It has been 5 months (October) since I applied and they still haven't sorted it out. I have called them over 5 times and each time they just ask for a different document; saying that my submitted document which they asked for during the previous call, is completely irrelevant. I have started university now, and my loan hasn't been approved yet. Now they want to do a check that's going to take 20-30 days. I had to pay my termly accommodation costs out of my savings.

I am the parent of a student (daughter 23ys) who I am still forced to support as an adult. Student finance England are probably the most useless and incompetant organisation (closely followed by British Telecom) who I have ever dealt with. Staff, systems, computer systems are all unfit for purpose and just make you want to give up doing the right thing.

Totally useless service received, the staff I would say were completely incompetent didn't have a clue how to answer my queries pass you about. I wrote formal complaint they said twice can't speak to you because it's not your account the complaint refers to when it was my account. I wish I never had to deal with such incompetence company.

Staff have no clue what they are doing. Money was incorrectly taken from my salary through PAYE and has not been allocated to my account. The tax office have confirmed the amount deducted and I have sent a P60 to confirm the amounts but SLC are blaming the tax office for not sending the full information. 18 months on I'm still trying to resolve the issue. I am constantly put on hold so staff can 'speak to a colleague' which shows me they are unable to do their job. Nearly £1000 is 'missing' from my loan repayments and the SLC keep making promises to resolve it but the letters they send my to confirm my correct balance are useful and only valid for a limited amount of time. After that the statements are still wrong and interest is accumulated on money I have already paid back.

I had a tuition fee loan from the Students Loan Company Ltd while studying in Wales. After my graduation I moved back to Finland and I was fine paying my loan back at the rate the company requested. However, suddenly my monthly payment schedule ended but I was not informed in anyway. I did not receive any letters, phone calls or anything from the company. I naively thought that perhaps I had payed my loan in total as no inquiries about my payment schedule were made. Then after 11 months (!!) I was contacted by debt collection telling me I have almost a £1000 to pay at once or else it'd be a legal issue. I wasn't sure whether they were legit company or not as I live in Finland and had never heard of such company. I requested that the students loans company would contact me so that I could be sure I actually had such arrears and I'd be happy to pay. After a month another person from the same debt collection contacted me with even more arrears due. I was so annoyed and after paying I contacted Students loan company that they handled the situation very very poorly and their way of communicating to outside the UK is appalling. All they had to say was sorry you felt that way and urged me to make another payment program. Would not use this company again and cannot recommend it.

Total incompetence!! Have stopped my child's loan! They requested payslip eveidence 3 times, on the third time we called to ask why and turns out they couldn't read the small print once they scanned the document in?! So their fault?! instead of saying this they just kept asking again?!? We sent it in A1. Absolutely immense in their inability to complete simple task as read the original or ask for bigger print in the new request. Caused judge stress during my child dissertation!!

On receipt of the letter querying my daughters current employment status I called Student Loans Co (SLC) and spoke to a (very rude) woman, to explain that my daughter is currently overseas travelling and so cannot deal with it. The SLC operative said she should have filled in an Overseas Income Assessment form before leaving and asked how she could afford to travel if she has borrowed money as a student and also how she is supporting herself if not working. She pointed out that “this was a loan not a gift and so needs to be paid back ASAP”!. She implied that my daughter should be should be paying it back now rather than travelling. She said that in the 21st century they have phones in all countries so she should ring them . Her tone was rude and arrogant and the nature of what she said extremely inappropriate. I tried to explain that my daughter was very thorough and would filled in any forms required but that having discussed with her that she had never been made aware of the need to complete such form. The operative insolently said ‘ Oh so she can phone you then!” I explained we communicated via WhatsApp… The operative then went on to say that despite my not having any Power of Attorney that I was to sign the Overseas Income Assessment Form on my daughters behalf which I found odd as on all previous occasions the Student Finance Office they insisted on dealing with my daughter direct and refused to deal with me even when authorised to do so. I explained that there is nowhere on the form for a parent to sign on a student’s behalf and she replied “don’t worry about that just sign it where she should sign anyway”. Due to the wording on the form this would clearly not be legal. I was shocked that I was instructed to commit a crime and at the rude, unprofessional manner in which my enquiry was handled. My daughter has not worked other than as a temp for a few months so is well under the threshold (as they would know if departments communicated and exercised a little joined up thinking) and is funding the trip from savings. To have been spoken to in such a judgemental and rude way was way out of order. No doubt SLC will continue to get away with rude, immoral and unintelligent conduct despite everything thing flagged up here but who knows maybe someone who can make a difference will pick up on it - so am reporting my experience in that hope.

Student Loans Company. The answer to all of your university funding problems....or maybe the cause. It seems like SLC are onto a winner from a business point of view. Give complicated loan information and forms to 18 year olds. Morally it's abysmal. 18 year olds don't know what they're agreeing to and with little to no other option regards funding their university education they happily sign their little lives away (Need a kidney SLC?! Take two!!). Legally, it's perfect! They're 18! 18 year olds are 'technically' adults so you can get them to sign contracts with no fall back on you, because hey if they don't understand what they're agreeing to, well that's their problem not yours! I applied for a student loan to go to university back in 2013. However due to circumstances beyond my control I was unable to stay at university. I was only there for 10 days. 10. That's not a lot. You can count them on your hands. You don't even need to use your toes. I contacted SLC about the money they had paid me which I was now obviously not entitled to. I was told not to worry and they would be in touch shortly. Well I hear you ask, were they in touch shortly? Ehhh...it depends on what you define as shortly. If you call two months on a loan that is accruing interest shortly then ding ding ding we have a winner! I received a letter headed with big bold letters 'RECOVERY OF OVERPAID GRANT' for £630. Accompanied with the request to 'please pay the overpayment to us now'. 'Now'. 'Now' is a very threatening word when you're 18 and on the verge of a complete mental breakdown. I didn't have £630. I didn't even have 630p. The people at SLC agreed that I could pay in monthly instalments. They gave me an account number and sort code over the phone in which I was to deposit these payments. Did I receive a confirmation letter regarding this on official letter headed paper assuring me that I was in fact paying money to SLC and not an SLC employees private bank account? No. No I did not. Because SLC are shady AF. I continued making these payments for 15 months hoping for the best, that these payments were in fact coming off of my loan repayment amount. But after 15 months and receiving no acknowledgment of payment either via email or post, monthly or even an annual statement you begin to seriously worry about what's going on. So I stopped the payments. Thought I'd see if the money was actually going where I hoped it was. Turns out it was. But it also turns out that SLC don't like to acknowledge payments. They do however like to jump on you  when they aren't receiving your money. I received another letter this time asking for more than the original amount. What happened to the money you had already paid of I hear you cry? Well SLC, the sneaky little weasels that they are, decided to take this moment to inform me they had found more money I could pay them back. How did they do it? A kindly worded letter informing me of the amount I now owed and explaining why? No. Just a big bold 'Balance Due' and a bid bold '7 days'. A la the girl from the ring. 7 days. Thankfully I have wonderful parents who possess a credit card. They paid the amount off for me and enquired to SLC about getting a statement to show the account balance. Will there be more to pay? Is that now clear? Because if there was more to pay they would have paid it off for me and I could have paid them back without them threatening to send bailiffs round, or the girl from the ring to eat my face. However, we were told that SLC don't send statements out. Imagine that! A loans company that won't give you a statement showing your account balance!...I wonder why? Perhaps because it's harder to suddenly spring new money demands on people when you've sent them a statement saying their balance is cleared. Anyway that was that. It was paid off....or was it?! *Cue Eastenders style duff duffs* MORE LETTERS!!! (6 months later) The 1st one telling me I owed around £200. That was nothing though the second wanted £1200 with 7 days. the person I dealt with from the ring was back. I was a barmaid at this point and as we all know barmaids are grossly overpaid so I was wondering what to do with my spare £1400. Luckily for me SLC were there to save the day. Not really. I was poor. Thankfully my parents were there for me again armed with a credit card to protect me from the bailiffs. I can't imagine they'd be best pleased either when they realised all I had for them to repossess was a car that had a leaky roof and so the passenger footwell could sometimes be used as a swimming pool. The best part of all of this was when I pointed out I had already paid a lot of money off, they spent a while looking into my accounts and Oops! Yes I had paid off a substantial amount! Good job I was paying attention because SLC certainly weren't. Anyway, what remained was paid off and we were told not to worry, that would be the end of it. No more letters demanding money. I could live a peaceful existence. Or so I thought. Another letter! But wait! What is this one?! SLC must be running some kind of Ministry of Magic because this letter had come straight from the Department of Mysteries! It was a statement! Oooooo! *Que creepy music* The mystical statement. Only sighted in the SLC offices when the planets align on the night of a full moon. This statement was for the 3 year period between April 2013-April 2016. I received this statement in August 2016. What were SLC doing with this statement for 4/5months? Is it such a rare occurrence that they didn't want to let go and wanted to treasure it for just a bit longer? The statement was asking for yet more money! Of course it was! SLC don't write to you unless they want more money. Speaking to them on the phone again I was informed that I did infact owe more money. I was also told that the Government set a rule so that SLC only had to send a statement after 3 years. That's all well and good but if you are a loan company and someone requests a statement for their account you have to give them one. Anyway. I've (once again) been told that's it now. All paid off. No more letters. That remains to be seen though. I wouldn't be surprised though if when I die they have a rummage through my coffin to see if I've been buried with anything good.

To get anything done with SLC you need patience and plenty of it. I had a change of circumstances and needed to relay this information back to the SLC. We went backwards and forwards with evidence to the point where I didn't want to keep incurring postage fees and so requested if I could send the evidence in via PDF in an email. After inaction here I escalated it to the complaints department and even here things were dog slow to get anything done. They then went ahead a deducted money from my account without reviewing the new evidence. I was on the verge to escalating this yet further to an external body when it finally got reviewed. It took 4 months from my first contact to resolving my case. Abysmal customer service.

I don't think I have ever encountered a fellow student who hasn't at one point or the other had some sort of problem with the SLC. To call this organisation cretinous is an understatement. Even if you do everything they say, when they say it, they will find some way to lose you documents, your application, or generally balls up your life. You will ring them up, they will fob you off, you will be infuriated as you realise they really can't tell their rectum from their elbow. You start to feel they are proud of their ineffectualities, finding it hard to give you a simple answer, or solution; I mean why should they know what they need from you!? It is seriously a joke, the funny bit being they feel that being this incompetent is acceptable. Chances are you will have little choice but to go with them, and it seems the money you get 'loaned' get's paid much easier than any that is 'granted'; read into that what you will. I just wouldn't rely on them getting the money to you on time or when you need it.

They overcharged me and took payments despite me paying the remainder of my loan over the phone and being "guaranteed" they wouldn't take extra payments. No surprise then when they took an extra payment, demanded inordinate amounts of paperwork to prove the point and lied to me numerous times about paperwork sent. They did not arrange a refund until I threatened legal action, and have now refunded me LESS than they took. Disgusting.

SLC has taken every possible step to make repaying my loan as difficult as possible. They insist on using antiquated methods of communication to ensure I can not get any information from them. I made the mistake of filing a complaint which has resulted in abuse from staff every time I call the helpline. Staff are being deliberately difficult and unhelpful, lying to me about information I have sent in.

Called up SLC to make a final settlement payment. It all went smoothly, SLC took the payment within 2 days, and I was assured that there would be no more further deductions. Fast forward one month and SLC continued to deduct money for a debt that no longer exists!! I then spent an hour on the phone trying to resolve it, but the only thing I can do is send a cover letter and 4 months of payslips to proof I was overcharged! If I don't do this SLC won't correct it and repay me for a WHOLE YEAR. What a joke this company is. They promise you one thing, take your money without any problem, then overcharge you and expect you to do all the legwork to fix it...completely useless organisation

Student Loans Company England's customer service hotline is an absolute shambles. For an organisation with so much money, apparently run by the government (gov.uk), and so much power over the lives of future students their service they provide needs to be better regulated and managed. So many wasted hours waiting for them to answer, and when they do answer, they are mostly useless. You get told your tuition fee is being paid in one call, and in the other they tell you you have the wrong course code so you can't get the tuition fee unless you fill out a change of circumstances form which they can't fill out because they don't have it on their database and so on and so on. I believe that these ploys are put in place so students have to spend more money ringing their call centres. Thanks for the loan, but please, please, get your customer service centre sorted.

What a bunch of incompetent useless unhelpful moronic bottom holes

I graduated in 2004 having taken out a £12000 loan with the Student Loans Company. I was paying it through PAYE for 6 years totalling £7000 and I still owe over £12000!! I only ever paid their interest off. I now live in Australia and every year send them my financial update of which there has never been a problem until now. 3 overseas phones calls and several emails later I still cant access my account, they told me on the phone not to worry as no money would be taken form me without my knowledge which was a complete lie as they took £344 from my UK account (I stupidly didn't delete the direct debit when I moved overseas) which then took me overdrawn and charges incurred. When I called to ask why this had happened they said I had no proof of what I had been told so nothing they could do. They said they would continue to take £344 every month from the account until they could assess my situation. They only accept information sent by post or fax (do they really live in this century???)so emailing them is pretty useless and the website is just terrible. I have closed the account but they now request a UK bank account only which is stupid for people living overseas. I'm still waiting to hear more from them so the saga continues...............

Towards the end of the loan repayment process they will ask you to switch to direct debit repayments instead of PAYE. This is because their incompetence does not allow them to know when you have finished paying your loan. It does however mean that there is an overlap and they take more than they are owed. An awful service and one I would strongly advise against. I have never written a review before but these guys are useless.

Student Loans Company are a complete shambles. They lost financial evidence we sent them, wrote letters to the wrong parent asking for the wrong information, and refused to admit their errors until only four weeks before the start of term. The situation is still unresolved and despite now having sent them the information they requested THREE TIMES we are still no nearer getting things sorted out. Quite the worst customer support I have ever experienced.