Published: 2/02/2021 · Last Updated: 12/01/2021

HEP bulletin – February 2021


Attendance confirmations – liability 2

For AY 2020/21, we offered the option to receive your term 2 fee payments during term 1. The majority of higher education providers have taken up this offer. 81% of attendance confirmations for liability 2 were submitted by the end of November.

If you did not choose to take up this option, the deadline for attendance confirmations for liability 2 was Thursday 28 January. We will begin making the liability 2 payments on 3 February.

Registration but no attendance confirmation

If you have confirmed a student's registration, you should also follow up with an appropriate attendance confirmation. You should have no students who are registered but have terms without an attendance code.

Occasionally the attendance confirmation may be delayed because a Change of Circumstance notification (CoC) has been submitted but not processed. There are negative codes you can use in this scenario. These will help you to meet the service standard for attendance confirmations (85% by the due date for the next payment).

You can find more information about negative codes (C, F, N and S) in our attendance worklist section of the SIS user guide.

If a CoC has not been processed within the 30 day service level, you can contact the Partners Support Desk to escalate it for investigation.

You should also regularly check your worklists for any attendance confirmations that have come back onto the list. This can happen after we reassess a student. If you accept the change, you should confirm these with an 'A' code. Otherwise, you can follow up with a further CoC if needed.

Course collection for AY 2021/22

Course collection for AY 2021/22 opened on 26 November 2020 for both full-time undergraduate and Scottish postgraduate courses. The deadline for submitting your full-time undergraduate courses was 22 January 2021. For Scottish postgraduate courses, the deadline is 4 March 2021.

We appreciate that you may still be deciding the term dates for some of your courses in AY 2021/22. If this is the case, please do not update them with estimated dates. Instead, let your HEP account manager know you are awaiting final dates.

If you have submitted your term dates for AY 2021/22 but need to make changes due to COVID-19 related issues, you should follow the process that was in place for course changes in AY 2020/21. You can find more information in our COVID-19 FAQ.

The next submissions we'll ask you to make are part-time undergraduate courses for all domiciles. Collection of these is likely to open in mid-March. The submission deadline will likely be in early May.

Temporary winter start courses

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, some providers needed to change the term start of their AY 2020/21 courses from autumn to winter. To give you that flexibility, we established a process for creating new temporary winter start versions of your courses. This was only available for AY 2020/21.

These courses allowed for a condensed period of student engagement from January 2021 to August 2021. In AY 2021/22, we expect these students to start in the autumn period (August to December) again.

When these courses roll over into AY 2021/22, you should leave them unsaved on the Courses Management Service (CMS). This will ensure they are not available to students in AY 2021/22 who should be applying to the autumn start version.

We are currently seeking advice whether this type of flexibility will be available again for AY 2021/22 courses.

Change to repayment threshold for Scottish student loans

The loan repayment threshold for Scottish student loan borrowers will change on 6 April 2021.

Currently the repayment threshold for Scottish borrowers is £19,895. It will change to £25,000. The rest of the Scottish Government Repayment Terms and Conditions will stay the same.

We will email all customers who are due to enter repayment this April to tell them that the threshold is changing. The GOV.UK website will be updated with the new threshold information around March 2021. This is at the same time that the all the other repayment plan type thresholds are updated.

New Doctoral Thesis Submission CoC

There is a new doctoral CoC option you can use to tell us when a doctoral student needs more or less time to complete their course.

You can read more about the process in the Doctoral Thesis Submission CoC section of the SIS user guide.

Postgraduate students changing year of study

In December, we added a new CoC you can use when a postgraduate student wants to transfer to a course in another year of study. For example, they could be moving from the second year of a course into the first year of a different course.

This CoC applies to full-time English and Welsh domiciled students. You can find read more about it in the Cross Academic Year Transfer CoC section of the SIS user guide.

Student Support Seminar 2021

Due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, we've had to reschedule the virtual Student Support Seminar from March 2021 to the autumn of 2021. We will confirm exact dates and the programme nearer the time.


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