HEP bulletin - August 2025

Student information for academic year (AY) 2025/26

We're approaching the largest number of term starts for AY 2025/26. Please review and correct your AY 2025/26 approved applications in the Student Information Service (SIS) before the first day of term. You can change tuition fee amounts, the course, or the receiving provider's details using the pre-liability CoCs. Please also compare SIS to your own student management system records and prompt students to apply for support if they’ve not already done so. This will help minimise any shortfall in our initial tuition fee payment instalments before the start of term.

Students should use their student finance account. It's available to all Student Finance England and Student Finance Wales students.

Scottish students can sign into their online SAAS account to apply and check their application status.

Northern-Irish students can apply for student support on the Student Finance NI website.

Change of Circumstance (CoC) status definitions

You must submit a CoC notification for incorrect student applications as soon as possible. This lets us know what needs changed. Our service level for CoC processing is 20 days in off-peak periods. During peak periods (August to end of November) it’s 30 working days. Once you've submitted a CoC, you can view its status on the Change of Circumstance tab of the Detailed Student Information page on SIS. Please follow the process and timescales before contacting us about routine CoCs. You should still direct any exceptional queries to our Partners Support Desk.

Awarding body registrations

You should make sure students are registered with the relevant awarding body before you confirm attendance on SIS. You must check that all student details are correct on both systems before you confirm attendance. Please do so whether you validate your own courses or they're validated by another awarding body. This includes:

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

AY 2024/25 registration and attendance confirmations

Please prioritise outstanding registration or attendance confirmations for AY 2024/25 courses. Particularly for later intakes, for which we have outstanding attendance confirmations. These may generate maintenance support overpayments or represent a shortfall in your fee loan income. You should follow up all registrations with an appropriate attendance confirmation. Please also clear your CoC worklists to ensure student accounts are accurate and up to date.

Smishing

Please remind your students of the importance of being aware of smishing scams during this time. Smishing is fraud using text messages. It’s currently the most popular form of scam targeted at students. Please advise that we’ll never ask them to provide or verify their personal or financial information via email or text message. You should also encourage your students to pay attention to any communications they receive from us over the coming weeks.

Fee limits for part time undergraduate foundation year courses

All students on the foundation year of a part time undergraduate course must have their tuition fee reflected in line with the new regulations.

For courses that meet the criteria for the lower fee limit, there's guidance on the foundation year tuition fee limit available on the HEP Services website.

LLE course export – Courses Management Service (CMS)

Ahead of the introduction of LLE we’ve created technical specifications, which detail the layout of the new CMS LLE export file. The export will be available as we move toward LLE go-live. You should import our CMS file into your systems and decide if you need to make any changes to accept the additional LLE data fields.

You can find the document in the HE Gateway homepage in the technical specifications for CMS section.

Maintaining contacts

The HE Gateway holds a list of contacts at HEPs that use each service under the Maintain Contacts tab. Each contact is assigned one or more contact roles. We use this list to identify who to contact at your university or college. We’ll also send service updates and news bulletins to this list of contacts. You can find guidance to help on the HEP Services website.