HEP bulletin - June 2025

Registration and attendance confirmations for academic year (AY) 2024/25

As we near the end of the standard academic year, it's important to make sure you clear down registration and attendance worklists. This allows for the correction or recovery of fees and maintenance funding where appropriate.

Please check previous years' worklists for reassessments that may have returned to your attendance worklist. You should also reconfirm attendance, in acceptance of the changes made. This will allow us to release payments or recover overpayments.

SIS default academic year

Each year in June or July we update the default setting in SIS to the upcoming year as opposed to the current year. We do this when the majority of actions start to be for coming year accounts.

This year, we're changing the default year from AY 2024/25 to AY 2025/26 on 20 June.

Please let your colleagues working in SIS know of this change. They can then undertake actions against the correct year in SIS.

Help us encourage new and returning student applications for funding

New applicants and continuing students for full-time, part-time and postgraduate courses can now apply for their AY 2025/26 funding. They should apply as soon as possible to make sure we can process all applications before the autumn term start.

You can help us by:

• reconciling student applications in the ‘View Student Information’ tab of SIS, with your own database of returning students and prompting returners
• putting in place additional types of communications to new students such as adding to offer letters or early induction days

Please share your insight on trends and behaviours that may affect the workflow of funding applications to SLC with your Account Manager.

Updating courses on CMS for AY 2025/26

Important fee information for placement years, part years and study abroad

When updating courses for AY 2025/26 on CMS, we've noticed common errors on fees for placement years, part years and study abroad.

This is because the published fee limits involve a rounding down to the nearest £5, rather than calculating an exact 50% of the full fee.

For example, for SFE, several providers used £1907 rather than £1905 for their placement year and in other scenarios. We need to check whether these fees are an error, or a deliberate figure.

The fee information on the OfS website only includes the standard placement or study abroad caps. Please check the guidance on the practitioners website for full detailed tuition fee amounts.

Postgraduate courses on CMS

If you're expecting students on a postgraduate course to return for AY 2025/26, you must update your postgraduate courses for AY 2025/26. We can then assess returning postgraduate students and make sure they receive their funding.

You can find course guidance and information about how to submit your courses in our CMS user guide on the HEP Services website.

Please email our CMS validation team when you complete your course submission as this will allow us to track the level of course returns.

Bursary Administration Service (BAS) for AY 2025/26

Applications for AY 2025/26 are now available in BAS. This data will be available when you:

• pay your BAS invoice for AY 2024/25
• sign and return the Minute of Variation, approving the one-off cost for the BAS uplift improvement

If you have queries about any of these documents please contact your Account Manager.

BAS service enhancements

We made 2 enhancements made to BAS. We're currently updating the online guidance to include these changes.

POLAR4 data now available

POLAR4 is a measure of deprivation. It classifies local areas in the UK based on the proportion of young people who enter higher education.

You'll now be able to search for students using POLAR4 quintile data within advanced search. This enables universities and colleges who use the POLAR4 criteria to identify students in areas of high deprivation.

Award approval - approving multiple awards

BAS will now group students with multiple awards together on the approval list. A toggle function will allow you to expand when a student has more than one award awaiting approval.

You'll then be able to individually approve relevant awards for this student or to select all and approve all awards.