How to report the TEQSA Provider Information Request

Why do you report?

The PIR is a formal information request under section 28 of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Act 2011 (TEQSA Act). It is a condition of your registration that you comply with a request for information made under this section by providing TEQSA with the requested information within the timeframe.

Further information about TEQSA is available on the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) home page.

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.

Please review the relevant reporting requirements for your provider type.

• Provider Information Request (PIR) data Collections

From 2022, there are additional data collection requirements to support the operation of the Tuition Protection Service (TPS) for upfront fee-paying students. This includes information which has been collected via manual processes from 2021, such as student names, residential addresses, and information about student courses and units, including cost and information on any work integrated learning unit requirements.

The PIR collection consists of data about; 

• courses and campuses; 

• students’ enrolment information, study load, their personal details including their names and addresses

• unit of study completions 

• Full time and casual staff numbers 

There is also a TCSI mapping table for PIR staff collection available for the translation of allowable values from HEPCAT to TCSI.

When do you report?

An annual collection, as part of the formal information request under section 28 of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Act 2011 (TEQSA Act). 

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

The student reporting timeframes are listed on each packet page under the 'Reporting deadlines header'.

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.

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.

If student data in these reports needs to be corrected, you will need to delete the record and re-report. Please be aware that data packets in TCSI have dependencies, so if you need to re-report a course admission, you must delete the linked unit enrolment files within the course admission, before you will be able to delete the course admission.

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

TCSI Support contains a wealth of information for reporting the PIR collection. 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. There are dedicated webinars for PIRs, the upcoming and recorded sessions are available on the PIR webinars page.  

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