Student course session (StudentCourseSession)

In general, one StudentCourseSession must be returned to record each year of activity that a student undertakes on a course as part of their Engagement. In some cases the StudentCourseSession may be less than a year or a StudentCourseSession may be required to record that a student is dormant. Please see guidance for full details.

A StudentCourseSession associates a Student with the Course that the student is engaging with. In most cases, the StudentCourseSession will represent a year of the student's study.

The StudentCourseSession is also associated with the relevant SessionYear that reflects the planned start date of the year of programme they are engaging with.

The associated SessionYear will represent a year of the programme. The dates returned on the StudentCourseSession will reflect the start and end of the students activity within that session year. The StudentCourseSession dates may therefore differ from the SessionYear dates if the student starts the year late or leaves early.

Please see the SessionYear guidance for guidance on returning SessionYears.

StudentCourseSessions must be returned in line with the below principles:

• The start and end dates of the StudentCourseSesion must fall between the start and end dates of the associated SessionYear.
• StudentCourseSessions must not be longer than a year
• An Engagement cannot have overlapping StudentCourseSessions
• If a student transfers between different Courses within the same Engagement, the first StudentCourseSession must be closed and a new StudentCourseSession opened associated with the new Course. In these cases, StudentCourseSessions may be shorter than a year, depending on when the transfer happens.
• Once submitted, a StudentCourseSession must continue to be returned until the StudentCourseSession.SCSENDDATE is returned to indicate it has ended. If there is no activity for an open StudentCourseSession in a given reference period, the StudentCourseSession would still be returned with the FTE information and SessionStatus indicating that the student is dormant.

Postgraduate research and fully flexible courses

For these courses, StudentCourseSessions are not required to be associated with a SessionYear as the flexible nature of these programmes means that the concepts of a planned start date and end date often do not apply.When a student starts studying one of these Courses, a StudentCourseSession is returned associated with the relevant Course with the StudentCourseSession.SCSSTARTDATE indicating the students start date. From this point, yearlong StudentCourseSessions would be returned until the student completed their studies with the final StudentCourseSession having a StudentCourseSession.SCSENDDATE indicating their actual end date. Each StudentCourseSession would therefore start at the same point in each year of the students studies.