Student Finance England Refuse to fund me due to arrears on account

I submitted an appeal via email 2 December and received this response on 3 December:
“Thank you for contacting the Formal Appeals department. Based on the contents of your correspondence, the Formal Appeals team are not theappropriate department for you[…].”
I then immediately resent my appeal and stated that I didn’t think that my original appeal was fully read and understood. I then received this response on 5 December:
“Thank you for contacting the Formal Appeals department. Please considerthis email as acknowledgement that your appeal has been registered.Please note that appeals are worked in received date order, and we arecurrently experiencing a high volume of cases which has impacted ourresponse times. Your case handler will contact you once they have been assigned and reviewed your case.”
I’ve never been officially informed that I am ineligible for any further funding from Student Finance England via letter. However when trying to apply for funding for my PGCE through my online account I am unable to proceed as this message appears:
“To continue with your application please contact us on 0300 100 0632
We need to discuss some of your details with you before you can continue.”
I rang this number and the operative said that I needed to discuss my situation with the companies who purchased my student loan as Student Finance England didn’t have any information about my arrears. I was told that I would need to ask about the status of my account. The advice I’ve received from debt charities is that any arrears (due to not submitting deferment letters) are now statute barred due to the amount of time that has lapsed.

My student loans are with Thesis and Erudio as these loans were sold off by the government in 2013 although my deferment letters are sent to the student loans company. Thesis had sold my arrears to a company called Link. I have sent them a letter stating that the debt is statute barred as advised by debt charities and have not had a response to this. With Erudio, the Student Loans Company sent them the correspondence relating to my missing deferment letters and I was then contacted by them in 2019 as they wanted me to set up a payment plan which I didn’t respond to. I have never been approached by this company about these arrears since that time. I have only received statements about my arrears and a letter stating that they had made errors to do with my account by wrongly applying interest to it when they shouldn’t have. The arrears with Erudio will also be statute barred as it is six years since my correspondence was sent to them by the Student Loans Company. It is a complex situation due to the nature of these old style student loans.