不許可通知は、だめという一語以上を語ります。

A refusal arrives and everybody in the room reads the same sentence. The family reads it, the counsellor reads it, and the letter goes into the file. What follows is usually a conversation about whether to try again, held before anybody has read the document that would inform it.

The letter deserves better treatment than that, for a reason that has nothing to do with sentiment. Every other paper in the case was written by your side: the application, the statement, the bank letters, the offer. The refusal is the only one written by the person who decided, and it is the only description you will ever get of how your file looked from the other side of the desk.

Read the whole thing, twice.

Most refusal letters are built from two kinds of paragraph, and they have to be told apart before anything else can happen. There is standard text, which appears on every letter of that type and describes the test being applied. And there is case-specific text, which describes what the decision maker made of your particular documents. The second kind is often short, sometimes a single sentence, and it is the whole of the useful content.

Read once to find the case-specific sentences. Read again with the file open next to the letter, matching each sentence to the document it is talking about. The exercise is slower than it sounds and it is where the actual finding usually appears.

What the common reasons tend to mean.

Funds.

A funds refusal is rarely about the total. It is usually about the history, the source or the ownership of the money: a balance that appeared recently, a deposit nobody explained, an account in a name that does not match the sponsor named in the application, or a statement that does not cover the period being tested. Check which of those the letter is describing before concluding that the family needs more money.

Purpose of study.

This one is about coherence. The course, the previous study, the stated plan and the cost have to read as one decision made by one person. A student moving to an unrelated field at a lower level than they have already completed is not disqualified, but the file has to explain the move in the student's own terms rather than leaving the decision maker to guess.

Intent and circumstances.

How this is framed varies a great deal between countries and it changes more often than the other grounds. Resist the temptation to apply what you know about one destination to another. Read what this letter, from this country, in this year, actually says the concern was.

Documents.

The least interesting reason and the most common: something was missing, something was inconsistent with something else, or something was not translated or certified in the form required. This is the category where the agency's own process is usually implicated, and it is worth being honest about that internally.

The step that gets skipped.

Reconcile the letter against what was actually submitted. Not what the checklist says should have been submitted, and not what somebody remembers sending. The submitted bundle itself.

• Was the document the letter refers to in the bundle at all.
• Was it the version you think it was, or an earlier draft.
• Did two documents in the bundle disagree with each other about a date, a name or an amount.
• Was anything submitted after the decision had already been made.

An agency that cannot answer those four questions from its own records has a records problem, and it will meet the same refusal again with a different student.

Telling the family.

Say what the letter says, in the order the letter says it, before saying what you think should happen next. Families can tell when a refusal is being summarised into something softer, and the softening costs more trust than the refusal does.

Then separate the two decisions that are now in front of them. Whether the reason is answerable is a question about the case. Whether to spend more money and more months on it is a question about the family. Confusing the two is how an agency ends up re-filing a case it privately believes will fail.

What to keep.

1. 01The letter itself, as received, in the student's file rather than in somebody's mailbox.
2. 02The submitted bundle exactly as submitted, so the reconciliation above is possible at all.
3. 03A short note of what you concluded the reason was, signed and dated by whoever concluded it.
4. 04Any advice you gave the family afterwards, including advice not to re-apply.

A file holding those four things answers the only question anyone will ask in a year, which is not whether the case was refused. It is what the office did when it was.