Hardship fund

Any Keele University student (undergraduate or postgraduate, home or international, full-time or part-time, including apprentice learners) who is facing unforeseen and severe financial difficulties can apply to be considered for the Hardship Fund.

We would consider severe financial difficulty to be where a student is struggling to afford essential costs such as accommodation, food and necessary travel, through circumstances beyond their control.

You must meet the following criteria to be considered for the Hardship Fund:

• Be a current Keele University student
• Be able to evidence an unforeseen, unavoidable shortfall between your income and reasonable essential living cost expenditure which you are unable to resolve without financial support
• Be able to evidence that you have exhausted all other available financial assistance prior to application (for example, you must have applied for your full Student Finance entitlement if applicable and exhausted any savings available to you)
• Be able to evidence that you made reasonable provision to cover your living costs prior to the start of the academic year

Similarly, we will not be able to consider your application if you have significant expenditure on non-essential purchases or services (such as takeaways, leisure activities, holidays, premium clothing...), or if you have transferred large sums of money to family or friends.

We are unable to accept multiple applications for the Hardship Fund in the same academic year unless there has been a significant change in financial circumstances since your first application. Please also keep in mind that unforeseen difficulties in a previous year will no longer be considered unforeseen if you re-apply.

Our Hardship Fund applications are managed within the Blackbullion platform. Once you’ve registered with Blackbullion, you will find the online application for the Hardship Fund in the ‘Funds’ tab.

The application form includes questions about your course and your individual circumstances, and all applicants need to upload the following evidence to support your application:

All applicants will need to upload the following evidence to support their application:

• Student Finance entitlement letter for the current academic year (downloadable from your Student Finance portal) or evidence of alternative funding in place
• Tenancy agreement for the current academic year, if applicable
• Bank statements for the most recent 3 months for all bank accounts (including savings accounts and ISAs) for you and (if applicable) any co-habiting partners

Blackbullion has introduced the option to use Open Banking, which means that it's much easier to provide your bank statements. By using Open Banking with Blackbullion, you will be able to automatically pull in bank statements required for your funding application, saving you the time of manually downloading, annotating and submitting bank statements from different bank accounts. This makes it fast and secure to provide statements for all of your bank accounts, and makes it easier to assess your application quickly.

If you're unable to provide one or more elements of the mandatory supporting evidence, you will be able to provide a reason for this within your application. For example, this could be because have chosen not to take out Student Finance for religious reasons. We may need to contact you to discuss this further.

We won't be able to process applications without the required supporting evidence. If any evidence is missing or unclear in your application, or if any additional evidence is needed, we will request this from you through Blackbullion.

All students applying to the Hardship Fund must also complete the short 10 minute 'Make Budgeting Work For You' module in Blackbullion before we can assess your application.

If you need help with your application, please contact the Financial Support Team so that we can support you with this.

If you're experiencing technical issues with the Blackbullion portal, you can contact them directly for support with this.

We will take into account at your expected income across the academic year and what we consider to be reasonable expenditure on essential living costs (such as accommodation, travel and course-related costs), to determine whether you have a shortfall.

We assess each application on a case-by-case basis and will take into account your individual circumstances wherever possible.

You can find out more about how we assess your application in the Application Guidance which you can download when you start your application. We will need to read through this before you continue with your application.

Due to the high volume of applications that we receive for the Hardship Fund, it can take up to 8 weeks for an application to be processed once we’ve received all the required supporting evidence. Any delays in providing your supporting evidence will result in a delay in your application being processed.

If you need urgent financial support, please contact the Financial Support Team to discuss this so that alternative support can be put into place for you while you wait for your application to be processed.

Once you have submitted your application, you will be able to track its progress within the Blackbullion platform (in the ‘Funds’ tab). If at any point you wish to withdraw your application, you can do this in Blackbullion.

If any supporting evidence is missing or unclear in your application, we will request this evidence from you and you will receive an email notification of this, but this will also show on your application tracker in Blackbullion. If we don’t receive the requested supporting evidence within 2 weeks of our request, we will assume that you don't wish to proceed and close your application unless you have contacted us to let us know about any delay.

You will receive an email notification once your application has been processed to let you know whether your application was successful.

We work in a methodical and systematic way, based on national guidance, to ensure that we award funding fairly and proportionately to those who need it most. Therefore, we cannot guarantee whether your application will be successful. The Hardship Fund has limited funding available which means that we unfortunately, even if your application is successful, we aren't always able to cover your full shortfall.

Successful applicants can be awarded up to a maximum of £2,500 during the 2024/25 academic year. Please note, only students in the most severe financial difficulty can be awarded the maximum grant, due to limited resources.

You will be asked to provide your bank details (account number and sort code) in your Hardship Fund application. It’s important that you check that these are correct as, if your application is successful, your award will usually be sent by bank transfer to the bank details you have provided.

The Hardship Fund has limited funding available which means that we unfortunately, even if your application is successful, we aren't always able to cover your full shortfall. We work in a methodical and systematic way, based on national guidance, to ensure that we award funding fairly and proportionately to those who need it most.

If you would like an explanation about how your application has been assessed, please contact the Financial Support Team and we will be happy to discuss this with you and help you to explore any appropriate alternative support.

Formal appeals may only be made on the following grounds:

• procedural irregularity in the conduct of the assessment processes, providing that:
  • you have already met the Financial Support Team to understand how your application has been assessed
• exceptional circumstances, providing that:
  • the circumstances were not already disclosed in the Hardship Fund application
  • the circumstances can be verified by appropriate evidence

Formal appeals should be sent to student.services@keele.ac.uk and addressed to the Head of Student Participation and Success, who will aim to respond to you within 5 working days of your appeal. If you wish to make a formal appeal, you must do so within 4 weeks of receiving the outcome of your application.