs problem, just one of many things that might be considered. I see no clear route or solution is offered by anyone in a full couple of days now save for the suggestion that SFE call centre staff treat students as dirt so a step up from there might be to have a university admin staff sit in on the call. That might unstick this one, or it might not, but no way is the general problem to be left like that.

I think you and some other responders think that we can call the problem "normal" and "no stress" when in fact it is completely unacceptable and the stress caused is unforgiveable. You might never stress over such a problem, and nor might I but that is because we have individually developed a myriad of suitable confrontational styles and responses to suit our own tolerance thresholds. We are ugly and street-wise. You can't post that as a solution.

Are you perhaps for the quiet life and not into my noisy posts? Why post again at all if your sole motive this time is to simply insult me for the content of my post by calling it a rant and naive ?

You might tell us all for example what is naive about it? Do you think that MSE has no significant political clout, or no significant audience ? Do you think perhaps that the Student Finance system we were landed with in 2012 is in fact good enough and deserves a long life?

GothicStirling

OP: has he kept in contact with the accommodation department, normally they are very good with this kind of thing. Also has he been in contact with the finance department there are hardship funds and grants for this kind of situation.

Also double check with SFE that there isn't a problem. My sister had this issue, and it turned out the University hadn't notified them that she was there, so the money had not been released.