Colleagues
This is an attempt to give you advance information on a number of matters on
which the DfEE will be issuing Student Support Information Notes in the next
few weeks, and to answer some of the questions which I have been asked. My
apologies to those who have e-mailed me and not yet received a reply.
Please bear in mind that this information comes from DfEE drafts, and some
of the detail may yet change at the margin.
As you know, the design group has had to take the arrangements in order of
implementation, which means that the detail of what HEIs have to do has
followed behind the LEAs and SLC detail.
The most important bits at the moment are (I think) to do with fee
notifications to HEIs, and what is then expected of us.
Thanks to those of you who have offered suggestions for the messages to be
given to the LEA Awards Officers Conference
Roger Clark
Academic Registrar
University of Reading
FEE CONTRIBUTIONS
Fee contribution schedules
The plan is that we will receive from the SLC an initial fee notification
schedule on about 20 September, which will save us having to re-key a large
proportion of the fee split information. Further substantive schedules will
be sent on 29 October and 25 November. The SLC will send the notifications
by e-mail to a named contact; or on disc by post to a named contact; r on
paper to a named contact. The strong preference is for e-mail. Electronic
files will be in comma delimited format
The schedules will be sent to us by e-mail, to a named contact; those who
cannot take e-mail information will be able to ask for it on floppy disk,
and, as a last resort, they can be sent on paper. The files will be
delimited text files (I do not yet know what the delimiter will be). The
data items on the list are:
Student Support Number 13 characters
Student Surname 30 characters
Student forename 35 characters
Student date of birth 10 characters
Course code (UCAS course code where
one exists, otherwise SLC course code) 6 characters
Course title 50 characters
Year of course 1 character
UCAS Student number 11 characters
Net contribution to fee from the SLC 7 characters
Assessment status 2 characters
Issue date of financial assessment 10 characters
Assessment status: P = provisional assessment
F = final assessment
R = revised assessment
These can be combined eg RP = revised assessment, but still provisional; RF
= revised assessment, expected to be final.
The Combined Fee Notification list will include an additional item/box at
the end for institutions' responses, as follows:
A = student is or was in attendance on 1 December and is expected to
continuein the next term
L = student was in attendance on 1 December but is not expected to be
returning next term
U= student was not in attendance on 1 December but may return during the
current quarter or later
S = student was not in attendance on 1 December (course suspended)
W = student not in attendance on 1 December (withdrawn)
D= in attendance but studying a different course from that listed in the
schedule, or studying a different year
HEIs will be able to load the student and SLC fee contributions and SSN into
their own student record systems (or finance systems), using the UCAS code
as the look-up key. Some institutions do not hold the UCAS number as a
discrete data item in their student record systems. However, the UCAS
number is embedded in the HESA ID, and it should be possible to extract it
in order to facilitate matching. The other data items are included as an
aid to checking for correct matching.
COMBINED FEE NOTIFICATION SCHEDULE AND ATTENDANCE RETURN
The 25 November schedule will also act as the attendance schedule, which we
will have to return to the SLC indicating that the student was in attendance
on 1 December, and that we claim the tuition fee. Where a student is not in
attendance on 1 December, we will indicate whether the student has
withdrawn; has suspended; is not in attendance but expected to return; and
also, is in attendance but on a course or year different from that on the
schedule. I have suggested that there is a further category - students in
attendance on 1 December but not expected to return for the next term.
Where there is a discrepancy, we will need to tell the student to contact
their LEA to amend their course details.
As last year, we should be paid on about 15 February. My assumption is that,
having confirmed attendance, we will receive in February whatever fee is in
the file, and we should demand payment by the student of the balance of the
£1025. If there is a subsequent re-assessment, either the student will come
in with a new assessment form, or we will receive the new split in a later
notification file. Either way, we either bill the student for an increase,
or make a refund, and do the same for the SLC.
I have concentrated on the sequence for students starting in the autumn; the
draft also includes equivalent dates for students starting in the second and
third quarters. Further fee notification schedules will be sent out at
intervals after 25 November to inform us of late assessments, revised
assessments etc.
It is not yet clear whether we will also receive the fee split data for EU
students, as they are not part of the SLC brief.
There may be some variations on the above for Scotland, as SLC and SAAS are
cooking up some variations on their information flows.
This data should help put HEIs in a position to invoice students for their
fee contributions at an early date; HEIs will need to collect students' fee
notifications from them at registration, and will need to input data from
the notifications for students who were not included in the schedule. We do
not yet know what proportion of students with late course and/or institution
changes (those with changed course offers, those placed at their insurance
institution and those recruited in Clearing) will be included in the 20
September schedule; that will depend on the speed with which applicants
notify their LEAs of their changed destination, and on how fast the LEAs and
SLC can turn round the revised notifications.
ANNUAL REPORTS - AS1 AND AS2
You should be reporting on AS1/AS2 lists on "old award" students only, ie
second and later years, plus first years who were gap year etc. You should
not be reporting "transitional award" students, who will come under the new
Student Support Regulations. I am concerned to hear that some LEAs are
apparently unable to distinguish between old award and transitional students
(which will give them much more serious problems than this!!)
However, you should be assiduous about reporting to the SLC transitional
award students who withdraw, or who are not allowed to continue with their
courses for 1999-2000. Otherwise the SLC will assume that they are
returning for the Autumn Term/Semester, and will send a loan cheque to you.
That in turn will involve you in more paperwork, and, in the worst case,
result in your giving out cheques to students who are not entitled to them.
LOAN CHEQUES
The SLC will send loan cheques to HEIs five days before the student's term
begins. Cheques will be sent to the person named in the courses database
return as responsible for recipt of cheques.
A near-final draft of the "cheque with attached confirmation" form is
attached as cheque.doc in Word 6 format.
NOTIFICATION ABOUT ROUTINE CHANGES OF COURSE WHICH DOES NOT INVOLVE A CHANGE
IN FINANCIAL ARRANGEMENT
The prime responsibility for informing the LEA of any course change rests
with the students. You might think that unreliable. There will be a
procedure for us to follow when giving out cheques where we discover that
the course on the cheque form is different from the actual registration,
which will involve us and the student filling in a simple form and sending
it to the LEA. My suggestion is that if there is a risk of a queue building
up, the forms should be dealt with by a designated person eg the supervisor
of cheque issue.
WITHDRAWALS AND SUSPENSIONS
There will be forms (currently being designed) for notification of
withdrawals and suspensions, to be completed by HEIs and sent to SLC.
Meanwhile, of course, we are still under the 1998-99 loans regulations, and
need to be assiduous in reporting withdrawals, suspensions and changes in
course end date to the SLC. I am a bit concerned that there seems to be no
procedure under the 1998-99 rules for reporting course changes for
transitional award students where there is no change in course length, and
this could lead to numbers of cheques with the wrong course on the
counterfoil (sse below). Students need to be prompted to notify their LEAs
of any course cahnages
STUDENTS WHOSE CHEQUE COUNTERFOILS SHOW A COURSE DIFFERENT FROM THE ONE THEY
ARE REGISTERED FOR
Detailed guidance on this is in draft; basically, we will need to check that
the new course is also a designated course. There are also complications
about sandwich courses and some ITT courses (for which students may be
eligible for loans but not for additional grants).
Forms in design - see above. We will need to be assiduous in reporting
withdrawals (including those who cannot continue because of exam failure)and
suspensions to the SLC under the 1998-99 arrangements
COURSES WITH A YEAR ZERO
The failure to deal with courses which have a year zero was a major flaw in
the SLC database. LEAs will be asked to unravel these students' entitlement
at the appropriate time. I will ask for guidance to be given on this.
REQUESTS FORM LEAs FOR TERM DATES
We should not be replying to requests for individual attendance dates. The
LEAs have dates for all years of almost all courses on the database. So they
should not need to ask for the dates for old award students. (There may
however be a few cases where the student tells the LEA something different
from what is in the database, and the LEA will need to check)
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