How to report as a higher education provider (HESA approved)

Why do you report?

If your organisation is an approved provider under the Higher Education Support Act 2003 (HESA), you have responsibilities to:

• your students, to ensure they know how much Commonwealth Assistance they have accepted and how much they can expect to repay through their taxation; and
• the Australian Government.

Students must have accurate information about their available and remaining funding and repayments.

Provider payments are based on enrolment estimates and are paid in advance, in return, providers must report certain data within specific timeframes data so that payments can be reconciled.

Importantly, data can be used to better inform program and policy development, drive research, publications, and innovation.

What do you report?

In general, a data collection contains multiple data groups, those groups contain multiple data packets and those packets contain multiple data elements. A data element is essentially a piece of information formatted in a particular way. It might be birthdate, a code relating to field of education, or the outcome of a course of study.

The scopes of the packets in the student collection and the data elements are key to understanding what information you are required to collect from your students.

Higher education data reporting requirements are issued by the department through a Ministerial Notice under subsection 19-70(1) of HESA.

Ministerial Notices are in the form of an Instrument for Reporting and a Change Control document published on a year’s reporting requirements page.

The Instrument for Reporting is a document approving the form in which data must be lodged and signed by the minister’s delegate. The Change Control document identifies changes to the collection from one year to the next or any changes due to updates.

For example, please see the Instrument for 2022 reporting and the 2022 TCSI Change Control documentation for further information about updates to reporting 2022 data in TCSI.

The Administrative information for higher education providers (AIP) helps providers understand student support policies under HESA and its associated guidelines. It includes key requirements about reporting data (section 36) and other student support information.

Provider types 

Your provider type identifies your organisation’s access to Commonwealth grants and what data you are required to report. 

You can view your provider type on the Appendices, codes and tables page under Appendix A - Higher education, VET & PIR provider codes and names. 

A dual provider is approved as both higher education and VET provider and reports both data according to their higher education provider type and VSL data. 

Please review the relevant reporting requirements for your provider type.

• Higher Education Student Data Collections
• Higher Education Staff Data Collections
• University Applications and Offers Data Collections

Four collections are included the higher education reporting requirements; 

The Higher Education Student collection 

• courses and campuses 

• students’ enrolment information, study load, debt for all units of study undertaken in the reporting year and their personal details including their names, addresses and tax file numbers and Commonwealth Higher Education Student Support Number (CHESSN) 

• Unit of study completions 

The University Staff Collection 

• Full time and casual staff numbers 

The University Applications and Offers Collection 

• The courses for which students applied and those which they were offered 

For detailed reporting requirements please visit each collection from our reporting page. 

There are also TCSI mapping tables available for the translation of allowable values from HEPCAT to TCSI.

When do you report?

Each reporting requirements packet, which is a sub-group of data within a data collection, will list deadlines for each data element to be reported in TCSI

Student data

In most cases, due dates for reporting student data elements in TCSI is within 7 days of an event.

The student reporting timeframes are listed on each packet page under the 'Initial reporting requirement header'.

As per the reporting requirements, while early reporting is encouraged, reporting more than six months in advance of a census date is optional for Unit Enrolments and any linked packets.

Staff and University Applications and Offers data

For the Staff collection and the University Applications and Offers collection, the deadlines are annual and involve a reference date for the data that is to be reported by a particular date.

Don’t wait until the due date to start reporting your data. To successfully report, you will need enough time to prepare, validate and submit your data.  

A video outlining how to interpret HEP reporting requirements is also available to help you. 

You can report to TCSI in near real-time using one of the following methods:

• engaging a software vendor to develop an Application Programming Interface (API) solution that sends data from your organisation’s Student Management System (SMS) to the TCSI database
• using TCSI Data Entry, an internet portal to upload files and using web forms to submit your data to the TCSI database

When you submit data to TCSI, it is recommended you review the data frameworks to familiarise yourself with the best order in which to report packets of data to TCSI.

To access TCSI and the department’s systems to report your data, your organisation must register for Provider Digital Access (PRODA). PRODA is a secure and safe way to access government online services and you cannot access or use TCSI without PRODA.

Please follow the steps on Accessing TCSI services (PRODA) to register your organisation and manage staff member access.

After registering your organisation and adding relevant staff members, your head of organisation in PRODA will need to follow steps to connect to the TCSI service as part of the PRODA guide.

If your organisation is using Student Management Software (SMS) to report through APIs, follow the instructions to connect your student management software in TCSI. 

The method of testing data in TCSI will depend on whether you are reporting via TCSI Data Entry or via your SMS through an API. Please see links to relevant guides below.

• Testing for API users
• Testing for TCSI Data Entry users

You can submit data to TCSI using one of the following methods:

• engaging a software vendor to develop an Application Programming Interface (API) solution that sends data from your organisation’s Student Management System (SMS) to the TCSI database
• using TCSI Data Entry, an internet portal to upload files and using web forms to submit your data to the TCSI database

Responses about whether the submission of data to TCSI was successful may vary in display by reporting method. 

• If reporting by API - you may wish to speak to your vendor about how your SMS will display a message that your data submission to TCSI was successful.
• If reporting by TCSI Data Entry - when a file is uploaded, a response file will be returned with results from the upload. When using the web forms, message will be returned in the browser that the data was submitted successfully. 

When you submit your data to TCSI, a range of real-time validation (RTV) checks are performed to ensure any new data reported is consistent with data that was previously reported.

A full list of errors and whether they are fatal or warnings is available in the Validation spreadsheet, as well as each RTV published to production being searchable on the website through the main search bar or the validation page. 

We also have a guide to assist you with resolving real-time validation errors.

Data quality isn’t just important to the department; it’s important to your organisation in ways you may not realise. A provider’s funding, quality outcomes, student satisfaction rankings, international ratings, compliance record and reputation can all be negatively affected through bad data.

As you submit data to TCSI validations and checks automatically take place to maintain quality control and apply legislative requirements.

Real-time validations ensure any new data reported is consistent with what was previously reported and scheduled validations ensure that records are complete and correct.

TCSI will alert you to errors in your data with information to help you resolve them.

TCSI Analytics reports are available and will allow providers to check their data via a range of metrics and reports. This will help you confirm that the data that you have reported to the department accurately reflects your students' information.

You can also request a data extract to view your organisation’s data currently in the TCSI database. Verification is a formal sign off on your submitted data.

Notifications

Messages are posted on each providers' notification table in situations when real-time messaging is not possible where the system needs to call on other systems, or data issues are identified by system generated processes. Providers can check and retrieve these messages using guidance from our Notifications page.

Fixing data

Revisions and corrections to reported data are to be made within 7 days of the correct information becoming available.

If incorrect data is reported prior to the related deadline then revised data is to be reported prior to that deadline or within 7 days of the correct information becoming available whichever is later.

For detailed information on revising data in TCSI, please review the ‘Revising and adding data’ header in the relevant reporting requirements packets for further information.

In order to revise data in TCSI, consult the TCSI Data Entry user guides if you are reporting using this system, or consult your software vendor about how to do this via API.

Keep TCSI up to date with additions and changes to your student and staff collections using your preferred reporting method to TCSI. 

For HEP providers, while you are in safe mode TCSI will not send your students' HELP loans data to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO).

This will reduce any unnecessary transactions during the transition from appearing in your students' ATO loan statements.

Please review our Understanding 'safe mode' in TCSI guide for how to exit safe mode and further information.

TCSI Support contains a wealth of information for reporting the higher education collections. It will be your most valuable tool in understanding, managing, and meeting your reporting requirements. Changes to the reporting requirements may occur from time to time and it is a provider’s responsibility to stay up-to-date with those changes and updates.

You can subscribe to our mailing list on the News Centre to TCSI Newsletters for regular and system updates, reminders, and advice.

You can also sign up for a scheduled webinar or watch recorded webinars available on a variety of topics from the News Centre.

The contact page has our TCSI Support team contact information and a range of other useful contacts for providers.