I am a bit rusty on student finance, but if the “bursary” that you refer to is a “young student’s bursary” paid under the Students’ Allowances (Scotland) Regs 1999, then it counts as a loan for HB purposes and is therefore subject to the special rules in Reg 40(7) and (8) for dealing with left over student income when the student leaves the course in mid-year.
In some ways this is to the claimant’s advantage and in others to the claimant’s disadvantage. The advantageous aspect of it is that you assume the claimant has already spent their entire books and travel allowance for the whole year out of the first instalment, and you also assume that they have been spending their full net weekly loan income including the £10 that would normally be disregarded.
The bad news is that you take into account what is left for the rest of the academic quarter (i.e. up to 31 December), rather than removing the income from the assessment immediately.
If the bursary is not covered by the definition of a loan, there are no special rules and the general treatment of money due to be repaid is that you stop counting it as income as soon as there is a firm demand for repayment (which seems to have happened already in this case).
Finally, the effect of the change of circs is likely to be advantageous because you are compressing the whole books/travel disregard into one term whereas in your original student calculation it was spread over the year. So there is D&A Reg 8(3) to consider too.
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