More than 20,000 university students in England who received government maintenance loans and grants worth thousands of pounds have been told they will have to pay them back because their universities wrongly told them they were eligible for the money.
About 22,000 students studying for weekend courses at 15 universities and colleges have received letters from Student Finance England, part of the government-owned Student Loans Company, telling them they must hand back the money because their university “made an error when providing your course details to us. Unfortunately, they didn’t tell us you only attended on [sic] the weekend.”
According to Department for Education rules, students attending weekend-only courses are not eligible to take out long-term maintenance loans to cover living expenses. The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, blamed “either incompetence or abuse of the system” on the part of the universities for “let[ting] their students down” and wrongly registering their weekend courses, resulting in incorrect payments worth a total of £190m.
“This is not students’ fault,” she said in a statement. “Many of these organisations lack the necessary governance and oversight to properly implement clear guidance. Others have used this loophole as another opportunity to abuse public money. Either way, this is not the standard I expect from our world-class university sector.”
But several of the 15 affected institutions – which are understood to include Bath Spa, Solent and Oxford Brookes universities – have said they are considering a legal challenge to the decision.
“We are extremely concerned that thousands of maintenance loan payments to students across the country have been abruptly blocked,” said London Metropolitan University and a number of other unnamed institutions in a statement released through the sector’s representative body Universities UK. “Many of us are currently working together to take legal advice to challenge the actions of the Department for Education and the Student Loans Company.”
The National Union of Students has called the situation a “scandal” that had been “devastating for the affected students”, who would otherwise not have been required to repay the loans until their earnings rose above a set threshold. The NUS president, Amira Campbell, told the Guardian that many of those facing abrupt repayment demands were less well off students with family responsibilities, who were forced to work during the week to be able to afford to study.
“A lot of these students are people that have never had access to education, who entered into the working world and started families before [thinking]: ‘Actually, why shouldn’t I have the ability to become a more skilled member of our workforce?’” she said.
“These maintenance loans are a lifeline for mature students wanting to access higher education, and to see this being taken away is a massive access issue for a government that’s been talking about wanting people from non-traditional backgrounds to be able to access higher education. This feels completely at odds with that mission.”
One student, Cosmin Visan, 34, told the Guardian that both he and his partner, Elena Braisteanu, 25, have been studying weekend courses in business management at the London College of Contemporary Arts, while he works on construction sites during the week and she cares for their seven-month-old son.
While they have not yet been formally told how much they will need to pay back, he estimates they may jointly have to repay more than £30,000. He said he “can’t really find the words” to describe the level of stress he and his wife are experiencing. “My partner is starting to experience some signs of anxiety. I can’t show anything, but I’m pretty distressed about it,” Cosmin said.
Though the couple have since transferred to midweek courses, he says the repayment demands may mean they both have to withdraw from university to find work, though they would then have to find a childcare solution, and “I don’t really know what we would do.”
He said he blamed the government for not making the rules clear enough, and also his college, which is delivering the course under franchise from the University for the Creative Arts. “They’ve been taking advantage of it, and now we find ourselves in this situation.”
