HEP bulletin - April 2025

Registration and attendance confirmations

Please submit your spring attendance confirmations as soon as you can. You need to make your submissions by close of business on Thursday 1 May to make sure of payment on Wednesday 7 May.

You should submit confirmations when students have started attending the course and become liable for tuition fees. This means after any cooling-off period. Please also check any cooling-off period detailed in your student terms and conditions.

You must also submit confirmations of non-attendance and any Change of Circumstance notifications. You should do this as soon as you're aware. This helps us to maintain accurate information on student accounts. It also helps us to minimise and recover any tuition fee overpayments.

Please also check and clear your registration worklist. You should submit any outstanding confirmations for new students on spring start courses. Remember to submit an 'N' (not registered) code or any other appropriate code for students who have not enrolled.

There's more information on how to submit attendance and registration confirmations in our Student Information Service user guide on the HEP Services website.

Course collection for academic year (AY) 2025/26

You should now have updated all your full-time undergraduate courses for AY 2025/26.

If you have courses outstanding and need to confirm details, please let your Account Manager know. Courses that are in 'unsaved' status on the system will not be available to applicants.

If we contact you about the details and validation of any of your courses, please respond as quickly as possible.

You should update postgraduate (PG) master's courses for SFE and SFW students on CMS by 11 April. The deadline is 18 April for part-time undergraduate courses and PG master's courses for Northern Ireland.

Please check the guidance as you update these courses. There's more information on how to submit your courses in our CMS user guide on the HEP Services website.

Please email our CMS validation team confirming the date you plan to complete your course submission. This lets us track the level of course returns.

AY 2025/26 SFE fee changes

In November, the government announced changes to SFE tuition fees for AY 2025/26.

The maximum tuition fee in AY 2025/26 for approved (fee cap) providers with a Teaching Excellence Framework award and with an access and participation plan has increased to:

• £9,535 for standard full-time courses
• £11,440 for full-time accelerated courses
• £7,145 for part-time courses

We round down placement fees calculated at 20% of the £9,535 to the nearest £5, which is £1,905.

Full details are available from the fee limit publication.

Health suspension Change of Circumstance policy clarification

If a student suspends due to health reasons before term 1 starts, we'll only award them 60 days additional funding if they provide a ‘return to study date’. Even if that return date is in the following AY.

If they do not provide a return to study date in this scenario, we'll not award the 60 days funding.

Financial hardship process

You should signpost students experiencing financial hardship to the student services department. Students can apply to us for a financial hardship review only in specific circumstances. Approvals are also conditional to certain criteria.

You should not use the hardship process to change a student’s payment schedule. For example, to release payments early in each year of study or defer overpayments fully in each year of study.

You should use the process for claims for financial hardship where students have exhausted all alternative options and need financial assistance.

Bursary Administration Service

We issued the annual subscription invoices for AY 2024/25 in the week beginning 24 March. If you're paying by Direct Debit, we'll deduct funds on or around 15 April. You'll be able to access student data for AY 2025/26 once we've received your payment. 

If you've activated bursary awards in AY 2024/25, these were automatically rolled over on 9 March. The approval and activation process remains the same as before.

To make sure your information is up to date, we recommend you check and update the following:

• bursary contact on the HE Gateway
• your logo on student correspondence
• the signatory on your correspondence
• any non-standardised text on your student correspondence

Maintaining contacts

The HE Gateway holds a list of contacts at HEPs (universities and colleges) that use each service under the Maintain Contacts tab.

Each contact is assigned one or more contact roles. If we need to contact someone at your university or college, we use this list to identify the most appropriate person. We’ll also send service updates and news bulletins to this list of contacts.

Please take the time to review and update your contact information to ensure it’s up to date.