Published: 9/11/2021 · Last Updated: 9/11/2021
HEP bulletin – November 2021
Registrations and attendance confirmations
Academic year 2021/22
It is important that you try to correct any errors in student records as soon as possible. At peak times like term start the SLC reassessment of a CoC can take up to 30 working days. We encourage you to work through any required changes as soon as possible to ensure students' records are corrected and accurate.
If you have submitted a CoC that has not been processed within 30 working days, please contact our Partners Support Desk who will ensure that your CoC is processed.
Registration
The service standard is that 80% of registrations should be made within 5 days of term start. You should only confirm registration if you are confident the student has registered and enrolled for the current year.
You need to review your registration worklist regularly and deal with any outstanding confirmations urgently.
Attendance
For courses that have already started, the service standard was to submit 85% of your attendance confirmations by 14 October for the first payment date (20 October).
If you have missed this date or your course started on or after 14 October, you must submit attendance confirmations by each Thursday to receive fee payment on the following Wednesday.
You must submit all attendance confirmations as soon as possible, unless you have submitted a CoC that is currently being processed.
You should confirm attendance when the student has started attending the course and has become liable for tuition fees, this means after any cooling off period. You should not confirm attendance during the cooling off period. You may need to check your university or college's terms and conditions for the relevant cooling off period which may also be referred to as the cancellation period.
Change of Circumstance notifications (CoCs)
After a course has started it is no longer possible for students to make changes to their course or fee loan amount through their account. You need to make these changes using the Student Information Service (SIS) after the student’s application has been approved. Similarly, there is no manual route for submitting CoCs, you must submit them on SIS.
You can find more information in the service standards document.
Courses Management Service webinars
We are delivering Courses Management Service (CMS) webinars in November to help everyone recap on essential points to remember when updating courses on CMS for academic year 2022/23.
Courses Management Service mandatory training
New providers and providers with restricted access to CMS need to attend mandatory CMS training before we will provide full access to add courses to CMS.
We will require universities and colleges with significant volumes of course submission errors in academic year 2020/21 to attend CMS training. We have already issued invitations.
CMS training dates and locations are:
- London – 16, 17, 23, 24, 30 November and 7 December
- Birmingham – 18 November
- Manchester – 2 December
- Glasgow – 25 November and 9 December
If you have been contacted and told to attend this mandatory training, please follow up and register now at your nearest training session.
Attending the CMS webinar is not a substitute for training. If you have been invited to training you may attend the webinar but it will not give you access to CMS.
If you are unable to attend any of the training dates you should discuss this with your HEP account manager.
Cyber security incidents
We are aware of an increasing number of cyber security incidents in this new academic year.
Please remember to contact your HEP account manager as soon as you are aware of any cyber security incidents within your university or college that may affect your ability to return any data to us. We rely on information from you to put in place support to help you complete outstanding actions, so your students can receive their funding.
We may take appropriate action to revoke user access to the HE Gateway and associated portals until we have obtained the required assurances. This will include enforcing a password reset for user access.
Similarly, the Partners Support Desk will not be able to respond to email or telephone queries until we are assured that you have secured your systems and we are satisfied that data can be securely shared.