HEP bulletin - August 2023

Academic year 2022/23 registration and attendance confirmations

Please continue to prioritise any outstanding registration or attendance confirmations for academic year 2022/23 courses. Particularly for later intakes, for which we have outstanding attendance confirmations. These could potentially generate a higher level of maintenance support overpayments or represent a shortfall in your fee loan income.

You should follow up all registrations with an appropriate attendance confirmation. You should also clear your Change of Circumstance (CoC) worklists to ensure student accounts are accurate and up to date.

Student information for academic year 2023/24

You should now be reviewing and correcting your academic year 2023/24 approved applications in SIS before the first day of term. You can use the appropriate pre-liability CoCs to change the tuition fee amount or details of the receiving provider.

Please also compare SIS to your own student management system records and to prompt students to apply for support if they've not already done so. This will help us to process applications before the start of term and minimise any shortfall on our initial tuition fee payment instalments.

Students should be encouraged to use our self-service system, available to all Student Finance England and Student Finance Wales undergraduate customers.

Awarding body registrations

When validating your own university courses or they're validated by another awarding body, you must ensure students are registered correctly with the awarding body. You must do this before you confirm attendance on the Student Information Service (SIS). You must check that all student details are correct on both systems before you confirm attendance. This includes:

• student details
• the level of qualification
• the student's application is against the correct course and the course names match

Withdrawal – change of circumstances

We've spotted inconsistencies in recent withdrawal submissions. Please ensure that you enter the Course Tuition Fee Liability to match to the Tuition Fee Charged to Student field to ensure automated processing.

You can find detailed instructions in our change of circumstance guidance.

Franchise partnerships

When a lead provider, or the franchisor, enters into a franchise agreement with another provider, or the franchisee, the lead provider holds responsibility for all aspects of Student Finance.

Please refer to our updated guidance to ensure you’re well placed to deliver your franchised courses effectively.

Cyber-attacks

Cyber-attacks or security incidents are becoming more prevalent in the education sector. These can result in the loss of our data or restricted access to our systems. This can affect our ability to make payments to our customers.

Please review our guidance on what to do if you experience a security incident.

Reassessed EU students defect

We are currently investigating a defect where students who were originally assessed as EU students are later deemed as a UK student, but both Student Support Numbers (SSN) still exist on SIS.

Please note that any changes you make to these accounts should be on their UK SSN only. We don't need EU SSN attendance confirmations, and you should not submit these.