You join the unsecured creditor queue, which usually means little or nothing back from the company itself. Recovery normally comes from how you paid: Section 75 makes a credit card lender jointly liable for £100 to £30,000, finance agreements have their own protections, and bank transfers have almost none. Pay staged, pay by card, never prepay in full.
A well-known academy collapse in 2025 left students reporting around £7,500 each in paid fees for qualifications that never arrived. The lesson is not that one academy was bad, it is that payment structure is your real protection: staged invoicing limits your exposure to the current stage, and card payments carry statutory recovery rights that transfers do not.
If it happens to you: gather evidence, contact the awarding body about completing assessment elsewhere, claim through your card issuer, and register as a creditor. The full playbook, including finance-agreement rights and the cooling-off rules, is in when a course goes wrong.