HEP bulletin - January 2024

Attendance confirmations – Liability 2

Please submit your term 2 attendance confirmations as soon as you can. You need to make your submissions by close of business on Thursday 1 February to ensure payment on Wednesday 7 February.

You should submit confirmations when students have started attending the course and become liable for tuition fees, this means after any cooling-off period. Please check any cooling-off period detailed in your student terms and conditions.

You should 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 check and clear your registration worklist. You should submit any outstanding confirmations for new students on winter start courses. Please remember to submit an 'N' (not registered) or other appropriate code for students who have not enrolled.

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 submitting your academic year 2024/25 full-time undergraduate courses is 31 January 2024. If you have not already done so, please submit your courses as soon as you can.
So far, we’ve highlighted many errors with Easter bank holiday Monday (21 April) as a term start date. Please double check term dates before submission and make sure the term start date aligns with your published academic schedule of when self or guided learning resumes.

Please take extra care with your course information to ensure the course details are correct and align to policy and guidance. It’s your responsibility to ensure that you only submit courses for which you are designated. You can find more information about designation in our CMS user guide.

The Courses Management Service (CMS) webinar on updating courses and the accompanying Q&A is now available on our website.

We appreciate that you may still be deciding the term dates for some of your 2024/25 courses. If this is the case, please do not update them with estimated dates. Instead, let your HE Account Manager know you're awaiting final dates.

Bursary Administration Service invoices

For those of you who subscribe to the Bursary Administration Service (BAS), the rollover of activated awards for academic year 2024/25 is scheduled for the end of February.

We’ll also issue your annual invoices in the coming weeks. If you pay by Direct Debit, the payment will be taken approximately 30 days after the date of the invoice. If you don’t have a Direct Debit mandate in place, you can download and complete the mandate from the home page of the BAS portal.

If you do not pay by Direct Debit, please arrange to pay within 30 days of the invoice date. You can contact us for a purchase order number as required. However, we will not be able to provide a value for the invoice until the end of February. Our bank details will be included on the invoice for ease of reference.

You'll not be able to access academic year 2024/25 student information until you've completed your payment.

Bursary Administration Service system updates

Earlier in January we made an update to the Bursary system involving the addition of new filters to the Approval page.
Previously you could only filter to identify Cancelled or Deleted applications, however now the filter enables you to identify all application statuses, including:

• Approved
• Not Approved
• Cancelled
• Deleted
• Suspended
• Withdrawn
• Deleted

We’ve also added a further enhancement to allow you to filter by student course year, either a single year or multiple years.

Maintaining contacts

It’s important you keep your HEP contacts details up to date in the Maintain Contacts tab found on the HE Gateway homepage as we use these contact details to:

• contact you regarding any issues with your student applications
• contact you regarding your SIS or CMS accounts
• send you service updates and news bulletins
• as an identity validation for access to our HEP Services

It’s important you add new users’ contact details to these pages and for security that you delete the details of users who have left your organisation.
You can find guidance on how to update your contacts lists in the HE Gateway guide. 

Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE)

We’ve added a tab to the HEP Services website as a location for important resources, presentations and policy updates regarding the implementation of LLE.
The FAQ section covers questions about how the LLE policy changes affect:

• course designation
• provider management
• course designation
• course provision

A new update was provided on 14 December regarding the Office for Students (OfS) Registration. Please check this area for regular updates.

Introduction to LLE regional programme 2024

The new Lifelong Learning Entitlement funding system is planned to be implemented for new SFE students from AY25/26 onwards.

We intend to run a regional programme of information and training seminars to help prepare for this new system. We are planning to hold these during May, June and July. They will be held in:

• London
• Manchester
• Birmingham
• Newcastle
• Leeds
• Bath
• Leicester
• Edinburgh
• Cardiff
• Belfast

We will communicate further updates in the coming weeks.

Student Support Seminar

Due to the priority and resourcing of the LLE seminar programme, we do not intend to hold our HEP Student Support Seminar in 2024, and regret any disappointment this creates.

SIS performance issue update

We recently provided you with an update on the ongoing issues you’ve experienced with our Student Information Service (SIS). In this, we stated the daily restarts were a short-term fix and were anticipated to stop after December. We're pleased to confirm that we have gradually reduced these and now no longer restart the system daily. With longer term improvements and recent enhancements, the system is functioning well. We’ll continue to monitor the system performance as we move into peak ahead of Liability 2.