Decision Report 201508176

Summary

Miss C, a student with additional support needs, complained about the processing of her application and the provision for her additional support needs. The college took over four months to give the correct information to a relevant third party, which delayed Miss C receiving relevant support. The access centre which assessed Miss C, while acting promptly to carry out the assessment, failed to communicate effectively after being informed Miss C had a change of address.

Due to the delays in processing Miss C's application, she was without access to some of the support she needed for longer than necessary. We found that the college failed to reasonably to provide the support Miss C needed and made a recommendation relating to this. The college have acknowledged the findings of this investigation in this regard and apologised to Miss C.

Communication from the college regarding what was required of Miss C in order to obtain additional support was poor. When Miss C complained about her experience regarding arranging and access to additional support, the college took longer than the target time to respond to the complaint. The time taken was deemed not to have been unreasonable given the complexity of the complaint. However, communication from the college to Miss C should have been better, and was largely reactive to contact from Miss C, rather than proactively seeking to update Miss C when the timeline had to be extended. We therefore upheld Miss C's complaint.

Recommendations

We recommended that the college:

• refund the fees paid for the course.