HEP bulletin - May 2024

Registration and attendance confirmations

Please prioritise any outstanding registration or attendance confirmations for 2023/24 courses. You should follow up all registrations with an appropriate attendance confirmation. You should also submit confirmations of non-attendance and any change of circumstance notifications as soon as you know about them. This will help us to maintain accurate information on student accounts. It will also help us to minimise and recover any tuition fee overpayments.

Please also check your registration and attendance worklists for any outstanding confirmations from previous years. If reassessment details are correct, you should reconfirm attendance in acceptance of the changes made. This will let us release payments or recover overpayments. If the details are not correct, please contact our Partners Support Desk to have these changed. It's important for student accounts to be as up to date as possible.

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

Bursary Administration Service invoice

We issued the subscription invoice for 2023/24 on 11 March, thank you to the large number of providers who have paid this so far. You should now be able to access your student data for academic year 2024/25. For those yet to pay, please arrange to do so.

Student finance applications

We’re currently processing student finance applications in line with our service standards. We’d urge you to put the usual processes in place to encourage new students accepting places on your courses to now apply for student finance. Likewise, please check SIS regularly to track, and encourage your continuing students where necessary, to reapply for finance for academic year 2024/25. Our Account Managers will be exploring the success of various methods and timings with you.

Course collection for academic year 2024/25

You should update postgraduate master's and doctoral courses for Student Finance England (SFE) and Student Finance Wales (SFW) by Friday 24 May.

After course submissions we undertake validation activity for all 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 you are contacted by our CMS team, please respond to these emails regarding course queries as quickly as possible.

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 user guide. 

Assessment guidance update: SFE Postgraduate Master’s Loans

There's been a revision to the eligibility guidance for Postgraduate Master's (PGM) Loans for SFE. The revision applies to students on Postgraduate courses who attract undergraduate support via the Education (Student Support) Regulations 2011, as amended.

These courses include:

• pre-registration PG healthcare courses
• integrated Master’s courses
• certain Master’s of architecture courses

You can find the relevant guidance on the SFE practitioner’s website under guidance chapters. We’ve updated the academic year 2023/24 postgraduate loans for Master's degrees chapter to reflect the PGM Loan eligibility points made here.

Policy for Wales, Scotland and NI is currently under review.