The CLASS submission made me wonder whether we are living on different planets.
Before the Hopkin report was published, in an exasperated fury, I sent off
the text below to the Guardian website comments section. It summarizes our
experience of what has happened since the SLC took over.
<<The SLC is basically a finance company that has blundered into the
disability field without making the least attempt to understand it.
In order to deal with DSA applications, the company employs a body of
desk-bound scrutinizers with minimal training who spend their time
second-guessing the recommendations of DSA assessors and student support
workers. Although some of the functionaries try to be helpful, the managers
who control this process are sniffily dismissive of the expertise and
dedication of those who work in this field. Their general attitude is one of
suspicion - that assessors' recommendations are over generous, that students
should receive less rather than more support, that everyone and their uncle
is on the make, that mistakes, errors, delays and mishaps are the
responsibility of applicants and their feckless advisers. They have
dreamed-up arbitrary rules based on a fundamental misreading if the
objectives of DSA itself as enshrined in the legislation and the published
government guidelines.
Under the pretence of "safeguarding public funds", the SLC has built a
bureaucracy that readers of Kafka will readily recognize: authoritarian,
impenetrable, impervious to entreaty. Doubtless its corporate eye is fixed
on the "savings" it can report to the government of the day, and thereby
justify its year-end executive bonuses
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/nov/16/student-loans-company-bonuses).
Processing delays are not the only problem with the SLC. Under the guise of
seeking "cost-effectiveness", it has also adopted a policy of imposing the
cheapest solutions and the cheapest suppliers of equipment and services. As
a result, many students whose applications have, finally, emerged from the
SLC labyrinth find themselves with inadequate equipment, and training and
support provided by poorly-qualified personnel. In a field that demands
significant expertise and experience, the SLC is ineluctably downgrading the
quality of provision.
What is most dispiriting about this sad saga, is that when the Local
Education Authorities were responsible for administering DSA applications,
the programme was working pretty well. Was it ideology that led the
government to centralize the process; or a fantasy about saving money?
What about a solution? Best would be to return responsibility for DSA
processing to the LEAs. In any case, the SLC should be trimmed of its
superfluous bean-counters and their managers, and acquire a new executive
team and board of directors. Without fundamental change at the top, it's
hard to see how the SLC could justify any future involvement with DSA and
vulnerable students.>>
I believe Sir Deian Hopkin has been seriously misled by the CLASS submission
and that we owe it to future DSA clients to try to correct it.
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