TCSI Newsletter November 2021

2022 Higher Education Data Collections reporting requirements have been released in the Ministerial Notice issued on 8 October 2021.

The key changes are the requirements for submission of the University Applications and Offers data collection and the Higher Education Staff data collection in the Tertiary Collection of Student Information (TCSI). 

The reference date for the 2022 Staff Collection is 31 March 2022 and all full-time staff data for this reference date is to be reported by 30 June 2022. The reference and due dates for the 2022 University Applications and Offers Collection are being confirmed. We’ll provide updates as they become available.

Further details on these collections are available on the TCSI Reporting pages.

These collections were deferred from the original deployment of TCSI to enable the project to be released to production in December 2020.   

Further changes to reporting requirements have been made:  

Extension of the loan fee exemption for higher education HELP Loans  

These loans have been exempted from a loan fee for a further six months, from 30 June 2021 to 31 December 2021. TCSI will not accept loan fees for this period. 

Tuition Protection Scheme (TPS) 

The expansion of the successful TPS model to domestic higher education up-front, fee-paying students at private providers is part of the Government’s ongoing commitment to safeguarding the integrity and reputation of higher education loans programs. 

To offer the same level of protection to all students requires providers to report additional name and address details for domestic fee-paying students (currently only reported for students accessing Commonwealth assistance). This increase in the scope on the student packet is detailed in the 2022 Ministerial Notice Change Control document on TCSI Support (2022 Reporting Requirements page). 

Tertiary Access Payment (TAP)   

The TAP is a $5,000 Commonwealth payment to school leavers from outer regional or remote areas who relocate for full-time, tertiary education at an education provider.

Providers will need to collect TAP data manually, as in 2021, until the details for reporting via TCSI are available.

In addition to the above changes, minor clarifications and corrections to the reporting requirements are included and identified in the Change Control document. 

If you have any queries relating to these reporting requirements or the transition to TCSI please contact TCSIsupport@dese.gov.au.

The HEIMS WebServices have been switched off and can no longer be used to allocate CHESSNs.

All future CHESSN allocations are to be undertaken by TCSI when sufficient 'baseline' data has been provided.

See the CHESSN management in TCSI | TCSI Support for more information.

Now that providers have onboarded to TCSI, the department is seeking to ensure that providers are progressing toward meeting all 2021 TCSI reporting requirements.

From June 2021, we undertook compliance reviews comparing 2021 year-to-date (YTD) EFTSL data with the equivalent period in 2020. We are continuing to undertake reviews to monitor provider progress with moving to event-based reporting.

As part of data monitoring going forward, we will be seeking to ensure that all required HEP and/or VSL data packets are being reported in accordance with TCSI reporting requirements.

Commencing at the end of October, we commenced contacting TCSI primary and secondary contacts for providers that do not appear to be compliant with their reporting requirements. Formal correspondence will be issued to Vice Chancellor’s at the end of November where a provider appears not to have transitioned to event based reporting.

In late November, all providers will receive a self-assessment survey to further assist with determining progress towards meeting all TCSI reporting requirements.

The TCSI Support team are available to meet with you directly to discuss any issues relating to reporting in TCSI. Please contact TCSIsupport@dese.gov.au if you would like to schedule a meeting.

The end of the year is fast approaching, and it has been a very busy time for staff at educations providers, software vendors and Government departments.

Understandably, everyone is looking forward to a quieter time and some leave at the end of the year.

TCSI will continue to operate and will receive enrolment and fee information over the holiday period. The Department will observe a shutdown from 24 December 2021 and will return on 4 January 2022. Provider reporting and the TCSI Support mailbox will not be monitored during this period, and any queries received will be answered on our return.

The following information is available on the TCSI Releases and upcoming development page:

Identified issues in production

This subsection allows you to obtain an indication of the current issues impacting the broader sector and their status of completion.

TCSI Analytics roll out schedule

There are further delays with the rollout of TCSI Analytics reports. The department is continuing to work towards delivery of some reports by the end of the year. We’ll provide updates as they become available.

Change of Release Date

As you may be aware, production releases have moved from a Wednesday to a Friday each week. The outage window of 8.00am – 10.00am (AEDT) will remain. The regular test environment outages will continue to be on Tuesday mornings from 8.00am to 9.30am (AEDT).

Visit the TCSI Releases and upcoming development page for more information.

In the coming month the department will be releasing the next phase of Scheduled Validations to check data reported in TCSI during 2021.

These validations will check for completeness and accuracy, ensuring no data is missing after the deadline date.

TCSI permits optional reporting of some data elements prior to the deadline date which can result in missing data for a packet. Scheduled validations will start appearing on your notifications table which can be accessed via API’s or through TCSI Analytics and will remain on your table until the data has been provided. When you start receiving these validations, please attend to resolving them asap.

To see which scheduled validations are due to be released each week, check the release notes section of the TCSI Releases and upcoming development page. These will be updated each Tuesday morning. For a complete list of planned scheduled validations check out the scheduled validations section on the Notifications guide.

The department is commencing small-group co-design on three topics.

Codesigning helps make sure reporting requirements, validations and guides are practical and realistic for the people who actually do the work.

Please send an email to TCSIsupport@dese.gov.au by Wednesday 24 November 2021, if you work with an education provider or vendor and expect to interact with any of the three topics listed below. Please email us from your best email contact and let us know the topics you are interested in and your current organisation.

Topic 1: Student Concordance

Reviewing validations, TCSI Data Entry interface and guidance materials

Topic 2: TCSI Support website

Demonstration with a small group, seeking input on menu structure and titles and the content groupings

Topic 3: Tertiary Access Payment in TCSI

Universities administering TAP. Input to data element specifications, validations and guidance materials.

The TCSI Support team is committed to communicating a number of the common reporting issues to providers:

Transfer of loan data to ATO

For the department to transfer loan data to the ATO data is required for a specific set of elements before TCSI is able to send these loans to the ATO. To support the timely transfer of HELP loans to the ATO it’s essential that data relating to a student and their loan has been reported, a CHESSN has been allocated, the TFN has recently been verified with the ATO and there are non-null, non-blank values for the following elements:

• loan amount (E558)
• student status (E490)
• residential country (E658)
• term address country (E661)
• residential state (E470) *
• residential postcode (E320) *
• citizen resident code (E358)
• amount charged (E384)
• amount paid upfront (E381), and loan fee (E529)
• the delivery location country (E660)

To minimise delays with the transfer of HELP loans please ensure that your organisation is accurately reporting a value for these elements within 14 days of the census date. For more detail on loan processing to the ATO check out the Loan processing for HECS HELP, FEE HELP and VSL loans guide.

The October TCSI webinar outlined more reasons why a loan may not be transmitted to the ATO. Please consult that webinar for more details.

To confirm when a change has been released, check the release notes section of the TCSI Releases and upcoming development page.

For information and resources to guide you in reporting your tertiary student information, see the TCSI reporting page.

Don't forget, a range of resources are available on our Help & Support page, including user guides and FAQs, that provide essential information about TCSI.

Check out our upcoming TCSI Support drop-in sessions and recordings of past sessions at the webinars page.

The 2020 student verification process date has been extended to allow the department to resolve a number of data issues identified by providers. We are currently working through these data issues to resolve them as quickly as possible.

To allow time for these revisions to be applied, and checked by providers, the new date for finalising verification is 12 November 2021.

For more information on the 2020 Student data verification process, see TCSI Update - 2020 Student Data Verification

Data extracts are still available but have been updated to return a combined unit enrolment and AOU file rather that two separate files.

This change is in response to strong feedback on the difficulty of merging those two files when providers need to check EFTSL and dollar amounts.

Non-University providers will see AOU data populated for all migrated records. The EFTSL and dollar amounts beginning with “UE” will be NULL for these records. Some non-university providers have opted to discontinue reporting AOU packets and will see new TCSI records with EFTSL and dollar values under the “UE” column headings (and NULL values under the AOU headings).

Universities are required to report using the AOU packet and will find the UE columns are NULL for EFTSL and dollar amounts.

Why does my extract have duplicate unit enrolments?

You can see copies of unit enrolments in your extract by looking at the UID16 (which will always be unique for a unit enrolment in TCSI).

Records with multiple active or deleted AOU packets will have rows duplicated to the left of the file.

A single unit enrolment may also have multiple loan records attached. This is most likely where changes to the unit enrolment or AOU have caused the original loan to be ‘deleted’ or ‘reversed’ and the same unit enrolment is updated so that a new loan record is needed. In these scenarios, loan statuses other than ‘deleted’ or ‘reversed’ are likely to be most recent. Check the Loan processing for HECS HELP, FEE HELP and VSL loans guide for more information on loan statuses and loan processing.

Student data extracts

HEP Student data extracts only return student with a higher education course admission. If you require an extract for these students please make a request for a custom student extract to TCSIsupport@dese.gov.au. Unfortunately, USI cannot be returned for higher education students in the data extract. We expect TCSI Analytics reports to provide that information once available.