It's difficult to adequately describe the levels of frustration and stress that dealing with Student Finance England has caused recently.
Several weeks ago we received a plain email containing a PDF document saying that we needed to hand over some evidence about our household earnings. I wasn't about to attach anything to an email and reply, but Student Finance England have a portal. So, we logged into the portal and uploaded what we thought was the evidence requested. The portal told us that the information we had uploaded was correct and everything was good.
Great stuff.
Then, a couple of weeks ago we got a terrifying email saying that we hadn't supplied any evidence and that the finance for the student could now be withdrawn. Terrified, I hurriedly logged into the portal, but again, everything seemed to be in order. The site still said that everything was great and I didn't need to do anything.
Since nothing appeared to be incorrect, I attempted to get in contact with Student Finance to find out what was going wrong. After quite a while of digging through a bunch of "help" pages I found a contact telephone number, which is where the real fun began.
The contact phone number led me to an automated system, on which I spent about 30 minutes going through menus only to be told that "everything was online, you do not need to contact us via phone" and being disconnected from the call. This happened over and over again until I managed to type in the correct sequence of menu options to get through to a human operator.
Well, eventually, it took me another 45 minutes of being on hold before I managed to talk to someone.
Since I the information on the portal didn't appear to be correct, I thought talking to a person might help. The conversation I had was largely pointless, and the person on the other end couldn't really tell me what was going on.
That seemed a bit strange; they couldn't even tell me why the email had been sent or what information was missing from the evidence I was meant to supply. They did have one lesson and that was that I needed to download the PDF document from the plain text email, fill it in, and upload that to the portal. Nowhere was this explained to me, the correspondence just said that we needed to supply evidence.
The operative also said that they couldn't tell me how long it would take before I did know if we had supplied the correct information.
I spent the next couple of hours filling in the PDF and uploading as many bits of evidence to the portal as possible. Some 15 different PFD documents in all.
Now, we play a waiting game. I think I have uploaded the correct information this time. The portal still tells me that everything is in place and I don't need to do anything, so I have no idea if the evidence I have uploaded is enough.
Also, they sent me a questionnaire about what my interaction was like. Most of this was the typical bunch of questions about my what I thought about this or that, in a range of values.
The only time they did ask me to fill in any details, the boxes only had 500 characters. I can't express the nuance of this farse in just 500 characters! Not only has the experience been frustrating, but the feedback was equally as ill thought out and frustrating as well.