Student Finance Direct has Messed me around!

flimbles_2

The student finance company is a complete joke.

I'm on a PGCE and in the past 2 weeks I got the first part a coupe of weeks ago and I applied in September!

The main part I applied for a couple of weeks later though is for my childcare support and parents learning allowance, for which it has been intimated that it could b another 5 to 6 weeks! all the while, i have credit card companies chasing me - childcare costs i can't meet, and all this massive stress on top of training to be a teacher!

How can they be allowed to mess people around like this?

My own opinion? They hold everyone up so that their phone lines are always busy, so you ring their 0845 number and they can earn some money of it.

They are basically government backed con artists.

Sorry Rant over

Taiko

flimbles wrote: »

The student finance company is a complete joke.

I'm on a PGCE and in the past 2 weeks I got the first part a coupe of weeks ago and I applied in September!

The main part I applied for a couple of weeks later though is for my childcare support and parents learning allowance, for which it has been intimated that it could b another 5 to 6 weeks! all the while, i have credit card companies chasing me - childcare costs i can't meet, and all this massive stress on top of training to be a teacher!

How can they be allowed to mess people around like this?

My own opinion? They hold everyone up so that their phone lines are always busy, so you ring their 0845 number and they can earn some money of it.

They are basically government backed con artists.

Sorry Rant over

Soryr to be perfectly blunt with you here, but what do you expect? The deadline to apply if you wanted payments for the start of your course was the end of June. You applied a good 2 months late, so you forfeit any rights to complain in my opinion. You need to take responsibility for your own actions here.

flimbles_2

I accept I was latter, but I did not have confirmation I was on the course until September - even so, how can it take over 3 months to process an application that is supposed to take between 4 & 6 weeks? That was for the standard part.

I am dealing with the situation, and I accept it, but what I don't get is ho can it take so long to process these applications? Especially with their new £30 million pound computer system to speed things up.

Taiko

In September, you get the rush of course changes, updates to fees, administration of payments and an increase volume of calls. October/November is usually taken up with additional things for disabled students, finalising provisional assessments and system updates.

As someone who has worked in an LEA processing applications for the last 4 years, I know how it goes. I take all my own students calls as we do not have a call centre seperate to answer calls for us, and I can process alone around about 20 applications in full per 7.5 hour day at least. SFE have 490 staff, although how many of those are assigned to assessing applications I don't know. I know the call centres are kept away from the assessments team though, who don't even take calls from LEA's anymore.

Now, if they're not taking calls, and say all 490 are assessors, they should at least be processing 9,800 assessments a week. Instead, it's been a lot of double handling, as they opted to give everyone non-means tested support and then reassess later down the line. This was against advice I gave back in January 2009. It was at this stage I posted warnings that this would happen on here and other student sites, which were ignored.