Student finance taking longer than 8 weeks to approve for repeat final year with EC

Hi there,

I applied for student finance on July 22nd and still haven't heard back (September 24th). It's been over 9 weeks now and I'm getting extremely concerned. The status still says "Processing Application". It says I have submitted and completed everything, and have had no further request for any other documentation. I have already enrolled, started attending my classes and even submitted some work already.

While I can appreciate that it's a busy period for SFE, a classmate of mine who is in exactly the same situation as me - also repeating their final year with exceptional circumstances - applied 14 days ago and got their application approved today. Our tuition fee for the year is literally the same. This is incredibly frustrating considering I actually told him how to apply, so he applied in exactly the same way as I did, just a month and a half later. Yet, SFE approved his in 2 weeks.

I did notice that I received an email back in early August stating that they'll give me a progress update between "None to None" (image provided for reference). Could this be a system error on their part? Has my application gone haywire for them?

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