On 16 November 2012, the Standing Council on Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment (SCOTESE) agreed to the mandatory collection and reporting of total Vocational Education and Training (VET) Activity data from 1 January 2014. The implementation details for the new requirements will be finalised at a later date. Currently, data are collected from around 2,200 providers either from government providers reporting data on all students or from providers reporting on government-subsidised activity only. Therefore, the proposed mandatory collection of data will impact approximately 2,600 providers who will need to submit data for the first time. Also a further 950 providers may need to increase their reporting. The costs of introducing mandatory reporting requirements will not be evenly distributed across stakeholders. The new reporting requirements are likely to have a greater impact on small businesses. Around 370 providers are expected to incur increased IT costs. Increased costs will potentially be passed on to students. The increased costs may also result in changes to course offerings and consolidation within the VET provider market. The benefits of mandatory reporting are expected to outweigh these costs. Benefits are expected to be an increased understanding of the skills produced in the VET sector, which will result in more targeted government intervention. Mandatory reporting will also support implementation of the Unique Student Identifier and transparency initiatives such as My Skills. A Regulation Impact Statement (RIS) was prepared by the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education. This RIS concluded that the preferred option was to mandate the collection of core demographic data only rather than full demographic data. However, the decision made by SCOTESE was to proceed with mandating the collection of full demographic data. The RIS was assessed as adequate by the Office of Best Practice Regulation.
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