Second year progression with failed module

I recently received my marks for my second year in an engineering discipline at a Russell Group university. A couple of my exams fell into quite a stressful and eventful period outside of university life, and prior to these exams I emailed my course director explaining my situation and how in the lead up to these exams my revision had been severely interrupted and he did believe I may have a sufficient claim for EC but for various reasons I ended up not pursuing it.

Getting my results back, these two marks ended up being very low. One was hovering just above 40 and the other was 39. Both exams were 20 credit modules. So I (only just) failed 20 credits overall this year. Despite these two results, I managed to average a high 2:1 for the year. However, after some correspondence with academic staff at my university it now seems my position on the Hons degree is still at risk.

Do you guys believe in my situation, disregarding the situation over which I may have been able to claim for EC as that has been and gone and can't be brought up after receiving marks, that I would be able to challenge a decision that may potentially go against me in this case, given that 1% in one module would be enough for this to not even be up for discussion?

Tl;dr: Passed 100 credits but failed 20. Averaged a high 2:1 including the 39. Could I challenge a potential decision to move me from an Hons to an ordinary degree?

Have your university explained explicitly why they might move you to an ordinary degree? Failing one exam is hardly uncommon, and you still have the chance to resit it presumably.

Different universities have different rules for progression so you need to look at the regulations for your university.

If you need to pass all modules in order to progress and maintain the credits for Hons then you haven't done that. Do you have a reassessment opportunity?

It sounds like you had grounds for EC but didn't bother claiming at the time for whatever reason and now want EC to be considered to avoid being downgraded? If you were at my uni and you had very good grounds for not claiming EC at the time of the assessment and have evidence supporting that fact and evidence of the problem at the time then you could try appealing on those grounds.

However different universities have different rules for what constitutes grounds for appeal so again, you need to look at the regulations for your university.

No I still stand by my decision to not apply for EC as once I had more time to think about it at the time I realised I could have worked around it. After talking about it with my tutor he ended up agreeing as well. Perhaps I should have just applied to see what happened but collecting the evidence would have been very tedious, and some of the more major disruptions were next to impossible to approve. I accept the result I got and think I just should have done better. Really, I guess I just shouldn't have added the EC part in my original post. Guess I just wanted to partially excuse myself to a bunch of strangers on the internet hahaha.

I've read the university and course specific regulations and it seems with 20 credits failed you should still be able to progress if you average over 50. (An average of over 45 is required if 10 credits are failed). This module also isn't stated as a core module anywhere.

For now I'll assume what I've read online is correct and that member of staff is just mistaken. Once I hear back from a more senior member of staff hopefully in the next couple of days if they agree I'll start preparing for the resit.