Job seeker’s £7,145 bill for training course

Ms M.C. writes: My son is experiencing much anxiety due to calls, emails and letters from Carnegie Consumer Finance. It says it represents Train4jobs and wants to collect on a loan of £7,145.

YOUR son sent his CV to various firms seeking an apprenticeship as an electrician.

After a meeting with Train4jobs, he signed up for a course and paid a £50 deposit. The full cost was £7,145, paid to Train4jobs by finance company Carnegie, with monthly repayments of £165.

You have told me your son, who is 19 and gets Universal Credit, was given course material to study at home. But efforts to contact his tutor failed.

Train4jobs is run by Metropolitan International Schools Limited in Luton. Its director Jaroslav Bradik told me: ‘Our tutor teams are available for telephone contact throughout each day, including weekends. All incoming and outgoing calls are monitored and we also monitor missed calls.’

He said he could find no trace of calls from your son and told me he had only twice connected to the online tuition website.

The only contact Train4jobs had with your son was just after he enrolled, when he seemed more than happy, according to Bradik. Nonetheless, Bradik agreed it would be best to cancel the contract as a gesture of goodwill and has told Carnegie. The loan agreement has been scrapped and your son has been refunded his £50 deposit and the one payment of £165 he made.