Understanding New Zealand Government Reporting

SDR Reporting

The SDR is a set of data elements that tertiary institutions in New Zealand must provide to the New Zealand Ministry of Education (MoE). The SDR includes all information that is required by the MoE for funding students and for statistical reporting.

The SDR business process flows like this:

1. You use the PeopleSoft system to enter and store the SDR data on students, courses, and course enrollments.

2. You use the SDR Extract component to extract the necessary data that is required by the MoE into five separate text files: student, course enrollment, web-based system register, qualifications, and course completion.

3. The MoE provides institutions with a program that validates the text files that you produced through the SDR Extract component.

4. After you send the validated text files to the MoE, the MoE processes the files and calculates the appropriate level of funding based on the files that your institution provides them.

A key part of the SDR reporting process is the reporting of data that is required by the EFTS (Equivalent Full Time Student) Funding System, through which the MoE provides funding grants for tertiary education providers. The funding, or bulk grant, that an institution receives is determined by a funding formula based on an EFTS unit, whereby 1.0 EFTS unit is defined as the student workload that would normally be carried by a full-time student in a single academic year.

To comply with the EFTS system requirements, institutions must assign an EFTS factor to all eligible courses. This factor identifies the proportion of a normal full-time year's study that the course is deemed to represent. The EFTS factor also depends on the type of course according to ministry guidelines. When students enroll in courses, they generate EFTS units that are equivalent to the factor that is defined for the course. These units, usually based on course characteristics, program characteristics, or both must also be coded using the New Zealand Standard Classification of Education for SDR reporting purposes.

NZQA Reporting

The NZQA is a government body that is responsible for the coordination of national examinations and the National Qualification Framework (NQF). Qualifications are registered at 10 levels, from year 11 of schooling or vocational entry to postgraduate. Educational institutions, primarily polytechnic colleges, need to equate their study offerings to the NQF unit standards. Progression in these unit standards must be recorded and institutions must award students grades not only in their course offerings, but also in these unit standards.

You set up unit standards in your system as milestones. Milestones are then linked to the courses that are offered by your institution. You can link more than one unit standard to a course or one unit standard to many courses. As students enroll in the courses that are linked to the milestones, they are simultaneously enrolled in the unit standard through the enrollment engine.

After enrollments are processed, you can run three different reports to send to the NZQA:

• Hook-on Request report: This report provides a listing of all students who have not previously been registered with NQF and have paid the hook-on fee.

• Unit Standard Results report: This report includes Unit Standard results (complete or not completed) for students who have paid the per credit fees.

• NZ Diploma in Business Results report: This report provides paid NZQA exam results for the NZ Diploma in Business and for advanced vocational awards.

NZVCC Reporting

The NZVCC was established by the Universities Act (1961), which replaced the Federal University of New Zealand with separate institutions. Today, the committee represents the interests of New Zealand's seven institutions: Auckland, Waikato, Massey, Victoria, Canterbury, Lincoln, and Otago.

The NZVCC requests the above seven institutions to provide a data file on destinations of those persons who became eligible to graduate from the New Zealand University system. This information is produced at the end of the year (31 December) or year-end for the institution and is used by the NZVCC in creating a University Graduate Destinations Survey. The University Graduate Destinations Survey includes names and details of all students who completed a qualification in the specified year at the institution. When a student has completed a degree, your institution manually inserts a row in the Student Degrees component.

Ethnicity information is included in the University Graduate Destinations Survey report. Ethnicity codes should already be set up and mapped in your system because this is required for the SDR report.

Before you can generate the University Graduate Destinations Survey report file, you must also enter a valid address type for a student's address and residency data. Valid address types are listed in the Addresses group box on the Campus Community Installation - Names/Addresses page.