Full time student or not?

I’d be incredibly grateful for any input.

I have a person under 25 who’s been placed in temp. Last year, she was a full time student. She is due to give birth early next year but not yet. She was previously living with family. No other relevant exceptions. In August, she spoke to her uni and agreed deferment - unclear of communication with SF. She’s in significant temp rent arrears.

She just received a student finance payment. I have explained that you are normally considered to be a FT student with deferment. She is now considering abandonment due to her wider circumstances. Here are my queries:

1) Does being paid student finance inherently means she is a full time student for benefit purposes?
2) If she is later considered to have abandoned her course, does the SF still count as income beyond the date it was paid? I.e. if she goes to UC and HB and has proof of course abandonment from 22.9
3) Along the same vein, if she has proof of abandonment and proof she’s paid the SF back, would this be a viable option?
3) If she is stuck as a student, does this status ‘expire’ with the end of the period that student finance was due to cover?

Any other ideas gratefully received - she’s really risking eviction and the SF she received is reduced because they’re not aware that she’s left home so is basically the same amount as her rent arrears.

On the “other ideas” side:

Has your client considered getting legal advice about the possibility of challenging the level of their housing charge? The LA may require a homeless applicant in TA to pay a reasonable charge for the provision of accommodation (s206 HA 1996). There are a couple of High Court JR cases that have made it very clear that what is reasonable depends on the circumstances of the applicant - and that “may” includes a discretion not to charge at all. In Yekini it was reasonable to charge a peppercorn rent to a Zambrano carer who couldn’t claim HB - it might be worth exploring the parallels here - looking at the amount of assistance available to your client.

Both available on BAILII:-
Paras 21-22 of R (Best) v Oxford CC [2009] EWHC 608 (Admin)
Paras 54-70 of R (Yekini) v LB Southwark [2014] EWHC 2096 (Admin)

Another consideration is whether, if your client were evicted from her TA, she could be found intentionally homeless, or would she still be owed the main duty? This is a question of affordability, and was covered in detail by the Supreme Court in Samuels v Birmingham CC [2019] UKSC 28 (although this didn’t change the overall position on affordability, so much as clarify how much a LA could squeeze an applicant’s reasonable expenses in the calculation).

All the means tested benefits use a similar form of words in their various definitions of “student”: they are regarded as undertaking the course until “such ... date ... as the person finally abandons it or is dismissed from it” - see for example UC Reg 13(1).

If she does abandon, I think student finance is no longer counted at all for UC purposes: Reg 68(1) says a person is only to be treated as having student income while undertaking the course, which brings us back to Reg 13.

HB has a calcuation designed to estimate how much student income ought to be left for the remainder of the term in which the course is abandoned: how much have you had, how much should you have spent by now and how much longer would you have had to make do with it if you had carried on studying.  Normally it works out less than a conventional student finance calculation because the one-off annual allowance for books and travel is regarded as having been fully spent in advance.  Moreover, if she qualifies even for 1p a month of UC, she will be passported to max HB.

I think that makes it unnecessary to worry about the final two questions

Thanks so much both - that’s great about the books and travel and will really make a difference.