Tuition fees demand from current University

[Titterofwit]

My Dd started University with a foundation course in a subject which she passed and then began a 4 year course in the same subject. On starting the course she and some other student realised that it wasnt set to go in the direction they thought and applied to change courses . This was agreed by the university so she didnt attend after october 2019 . She then started a 3 year course which she is getting on well with.
She has now had all of her access to online study blocked as the university want full tuition fees for the year she didnt attend.
She has been sensible and tried to manage this by contacting the student finance department who have only asked if she had a good reason(possibly sickness /family circs we think) for changing the course. She hasnt ,except misdirection from her course leader.
She has been worried sick before approaching me as I have no money to help her and she only has a 7 hour contract at work so the thought of trying to raise £9000.00 as a 20 year old is daunting to say the least.
Has anyone any thoughts or avenues we can use to try to resolve this .
If she needs to pay there is no question that she will try to wriggle out of it but it seems unfair for her to have to pay for unattended courses.

There is a formal process to follow to withdraw from a course. Did she follow that process? Emails between your DD and the course leader won't be sufficient. You need to find out from your daughter what the process is and see if she followed it - she may have assumed that the course leader was notifying the uni, she may have thought that the emails were sufficiently formal notice or she may have done everything correctly and it is an error on the part of the uni. She needs to take you step by step through what happened.

She needs to go back to both uni and SLC with confirmation of her withdrawal and check they updated their systems. Did her Student Loan confirmation for this year state which year it applied to ? Did she make a new application for the new course or renew the existing one?Surely her fee funding would not run out until year 2 of new course at the earliest.

@bibliomania

Agree with you itchy.

Itchy!!!

Okay. I have seen the record of payments and there was only one terms payment for tuition fees. However - there were two terms payments for maintenance. I wasnt aware of that as I had no need to know before this.
So does that change your advice Itchy Titchy

It would be so much easier to cope with if it was only one terms maintenence loan plus one terms tuition she would have to pay back .

She is still waiting for a response from student finance though and is exhausted by all of the toing and froing of this. Once we have a answer from them we will know that she can continue her studies and will use your combined advice to tackle the university.

She shouldn’t have taken the last two instalments of student finance maintenance payments. She was no longer a student and not entitled to it.

However as far as I’m aware the maintenance payments are a separate issue to fees payment. The university should only charge her a third of the fees (max) for the term she left.

She needs to contact the students union asap. They have people who can advise her, help draft emails and advocate for her.

Ok - so she needs to repay the extra terms maintenance and fees for the first term of this year (normally 25% of the total year). She was silly not to check the extra maintenance payments - I'm guessing she's spent this money?

Or she leaves things as they are and pays a full years tuition fees...

Harsh lesson - but check if someone gives you money you think you're not entitled to and check impact of deciding to change courses part way through.

Once the fee position is sorted btw she should be able to arrange a payment plan with her uni - we'd rather a student paid monthly instalment over a year than have them drop out again.

I can't see how they can charge a full years fees if it was agreed she could change course. You could try contacting your MP. If you find a means of paying you could then try to claim it back. It doesn't sound right to me if the university agreed to the change of course.

What she will have added to her student loan for the part year studied and what actually being enrolled for any part of that year will have done to her entitlement to further funding are separate issues.

From the government website, regarding the latter point:

If you changed course, stopped your studies or are repeating a year

If you stopped your course within the first year, you’ll get funding for the same course or a new course when you go back.

You might also get funding if you:

suspended your course or withdrew before it finished - and you’re going back to study any courseare repeating a year of your course at the same university, college, or institution.

If you stopped your studies for a personal reason(for example, you were ill or pregnant) you might get funding for all of your course - you should apply online with supporting evidence.

You can calculate the amount you will get by taking the total number of years of the course you are applying for and adding one year. Then take away the number of years you studied for. If you studied for part of a year you should count it as a whole year.

www.gov.uk/student-finance/who-qualifies

The overpayment of maintenance loan would normally be required to be repaid immediately, not added to the loan to be paid back later. If she actually received two instalments that year, that would imply that she was actually enrolled for the second term (and presumably noticed that this sum had been paid into her bank account...?).

Just seen your other post. If she accepted the maintenance payments its a far more tricky situation re was she on the course or wasnt she.

I can see that the 2nd maintenence payment should not have been paid to her. I asked her why she accepted it and she said that she had some thought that she would just not qualify for this years full entitlement somehow. She wasnt clear how it all worked -nor am I to be honest. Its only reading your excellent responses that its becoming clearer.

But as I said earlier she isnt an expert in student finance and wasnt aware that she needed to know more than was being told to her. Sadly she has little in the way of confirmation in email form except the details her course leader sent.
But yes - its a hard lesson and if we can get her back into her studies she will be more aware -of course this will never happen to her again so its not going to be something she can build on - except dont trust University tutors in the same way you can trust your school and college teachers. She cant believe that nobody ensured that she understood the implications and Im kicking myself that I didnt ask more questions at the time.

The first maintenance payment would have been made as soon as the university confirmed that the student had enrolled in September. But the second payment should not have been made (in January), if the student had officially left the university at some point in the first term - as soon as the university confirmed (I assume that the university has to do this) that she was no longer a student there, payments would be stopped and the overpayment on the first one would become due for repayment. So possibly there was delay in telling SFE that she had left until after the point at which the second payment had been made? But it still would have been due to be paid back at the time - and it is still irrelevant to the eligibilty or otherwise for a loan for the first year of her new course.

The issue is not with the payments to the university for previous tuition, it is with her SFE entitlement. SFE considers any time spent on a course as a whole year, so those few weeks have cost her an entire year of entitlement to SFE funding.

She is entitled to finance for:

1. the length of her current degree (3 years)
2. plus one gift year (3 years plus 1 year = 4 years),
3. minus the number of years she has spent previously enrolled in HE (4 years minus 2 years = 2 years finance remaining).

Her finance looks like this:
2018-2019 - Foundation Year - Previous study - covered by SFE Gift Year
2019-2020 - Couple of months of Year 1 of old degree - Previous study - SFE Year 1
2020-2021 - Year 1 of new degree - No finance
2021-2022 - Year 2 of new degree - SFE Year 2
2022-2023 - Year 3 of new degree - SFE Year 3

The one term's tuition from the old degree will be added to her student loan, but that is not the problem here.

Her taking the maintenance loan after she withdrew is also a different issue.

As she was planning to return to her studies, she was not required to repay the overpaid maintenance amount immediately and can have chosen to have it removed from her future entitlement instead. This means she will be without maintenance for one term and a bit terms.

Another issue here is that the second payment may mean that the university did not inform SFE of her withdrawal properly and she will find herself with 2 terms of tuition fees added to her student loan rather than just one. That is something to address separately.

Unfortunately, the best thing she can do is probably to approach the university and ask them about any hardship funds, repayment schemes and so on that she might be eligible for. They may be able to find her some help, particularly as her Foundation year was also with them.

You don't have to be an expert in student finance to know that if you are not studying then you should not be getting maintenance loans!

She spoke to her tutor within the first 2 weeks but stupidly didnt do anything until October. She isnt clear on dates but probably school half term time.

Most universities have very clear regulations & deadlines about withdrawal and transfer. It looks like she didn't follow through with the university to do this properly.