★ Regular column Focus on processing
In part four of her regular Exchange processing update, Nichola Malton talks about how you can further help students get their finance paid at this busy time of year.

At this time, SLC’s Operations and Customer Services will be mainly supporting the final processing and payment of full-time and part-time Higher Education and Further Education applications. And let’s not forget the launch of Postgraduate Loans this summer too! Our peak processing application activities and customer contact support over the last few months have been extremely busy as expected, but we’re not quite at the finish line yet.

At the time of publishing, just under 1.34 million full-time applications for student finance have been registered.

From this total over 1.3 million have been submitted and we are now over the 1.2 million mark for processed applications. From the total processed, 957,000 are 'ready for payment' and 171,000 are 'approved awaiting signature'. And those numbers are still rising!

Although the majority of applications have been processed for the main autumn start for 2016/17 courses, we still get some customers applying now as they make a late decision to start a course, or we get evidence through to progress an application as they realise the course starts or has started and they need their funding!

We anticipate a rise in the changes of circumstances updates we receive from students and universities and colleges over the coming weeks, with a lot of updates to payments and confirmation of attendance to release funds.

Our customers still need help in making sure we have everything to help them get their funds - last minute submissions of bank details, National Insurance numbers, signed declaration forms or updates to course information are very common at this time of year and we action these as quickly as we can to help release funding.

Different processing areas will still have some busy periods throughout the rest of the year and into the next, especially in our targeted-support areas for Disabled Students’ Allowances and Childcare Grants.

There is also a lot of focus on what lies ahead. Operationally, as one team, we have been focused on making sure our customers get their funds paid on time, but on top of that we are also working on projects for the future across SLC. It’s always exciting to be part of what is evolving and being involved in making it happen.

For example, we recently also supported our social media activities to help students through the Clearing and A Level results period, providing subject-matter experts from Contact and Processing to help our customers through their journey.

You can read more about how students get their money in this issue’s article on Getting paid.

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