HEP bulletin - February 2024

Registration and attendance

Please check and clear your registration, attendance, and Change of Circumstance (CoC) worklists.
This will help to maintain accurate information on student accounts. It will also help us to minimise overpayments to students and recover any tuition fee overpayments.

You can find more information about how to submit attendance and registration confirmations in the Student Information Service user guide. 

Registration but no attendance confirmation

If you've confirmed a student's registration, you should always follow this up with the appropriate attendance confirmation.

Please check your worklists for any attendance confirmations that have come back onto the worklist after a student’s reassessment, and confirm you accept the change with an ’A’ code. If the details are not correct, please contact our Partners Support Desk to have these changed.

Please see the Student Information Service user guide for attendance confirmation definitions.

Course collection for academic year 2024/25

The deadline for academic year 2024/25 course collection for all full-time undergraduate and Scottish postgraduate courses has now passed. Please prioritise course submission for any that remain outstanding.
You should now be updating undergraduate part-time courses with the deadline of Friday 19 April. Scottish providers with designation only for Scottish students, do not need to add part-time courses to CMS.

We’re currently undertaking validation activity for full-time undergraduate courses by comparing courses against those submitted in the previous year. We’re checking for any anomalies in:

• fees
• length of courses
• term dates
• other aspects

If our CMS team get in touch with you about your courses, please respond to these emails as quickly as possible to avoid further delay with the publication of your courses.

Full-time undergraduate service launch dates

We’re aiming to launch the SFE, SFNI and SFW full-time application system on Monday 11 March, subject to the usual systems testing. We'll let you know when this happens.

In order to avoid disruption for students, you must withhold the promotion of early student applications for any courses not submitted or corrected in time for launch.

Course contact details in ‘Maintain Contacts’

In undertaking validation, the CMS team has had difficulty contacting some providers as the CMS contact details in the ‘Maintain Contacts’ tab on the HE Gateway homepage is out of date. Please ensure the Courses tab in the Maintain Contacts list is up to date with your relevant contact details.
You can find guidance on how to update your contacts lists in the HE Gateway guide.

Mode of Study

We've updated our guidance to provide further clarity on determining mode of study, in particular how learning in the workplace can count towards regular attendance. The correct mode of study affects the level of funding.

The mode of study definitions cover:

• full-time in attendance
• full-time distance learning
• part-time in attendance
• part-time distance learning

The information here should help you determine the study mode of your courses.

Academic year 2024/25 student finance rates and policy amendments

A ministerial announcement outlining the student funding arrangements in England for academic year 2024/25 has confirmed that the maximum tuition fees for undergraduate students will remain at the levels of 2023/24 for the core student funding package. This is the seventh year in succession fees have been frozen.

A 2.5% increase (in line with forecast inflation) will be applied to living cost loans and other support grants.

You can find the Student Support Information Notice (SSIN) and Financial Memorandum in the policy documents section of the SFE practitioner’s website.

Student Finance Wales (SFW)

The formal Welsh Government announcement of the academic year 2024/25 student funding arrangements for Wales was made on 6 February 2024.

The main policy changes to be applied include the tuition fee cap (the maximum that regulated providers can charge to certain students on certain full-time undergraduate courses in Wales) will increase from £9,000 to £9,250.

You can find the full written statement on the Welsh Government website and we'll share further guidance once available.