Am I the only one tearing their hair out over the student loan company

[eatyourveg]

Filled out the online form - looked straightforward. Assumed everything was fine.

Letter from student finance England requesting confirmation of salary.

Ring student finance England to ask if its P60 or details of carers allowance or both. They have no record of me dh or ds existing on their system!

Send P60 and carers allowance details

Get a phone call to confirm salary as the online form has me down as earning 100x more than my P60. Confirm salary verbally and laugh the whole thing off and assume all is sorted

Scroll forward 3 weeks and letter comes today to say thank you for sending financial statements, they don't tally with what you filled in online please start again

Aaaaaagh!!

Oh yes, welcome to the wonderful world of student finance !

I'm into my third year of it... one child is in her 2nd year , another starts Uni in September (and complicates it with a NHS degree course so another set of forms to do)

They are a bloody nightmare. with DD1 we ended up giving up doing it online and requested paper copy ..it was MUCH easier that way. On the plus side..after the first year of doing them it does become easier (for that child) as they already have the details....

We are permanently having problems with Student Finance mainly because when they write to ask for information they don't actually give you the name of the form they want. In the end they stopped her grant until we had a long conversation with the only helpful person we have spoken to who managed to sort out this year's money. They still wanted her to pay her grant back out of next year's money but we think it is now sorted.

We have had to complain to our MP and we think it is now sorted out but you never know.

Dd is in her second year and they told her everything was in order but they check up on a certain number of claimants each year and we were the unlucky ones. They will probably pick on us next year because we complained.

I too am sick of them. They refused the counter signature on Ds's form, despite the fact that the passport office accepted it.

They sent a letter telling us to refill in all the forms as there were msitakes on the ones we sent in. They didn't bother to tell us what the mistakes were........so we sent them in again, and they sent them back agan etc etc etc. Eventually in a fury I phoned them, but of course, ds had to phone them.
.......and so it went on. Eventually found out that it was the above problem.

It went to appeal. God knows what has happened now. They have had ds's birth certificate for 3 months

Doesn't bode well. I didn't realise Medusa that you could do the whole thing on paper rather than online. That would be much easier as I could keep photocopies of everything. Is there an official booklet/guide to the whole thing? - everything I have read so far just points you to the website.

Don't get me started - I was a mature student, the SLC kept telling me thay had not recieved a form from LEA (few years ago) LEA said we have sent it.

This went on for weeks with the LEA saying they had sent it, resent it etc. SLC said they had form A but not form B, I went yet again to the LEA who told me that forms A and B were on opposite sides of the same piece of paper!

Some idiot kept scanning one side of the paper and not the other and the SLC people won't walk over to where the paper copies are kept, they just rely on what is on their screen.

God I thought it was just me!

I'm still waiting for my grant to come through for THIS year

If they'd given me a list of required documents at the outset I would have willingly provided them.But no they drip feed their requests, copy of this,original of that, (didn't help I don't have a passport as I can't afford to renew it)

I'm terrified now that they'll say no & I've all but finished this year, will college demand I pay? The bursar is sure it'll pan out & is as supportive as she can be but it's a worry.

I think that SFE clearly have the same ethos & training standards as the CSA

They don't TELL you it's all available on paper.. they used to but not anymore..you have to ring and ask.. but it is SO much easier because you can send all the info at once..complete..signed etc.

Ring them and tell them your computer is dead and you need to do it on paper:)
I have done two years of this so far and have another three to go as DD1 is doing medicine and DD2 will start her degree in september. If you ever hear on the news that someone has gone berserk and gunned down the student finance offices, it will probably be me...!

They are the most disorganised bunch of fuckwits I've ever had the nonpleasure of dealing with.

I'm part time so have to fill in a paper copy, and they STILL managed to lose about four separate parts of it, notifying me separately for each one

I can't apply for help with childcare until I get it through, it eventually came through AFTER the end of term 2. I don't NEED childcare in term 3, because there are about 3 lectures, and one day of exams. I am now wondering whether to bother going through the lengthy application process just to be told "We can't backdate this, here's some towards childcare in term 3"

(Though a backdate would be amazing! )

If you have to phone them, press 0 straight away. Saves you having to go through the whole rigmarole of putting in your birth date etc and the general enquiries people seem a bit more knowledgable than some of the others.

betelguese once they found the DSA forms were they reasonably speedy? My DS has just sent his forms off. Hopefully we are quite early so they won't have a backlog, but one just never knows how these things work. Seeing your post has made me very worried....

16 minutes on the phone to SFE and 3 lots of being put on hold only to be told they can't send me a hard copy of the guidance

"Its available to download from the website"
So what if I am visually impaired and can't get online to download it I say

You can ask your college to get a copy for you

And where do they get a copy from

I don't know, its not us!

I also wanted to ask them what they mean when they talk about household income before tax but after pension and allowances for dependent children - specifically what allowances for dependent children meant but I'd had enough.

Anyone know what it might mean? I assume something to do with how many children you have - do they knock a set amount per child off your income if so how much.

I think they are just about as incompetent as you can get!

Currently I'm applying for student finance for second son, eldest is already a student. We filled in all the forms online and was told no further evidence was needed ( Although I'm divorced thye had seen my decree absolute when eldest son applied 2 years ago so system said they didn't need it again)
Letter arrived in post saying they needed to see decree! I phoned them up and the conversation went

Hello, I've received a letter saying you need to see my decree and was just checking you did.

yes we do

It's just that the computer system said you didn't as you've already seen it

Oh well, we won't then

So why have I got a letter asking for it

Just in case we need to see it

Well do you

I'll check, no we 've already seen it,

so do I ignore the letter then

yes, that would be fine

I gave up!

The only way to deal with SFE is to submit all applications on paper, take a photocopy and send it by recorded delivery.

I'm now on my fourth DC and in my fourth jaded year....

Oh God................... We're preparing for our first year of this. Sounds like a complete nightmare.

My DD rang me and said 'you need to call student loans as they asked for more financial information about you'

I rang them and after explaining, I was told 'we can't discuss your DD's application without her consent'

I said 'I have her consent, I'm her parent. She told me to call you'

reply 'no, she has to call us or you can phone together'

I said 'we can't phone together she's 300 miles away'

reply 'I can't discuss your DD, tell her to phone'

I said 'but you told DD to get me to call you. I have her ID number and her permission'

reply 'I can only talk to your DD'

I hung up at this point.

We've been in a bit of a kafkaesque nightmare with student finance. Ds1 and Ds2 are both applying at the moment for September 2012. Ds2 started the process at college and manage to not tick the box about parents He's now reached a stalemate with the process as they need the parents customer reference number. Which we have never been sent because he ticked the wrong box. And he can't go back into the online form and tick the right box because the system won't allow it.

It turns out that because Dh and I both had student loans which we took out 15 years ago when at Uni the parents customer reference number is the same as our reference number for our student loans. If this customer reference number is the right one, then that's great, student finance will have all our income details for the last 15 years. But that would indicate two different Government departments being joined up in their records which I can't quite believe.

We need to get Ds1 to sort his forms out and put our reference numbers down and then somehow get Student finance to join their applications together to take into account we are supporting two students at the same time.

I'm holding my breathe on this one. I'll update when we are further through the process.

Love someone else apart from me experiencing a Kafkaesque nightmare :). Thank you dinasaw.

I forgot to add: tape record all conversations and if you can afford it, draft in the services of a particularly acute private detecive. Belts and braces too in the shape of noting down in a separate written file the details of all conversations, the names of the relevant SFE operators and the precise dates and times that the denied conversations took place.

All these stories are making me very nervous.

DH and I are starting degrees this year, and it's already a PITA. Fingers crossed.

If you apply for the straight forward loan without any proof of income needed its really straight forward

Our nightmare continues. Ds1 has put mine and Dh's student loan reference numbers into the system as our customer reference numbers. He tells us we have been sent an email. Guess what, no email. That's because student finance have sent the email to an email address I had in 1996 when I took out my student loan. I now have to ring student finance and get my email address changed

Who was the biscuit for, dinasaw? Can I have it? I am more deserving than SFE. They finally wrote to ask if DS1 still wanted his loan in June of his first academic year, by which time he had long since given up as he couldn't afford to live in the city his university is in and the one & half hour, 2 change of trains each way from home made him too tired to concentrate on study!