Sometimes a diagram can be useful. Hopefully this one will help understand reporting confirmed enrolments.
There can’t be many people who can honestly claim to have read the Productivity Commission’s new magnum opus “New Models of Tertiary Education”. I’m certainly not one, but I did search the document for any evidence that the Commission has recognised that inadequate and sometimes inaccurate data is being collected by the agencies responsible for managing the tertiary education sector.
And I did find some mention of using data analytics to trigger academic and pastoral interventions, and making smarter use of data especially in relation to collecting increasingly reliable and relevant performance data. All good stuff, but I searched in vain for mention of a proper replacement of our old friend the Single Data Return.
This elephant still sits stubbornly in the room meaning, ironically, that the Commission itself would not have had all the information it required to do its job.