SL bloody C

This week has been great and I’ve learned a lot and I’ve a lot to blog about, but right now I can’t actually take my focus off the bloody Student Loans Company – or, for that matter, the striking postal workers.

Between them, they are making my life an absolute hell, resolutely working together to mean I have no student finance, until today no student bank account and all together too much stress for the first week at uni.

In order for me to be able to claim my student grants and loans (and pay my tuition fees), LIPA have to log on to the SLC website and register me using my student number. My student number was sent to me in the post before I came, but I unfortunately left it at home. No problem, though, because the day after I arrived, K posted it up to me.

Of course, she posted it in the middle of the postal strike and, over a week later, it still hasn’t reached me. I think laterally and get K instead to go through my home emails and dig up the number that the SLC emailed me. I take that to the finance office at uni, who tell me it’s the wrong number. This is my customer reference number, not the student number – starting in a series of 3 letters – that they need.

Not a problem, I think to myself, and shuffle off to the uni computers to log on to the SLC website (with my customer reference number) and find my student number, which will of course be on there because that’s where all the details of my claim are.

But no. They don’t have the student number on their websites. They also don’t answer the phone when you call, instead leaving a very polite message saying we’re busy and then disconnecting.

So I have no student number and therefore the SLC don’t believe I’m at uni and therefore they won’t pay my money.

What this means is that the £900 grant I should already have had paid to me to kick start me off of benefits – which I’d been on up to now – isn’t being paid into my account. It also means that the £1000+ first semester’s student loan that was due into my account on Monday won’t go it. It also means that if I don’t get the letter and the number through from the SLC before the end of next week (end of September) I’m also going to find myself liable for paying the full £3,200 tuition fees for the years.

You may now, I hope, begin to appreciate why the joys of this week’s learning have paled somewhat into the background while I have to spend the whole weekend trying to work out how the **** I’m supposed to get my student number before Thursday.

I’m not a happy bunny.

For the record, though – the course is awesome. I’m off to measure up a piece of wall and convert it to 1:25 scale.