DfE attempts to explain the LLE to applicants. Badly

And ye gods it’s baffling.

The credit-based funding model means every student’s entitlement is now a bespoke calculation depending on how many credits they’re studying, what kind of provider they’re at, what TEF rating it has, what type of OfS registration it holds, where in the UK they’re studying, whether it’s a placement year or study abroad year, and how much previous study they’ve had.

The old system was already confusing but at least “you get a tuition fee loan up to £9,250 and a maintenance loan based on household income” was broadly graspable. Now there are multiple sliding scales interacting with each other, and three concepts – pace, credit and cash – all competing to be the dominant framing.

The interaction between the £39,160 lifetime tuition fee cap and previous study is going to generate enormous confusion. And the bit about deducting “today’s equivalent value” if you previously studied without fees is a nightmare waiting to happen – mature learners who went to university before 1998 are going to find chunks of their entitlement missing based on a notional historical fee calculation.

Something I’d not previously clocked – eligibility thresholds for what’s left of grants – you need to be studying 120 credits to access Childcare Grant, Parents’ Learning Allowance, or Adult Dependants’ Grant. So a parent studying flexibly at 60 or 90 credits a year gets no childcare support. That’s a significant barrier to the flexible study the whole system is supposedly built around.

More broadly, if you wanted to do 90 credits this year – because of any number of complexities your life might involve – you’re expected to live on a 75 per cent of the already inadequate maintenance loan. To the extent to which other countries offer maintenance support, nobody else in Europe chunks down like this. For good reason.

Meanwhile given one (UK) credit is worth 10 hours of learning time (would it really have killed us to just switch to ECTS), we are told here that you can be eligible for student finance when you study up to 180 credits a year.

That is more than the usual definition of full-time (stated here as 120 credits), but is obviously the bodge around accelerated degrees.

What you can’t do is pack the 180 credits into 30 weeks – unless you’re willing to take a hit on maintenance – that’s capped at 5 credits’ worth of maintenance a week.

But that does mean you can, apparently, if a provider is willing to offer it, pack 150 credits into 30 weeks. Which means DfE is prepared to assume you’re doing 50 hours work a week. What on earth?

There are, of course, some students whose course (or characteristics) demand high hours but whose credit load is identical to those with less demanding patterns. In theory a provider could offer a 360 credit degree over two years on 36 weeks a year where the student could pull down full maintenance.

That student will get a 50 per cent more maintenance each term than a student doing a notionally 360 credit, 30 week a year course. Bizarre.

And of course, to preserve “when students get their loan” and “when providers get their dosh”, none of this enables in-programme flexibility – flexing up and down as life might suggest. The pace and credit load has to be designed into the “course” from the outset.

It all reflects DfE’s lack of interest in flexibility for so-called “full-time” students, leaving those who most need room to breathe still locked into the very constraints the reforms claim to dismantle.

The other bleakly amusing thing is that providers are now supposed to be calculating the full cost of a course and displaying said “price”. But if they were complying with consumer protection law, the material here fails to explain clearly how much of your credit-based entitlement will be used up, because it says things like “You can get up to a maximum of £9,790 for every 120 credits you study” without covering off inflationary increases in fees.

There’s an actual section called “If you’re not from England” that then has links that say “There’ll be a different process if your home is not usually in England and you’re studying in Scotland, studying in Wales, studying in Northern Ireland, studying in Jersey, studying in Guernsey, studying in Isle of Man”.

If you’re a Welsh student wanting to study in England, or an English student wanting to study in Scotland, god alone knows what you’re to make of this.

Under the current system, tuition fee loans for repeat study are tightly limited – usually to one “gift year” unless there are compelling personal reasons – but under the LLE providers will be able to charge again for repeated modules, and those repeat credits sit outside the normal per-course cap, meaning a student on a 360-credit degree who fails a 30-credit module could be charged for 390 credits in total. A debt tax for failure. Cosmic.

Learners can still access tuition and maintenance loans for those repeats, but the way it affects their balance depends on the reason – if the repeat is due to academic failure it will eat into the £39,160 lifetime entitlement, whereas if it is due to compelling personal reasons such as illness or bereavement, the cost is added back onto the learner’s balance so their overall entitlement is preserved.

Because maintenance eligibility under LLE depends on having tuition entitlement left, that restoration also restores maintenance eligibility in principle, subject to the usual pro-rata and weekly caps.

I’m not at all clear on whose rules will apply. If it’s the university’s rules on academic v personal, we’ll end up with wild inconsistencies between universities. If it’s DfE’s rules, they’ll surely differ from some universities’ definitions.

There’s even a section that says “you’ll start repaying your loans when you earn over £25,000 a year. You’ll be charged 3.2% interest while you’re repaying them” without mentioning that neither are fixed. Sharknado!