TCSI November Newsletter 2024

Post date

Thursday, November 28, 2024 - 16:11

The TCSI Newsletter helps to keep our Higher Education and VET Student Loans providers up to date with the TCSI news.

Click on the headings below to find out more:

For VSL and Higher Education Providers

TCSI Roadmap and Release Notes Update

The TCSI releases and upcoming development page has been updated.

Changes have been made to the TCSI releases and upcoming development page that provide updated information on the TCSI Roadmap, and improve navigation of the TCSI release notes.

The TCSI Roadmap now includes new upcoming development items, with all items that have already been delivered to production now moved to a separate accordion. Providers are encouraged to monitor the TCSI Roadmap for any new upcoming development items as they are shared with the sector.

The TCSI release notes have been reformatted to display each fortnightly release for a whole year, broken down into 6-month periods. The main page will display release notes for the current and prior year, with older release notes being moved to an archived page. The purpose of this redesign is to reduce page clutter and make it easier to stay up to date and find specific information about fortnightly releases.

Update to TCSI Loan processing

Loans will no longer receive an A130 Loan status of ‘UNASSESSED’ in TCSI.

To improve loan processing, TCSI will now only create a loan record for a unit enrolment after it detects that student identity matching has been successful and the minimum data required to assess a loan have been reported. This new process replaces the ‘UNASSESSED’ status.

TCSI will only create a loan record when the provider successfully reports a student and unit enrolment packet that meets the following criteria:

there is enough information on the linked student record to uniquely identify the student,
the student status code (E490: Student Status code) indicates that the student will access a loan to pay their student contributions or tuition fees for the unit of study, and
the loan amount (E558: HELP loan amount) is greater than 0.

Any loan records that were in TCSI with a loan status of ‘UNASSESSED’ due to not meeting the above criteria were set to ‘DELETED’ upon the completion of the implementation. For these ‘DELETED’ loan records, once the above criteria have been met, the system will automatically create a new loan record.

The best way to ensure the creation of loans in TCSI is to monitor and resolve TFN verification errors and scheduled validations. If there are no other validation errors on the record, no action is required from your end (i.e. no need to alter or re-report the record).

Issues with identity conflicts will be actioned by TCSI Support and once resolved, loans will be created and queued for policy approval to be released to the ATO.

If you believe a loan record meets the above criteria and has not been created, please contact TCSISupport@education.gov.au with the student’s ID (E313), unit of study census date (E489), and unit of study code (E354).

For Higher Education Providers only

2025 Higher Education Data Collections

The 2025 Ministerial Notice was released on 25 November 2024.

The 2025 Ministerial Notice has been released defining mandatory data submission deadlines and providing additional clarity for some data elements to support higher education providers.

The 2025 data submission deadlines are summarised below:

Collection:	Deadline:
2024 Student Verification	17 April 2025
2025 University Applications and Offers	Preliminary collection - 12 February 2025 (Reference date 29 January 2025) Final collection - 28 May 2025 (Reference date 14 May 2025)
Staff 2025 Verification	27 Jue 2025 (Reference date 31 March 2025)

The details of technical changes and reporting clarifications can be found in the Change Control document.

If you have any queries relating to these reporting requirements, please contact Simeon Hearnshaw at Simeon.Hearnshaw@education.gov.au.

University Applications and Offers preliminary reporting guidance

Guidance on identifying records based on a unique combination of the elements.

TCSI Data Entry Portal

If you are planning to upload your University Applications and offers data, you will upload the data via file upload in February. Please avoid using preference ordinal position ‘00’ as these will not be treated correctly in the file. The department will then take a snapshot of the database to maintain this preliminary data collection.

In May, you will update those same files to reflect any changes to the previously reported data, and any new data required to be reported. The file upload in TCSI Data Entry is designed to detect differences between the TCSI database and your file and only process what has changed and what is new.

API Solution

If you have an API solution, your system will need to identify what has changed between February and May to send the appropriate POST, PATCH, and DELETE API calls. You may like to speak to your vendor about what your system can accommodate.