Weekend courses turn into weekday consequences – with students left holding the bill

Earlier this week, an ominous letter arrived on 15 providers’ desks from the Department for Education (DfE).

Politics Home has the story – officials had identified a “systemic issue” in how some higher education providers had been classifying courses for student finance purposes.

In particular, “weekend-only” provision had been recorded as “in-attendance”, when under the student support regulations such courses are ordinarily treated as distance learning – and therefore not eligible for maintenance support.

The “misclassification” has led to maintenance loans being paid to students who were not legally entitled to receive them. Around 22,000 students across 15 (“mostly franchised”) providers are affected, with payments in the region of £190 million in the current academic year.

The letter (which has been seen by Wonkhe) sets out operational instructions for the current academic year – the Student Loans Company will block all future maintenance and targeted grant payments for affected students, providers must submit Change of Circumstance notifications to transfer weekend-only students onto new distance-learning course records between 6 and 17 April, and overpayments for this year will be recovered through repayment plans agreed with SLC.

Historic irregular payments from previous years are subject to a separate joint DfE/SLC review, with the letter noting that ministers will be asked to give direction on “appropriate recovery action” – further guidance to follow.

The operational instruction in the letter is that the Student Loans Company will now “seek to recover previous irregular payments made,” and that maintenance support for those students will not continue going forward.

The framing is that these payments were made outside the conditions of entitlement under the regulations, rather than as a result of student misconduct, and so treats the issue as one of eligibility failure arising from course classification.

On that basis, students are considered liable to repay amounts already received, even where they enrolled and attended in good faith and on the basis of provider information.

Alongside the recovery instruction, the letter signals that ministers are reviewing the underlying regulatory framework to “strengthen protections of public money further.”

It also indicates an expectation that affected providers should take steps to support students facing financial hardship as a result, including where changes to course delivery or funding disrupt their ability to continue studying.

It all raises two big questions – how this happened – and what happens now for the students affected.

Weekend delivery?

The issue has not emerged without warning. In 2024, the Public Accounts Committee examined attendance and engagement as part of their look at franchised HE, and called on the Department for Education (DfE) to clarify what constitutes student attendance and meaningful engagement – and to publish guidance as soon as possible.

The Student Loans Company subsequently published guidance requiring providers to have a published, auditable attendance policy, not to claim funding for students failing to adhere to it, and confirming that the rules applied to franchised provision. Providers were given flexibility over what attendance and engagement looked like for different courses and students.

Then, in December 2024, the Secretary of State wrote to vice chancellors as part of what was framed as a franchising crackdown. Buried in that letter, alongside familiar warnings about governance and due diligence, was a specific line on weekend delivery – students whose attendance was limited solely to weekends would not meet the criteria for maintenance loan eligibility.

That wasn’t a new rule. It was a restatement of what the statutory definition has said all along. As I noted at the time, the Education (Student Support) Regulations 2011 define a distance learning course as one where a student is not required to be in attendance – and make explicit that “required to be in attendance” is not satisfied by a requirement to attend on a weekend or during any vacation, or on an occasional basis during the week. The same wording appears in the Welsh equivalent legislation.

The Courses Management Service guidance used by providers lifts that definition directly, and states plainly that regular required attendance at a specific place during the week is what distinguishes an in-attendance course from a distance learning one.

Nevertheless, the Universities UK position is that the sector had “no warning” of the SLC action, and on the underlying classification issue, its spokesperson argued:

The rules need clarifying, and SLC should have better systems. If universities misclassified courses as being taught in person, because they were in person, but only on the two days of the week when regulations classify in-person learning as “distance learning”, it’s easy to see how this situation came about.

Is it though? There is, as I noted in December, a genuine tension in the documentation – one set of guidance defines “attendance” for funding purposes as participation in the course, including face-to-face or blended teaching, while the distance learning definition is tied specifically to physical attendance at a specific place during the week. It is possible to read across those two documents and emerge confused.

But then again, the 2011 regulations are not buried or obscure – they are the foundational document for student support eligibility, and providers are expected to classify courses against them. The weekend carve-out is not a footnote – it is part of the operative definition. And that warning in December couldn’t have been clearer.

When it comes to what (lead) providers actually knew and when, there are really only four possibilities – and they carry very different implications.

The first is that some providers understood the position perfectly well, judged that the regulatory system lacked the appetite or the machinery to enforce it, and made a calculated bet that weekend delivery would continue to attract maintenance-eligible students for as long as nobody looked too hard. On that reading, the UUK line about confusing rules is less a defence and more a post-hoc framing of what was, in practice, a deliberate commercial decision.

The second is more ambiguous. Some providers may have known the classification was at least questionable, but took the view that transparency was a form of due diligence – naming courses “weekend delivery” or similar in submissions to SLC, and treating the absence of any challenge as implicit approval. If the system processed those courses without query for years, that silence will be cited as something close to acquiescence. It doesn’t feel like a strong legal argument, but it is one that will be made.

The third possibility is that some providers, having seen the December letter and read the direction of travel, have already been quietly winding down weekend-only models with their partners – restructuring delivery, adding weekday elements, or simply stopping recruitment onto the most exposed programmes.

The difficulty is that a brief tour of Facebook, Instagram and TikTok this afternoon still surfaces ads for degrees you can study at weekends with student finance attached, combined with work, with no suggestion that independent study might fill the gaps. Either the message has not reached some marketing departments, or the wind-down is rather more selective than it might appear.

The fourth is the most charitable – that some providers genuinely did not understand the regulatory position, and that a documentation landscape which uses “attendance” to mean subtly different things in different contexts created real rather than manufactured confusion. That explanation may be true in some cases. It does not, however, explain why the same providers were apparently content to recruit students onto maintenance-bearing courses without seeking clarity.

Even if the suspicion is that some providers have deliberately sought to exploit what might have been perceived as a loophole, it is much more likely that for most of the 15 this is an error of omission rather than commission – a failure to check the regs carefully rather than a calculated decision to ignore them. The letter – and the political framing around it – does not obviously distinguish between the two.

And all of it may be complicated by comms between those lead providers and SFE/SLC, and by the contracts that lead providers have with subcontractual partners.

But then we need to think about the students affected.

Not their fault

DfE’s letter is clear on two things for affected students – the maintenance payments they have already received are now classified as overpayments, and SLC has been directed to seek their recovery.

Secretary of State Bridget Phillipson told PoliticsHome:

This is not students’ fault. Too many organisations have let their students down, through either incompetence or abuse of the system. Many of these organisations lack the necessary governance and oversight to properly implement clear guidance.

Others have used this loophole as another opportunity to abuse public money. Either way, this is not the standard I expect from our world-class university sector. Universities must take immediate action to support students who will face financial difficulties as a result.

Providers are simultaneously told they are expected to put hardship support in place and must take steps to assist students whose ability to continue studying has been disrupted.

To understand why that combination is so serious, it helps to look at who these students actually are. OfS’ insight brief on subcontractual arrangements in September 2024 told us that these students are more likely to be mature students, from the most deprived areas of the UK, or living locally before entering higher education.

OfS also notes that information shared by the SLC suggests that in 2022–23 and 2023–24 just over 65 per cent of students eligible and applying for SLC funding to study on subcontracted courses were from nationalities where English is not the first language – twice the proportion seen among applicants to courses delivered directly by a lead provider.

It also recorded concerns about how these students were recruited in the first place. Among the practices it had seen or received allegations of, it noted that agents have used inappropriate methods to recruit students, for example incorrectly suggesting that the maintenance loan a student might be eligible for is a method by which the government will “pay the student to study.”

Either way, it’s a straightforward bet that these are not students with reserves to absorb unexpected debt demands. The maintenance loan will in most cases have been spent on rent, food, transport or kids’ clothes. It is not likely to be sitting in an account waiting to be returned.

Contracts and profits

Tuition fee loans, on the other hand, are not paid to students. They are paid directly to providers, in three termly instalments, on receipt of attendance confirmations submitted to SLC. The student becomes liable to repay the tuition fee loan under the standard income-contingent repayment mechanism – but that liability is contingent on the course being properly classified and the provider properly entitled to receive the fee payments in the first place.

Where a course has been misclassified, the fee payments flow from a defective confirmation of eligibility submitted by the provider. The practitioner guidance is explicit that where a provider fails to notify SLC of a relevant change of circumstances before a liability point, payments made can be clawed back from the provider.

More broadly, the framework makes clear that lead providers bear responsibility for the accuracy of the data they submit to SLC – including course classification data. There is no suggestion that students will be required to repay tuition fee loans, and the legal and regulatory logic of the situation supports that omission. The fee recovery question is one between DfE, SLC, and the lead providers.

Whether lead providers actually have the money to return is a more uncertain question. Some will. Others – particularly those that have been passing the bulk of tuition fee income to franchise delivery partners while retaining a management fee – may find that the money has already been distributed. Lead providers might only retain between 10 and 30 per cent of tuition fees, with the remainder paid to the delivery partner.

OfS has also documented cases where delivery partners have reported in their financial statements a very high level of profits, dividend payments or senior staff pay, despite all their income coming from tuition fee payments from lead providers. If the fee income has been extracted through dividends or management charges, it may not be readily recoverable from a delivery partner that is now facing a loss of funding.

The contractual relationship between lead provider and delivery partner will therefore matter – both for the question of who ultimately bears the fee recovery liability, and for whether the lead provider has effective remedies against a partner whose misclassification has generated it.

Inadequate franchise contracts are a known problem in this space – OfS has previously noted cases where inadequate contracts have made it difficult for lead providers to terminate agreements with their delivery partners when concerns have arisen, resulting in costly or litigious exit arrangements. The same contracts may prove equally inadequate when it comes to apportioning liability for this week’s events.

Maintenance

But on maintenance, the position for students is considerably more difficult. The practitioner guidance is clear that overpayment recovery in cases of course misclassification is not treated the same way as SLC administrative error.

Where the error is solely SLC’s, the overpayment can be added to the income-contingent loan balance and recovered gradually through the salary threshold system. Where – as here – the overpayment arises from a course classification failure, the default recovery mechanism is direct repayment, separately from and ahead of the normal loan balance.

The letter sets out two routes. For students who remain on a weekend-only or distance learning course, the overpayment will be recovered through a repayment plan agreed with SLC’s Repayment Recoveries Team – the letter is explicit that students “do not need to repay their overpayment in a lump sum” and that the team will discuss affordable arrangements, including income and expenditure assessments where monthly instalments are unaffordable. For students who switch to a qualifying in-attendance course, the overpayment will be deducted from future maintenance entitlement.

Neither route is painless. Affordable repayment plans still represent an ongoing financial liability for students who have done nothing wrong. And deduction from future entitlement means students who switch to weekday delivery will receive less maintenance support than they need to live on – at the same time as they may be absorbing the costs of a delivery change they didn’t ask for. But the mechanism is not the raw demand for immediate lump-sum repayment that the practitioner guidance’s default position might have implied.

That said, this applies to the current academic year only. Recovery of historic irregular payments from previous years has not yet been decided. The letter says DfE and SLC will jointly review those payments and “seek direction from Ministers on appropriate recovery action.” That review could produce very different outcomes – including, potentially, a harsher approach to earlier years, or a more generous one. We don’t know yet.

In reality, the Secretary of State has a statutory choice about whether to pursue that debt at all. Regulation 119 of the Education (Student Support) Regulations 2011 provides that students must repay maintenance overpayments “if so required by the Secretary of State.” On grant overpayments, the same regulation provides that the Secretary of State “must recover… unless the Secretary of State considers it is not appropriate to do so.” Both formulations preserve ministerial discretion. Neither creates an unqualified duty to pursue students.

The practitioner guidance acknowledges this directly, noting that the Secretary of State “may decide whether or not an overpayment should be repaid.” It then sets out the factors that DfE must weigh when making that decision – including the type of overpayment, whether the recipient accepted the money in good faith or bad faith, the cost-effectiveness of recovery action, relevant personal circumstances, and – critically:

…the need to deal equitably with overpayments to a group of people in similar circumstances.

That last factor sits very uncomfortably with a blanket recovery instruction directed at students who enrolled in good faith, on the basis of provider information, onto courses that their institutions had classified – and SLC had processed for years without challenge – as maintenance-eligible. The good faith argument is not peripheral. It is, on the guidance’s own terms, a factor the Secretary of State is required to weigh. The instruction to SLC this week does not scream that that weighing has been done, or done transparently – particularly when it comes to the still-undecided question of historic recovery.

Hardship funds

The letter and Phillipson indicate that providers “should” put hardship funding in place. That expectation raises an immediate practical question – which provider? Students are registered with the lead institution, which many will have had minimal contact with. Routing a hardship application through an organisation they have never visited, in response to a crisis caused by that organisation’s governance failures, is not a process designed to produce fast or sympathetic outcomes.

The scale of the hardship fund requirement also bears scrutiny. Twenty-two thousand students facing unexpected maintenance repayment demands, across fifteen providers, represents a liability that most hardship funds – sized for individual student emergencies, not systemic institutional failures – are not equipped to absorb. The sum total of the expectation in the letter is fanciful – and in most cases, nigh-on impossible.

Students affected by this situation have, in principle, a strong case against their provider – and that case sits against the lead provider, not the delivery partner. The contract for the course is between the student and the lead institution. The lead provider is the registered body, the entity that confirmed the course as eligible for student finance, and the organisation that bears regulatory responsibility for what was delivered on its behalf.

The basis for complaint is not obscure. Students were enrolled on courses marketed and classified as eligible for full maintenance loan support. That classification was wrong. In many cases, the marketing – including agent activity that the lead provider either authorised or failed to prevent – actively misrepresented the nature of the funding students were receiving.

OfS has documented (and I’ve written repeatedly about) cases of agents telling prospective students that the maintenance loan is effectively the government paying them to study. If that representation was made to students now facing repayment demands, the mis-selling argument is not merely available – it is compelling.

Under consumer protection law, students entering a contract for educational services are entitled to accurate pre-contractual information about what they are buying and what obligations they are taking on. And under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (DMCC) Act 2024, we’re very obviously looking at highly vulnerable consumers here, where additional care and due diligence duties apply. Whether the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) show any interest is a whole other question – but this is unlikely to be a group of students who know their rights or who are in a position to enforce them.

Notably, the DfE letter itself acknowledges this territory. In its Q&A, it states that where students cannot switch to weekday delivery, providers should ensure they are “offered appropriate alternative options or redress and treated fairly in line with consumer law.” That’s the Department explicitly recognising that consumer law applies here – which strengthens the hand of any student who pursues a complaint or claim.

A representation – explicit or implied – that a student is entitled to a maintenance loan when they are not, made in the context of inducing them to enrol, is a misrepresentation that could ground both a complaint and a damages claim. And the lead provider cannot easily disclaim responsibility for agent or subcontractual partner conduct where it has authorised or benefited from that recruitment, which it must have done to get the loans drawn down from SLC to begin with.

Changing course

Philippa Pickford, Director of Regulation at the Office for Students, said (lead) universities should be prepared to offer compensation:

If institutions intend to change the way courses are delivered, they must ensure any new teaching and learning arrangements work for their students.

Some providers may attempt to restructure delivery – adding weekday (maybe evening) teaching to bring courses within the “in-attendance” definition. But as Pickford notes, a move to weekday teaching will not be suitable for every student. Many enrolled specifically because weekend delivery was compatible with work, caring responsibilities, or other constraints that do not disappear because a provider needs to fix its regulatory position.

The letter does provide one potential route for programmes – particularly in health and social care – where teaching takes place at weekends but students undertake work or placement activity during the week. If that weekday placement is an integral, regularly timetabled component of the course and subject to the same supervision and rigour as other forms of in-attendance learning, it can satisfy the in-attendance requirement. That carve-out may save some programmes, but it is narrow and will require robust evidence.

The letter also introduces a harsh but logical rule on mixed-delivery programmes – a course is either distance learning or in-person throughout. It cannot be broken down into individual years. So a programme where Year 1 is weekend-only but Years 2 and 3 include regular weekday teaching is still classified as distance learning. That catches programmes that were partway through restructuring, and it catches providers who thought a phased transition would be enough.

In any case, a forced switch to weekday or evening delivery is not a minor logistical change. For a significant proportion of these students, it may make continued study impossible.

Where a provider unilaterally proposes to change the mode or timing of delivery without a student’s agreement, it is almost certainly in breach of contract. And if the contract allows it, the contract is almost certainly unlawful. The terms on which a student enrolled – including the days and times of delivery – are material terms. Imposing a unilateral change is not a compliance solution – it is another legal problem layered on top of the existing one.

A provider might invoke “Force Majeure” if there’s a clause on unexpected or uncontrollable events in the contract. But that would be a stretch given Phillipson’s comments and the December letter.

For students who can’t or won’t make the switch, the situation tips into something the whole framework has a specific mechanism to address. A provider that can no longer deliver a course on the terms on which it was sold – whether because of this enforcement action, a loss of franchise funding, or the departure of the delivery partner – is facing what OfS’ framework treats as a course closure or material change event. That triggers the student protection plan.

Providers are required to set out what will happen to students if their course is discontinued or significantly changed, and how their ability to complete their studies will be protected. The plan should address continuity of study, transfer to equivalent provision, and – where neither is possible – refund arrangements. Whether the plans that exist for the affected providers are adequate to the scale and specificity of what is now unfolding is an open question.

OfS should be asking to see them – but as I concluded in December, it probably should have been doing that three months ago.

What’s next?

There may well be more on this to come – 22,000 is a lot of students. It’s a real mess – with DfE, SLC and OfS all pointing at lead providers, lead providers pointing back via UUK, franchised-to providers still profiting in the process, and students hit with a whopping bill and potential end to their study ambitions.

There will be a need to look again at the regs here too. I’ve been over various Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) injustices and contradictions here before – suffice to say that there is clearly not a lot of difference between eight hours of contact time on a Monday and Tuesday evening and eight hours of contact time on a Saturday and Sunday. Either we want more flexible options or we don’t – but flexibility within full-time study, rather than a market for modules that simply isn’t there, just hasn’t been thought about in any depth.

What this all starts to feel like – complaints about students without A-Levels not doing well on courses, press coverage on foundation years, and both the DfE and OfS crackdowns on franchised-to providers – is avoiding the obvious. If government doesn’t want to fund non-specialist franchised-to, for profit provision – and there’s good reasons to make that call – it should just say so, and make arrangements to wind it down in a way that doesn’t screw students, rather than this daft game of whack-a-mole it seems to be engaged in.

Phillipson has nailed her flag firmly to “protecting public money” – and this approach serves that positioning, letting her look tough on providers while deferring the harder question of whether the students she says are blameless will actually be held harmless. The optics of a £190 million recovery are strong. The optics of 22,000 disadvantaged students being chased for overpayments are less so.

These are, after all, some of the most disadvantaged students the system has. And despite Phillipson declaring that the issues are “not their fault”, it’s not at all clear whether and how it will end up not harming them one way or another – either via the forced repayment of the maintenance, or the lack of compensation for or inevitable drop out that flows from a switch to weekday delivery, or both.

They can, of course, complain up to and including the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA). But of all the complaints I’ve ever come across, the individual OIA complaints scheme is obviously not a suitable route. If government is saying they all have a complaint, government should cause one of the arms of the state to step in – not wait for students to find the energy and time to do it.

If nothing else, none of DfE, SLC, OfS, lead providers or franchised to providers will be straightforwardly willing to accept blame, and will have lawyers to back them up. The students enrolled? Not so much. Many not even a students’ union to talk to.

What we do know is that most of these issues have been hiding in plain sight for several years. From a student perspective, this is no way to handle them.