Issue 3

Regular column Focus on processing
Nichola Malton talks about processing late applications and how you can help students who are worried about not getting paid on time.

Nichola Malton picture

Nichola Malton

Nichola has worked in student finance for 11 years, originally at a local authority and for SLC since 2006. Nichola looks after the Assessment Services Department in Processing and she is responsible for entitlement assessment for SFE and EU customers.

The 2016/17 service has now launched, and for some of us, this year will be our 11th cycle of application processing in Darlington. Most of the operational processing areas are taking on new staff and are supporting them through their training and development. There is a lot of coordination between the business areas and our partners in HR, Learning and Development and finance to achieve this. The processing staff have also been attending their training for 2016/17 changes, in terms of policy changes, cross skilling and internal process updates, making sure all our guidance and work instructions are updated.

We have already processed some 2016/17 applications and carried out evidence checking. The automatic roll over and creation of returning non-income assessed student applications is also well under way. This means that for these returning students we’re making it easier for them to receive their finance by creating their application for them; all they need to do is sign and return their declaration. If any of their information needs updating they can do this through their online account. This usually takes a few weeks to complete and it really helps having the course database completed by Higher Education Providers to create the application data, this has been improving year on year... so thank you for that!

There are still activities being undertaken for the 2015/16 academic year, such as applications for later seasonal year starts, changes of circumstances and finalisation exercises for assessments based on the current tax year. The nine month deadline for applications from 2015/16 September academic year starts is also coming up at the end of May.

Some of our operational processing staff recently attended SLC’s Higher Education Student Support Seminars to support or deliver workshop sessions. These gave an insight into what we do and offered you the chance to have face-to-face discussions and ask us questions. This was a great opportunity for us to gain some real understanding and feedback on how we are doing and what we can do to keep on improving. I really enjoyed meeting the delegates from Higher Education institutions and learning more about them and life in their shoes.

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