The SDR is an electronic database of learner enrolment and completion information required by the Ministry of Education (MoE) and the Tertiary Education Commission (the TEC).

The data is used for:

• monitoring performance against your Investment Plan 
• funding and fund recovery 
• publishing performance information
• statistical reporting.

You’ll find comprehensive guidance on the STEO website, but here is some important information to include:

You can change the credits, fees, levels, or classifications of your courses and qualifications, at any time. You don’t need to wait until just before your SDR is due. But it’s important to submit the change request through the STEO website before you submit a trial SDR.

If you want to make multiple changes to courses (as a result of changing the disaggregation approach for a qualification), you need to do this before the courses start each year (as soon as possible after the December SDR). We don’t approve in-year change requests resulting from substantial disaggregation.

We use data from every SDR to plan our ongoing investment in tertiary education. This means if you submit your data late or with errors, or you resubmit it with changes, this can have flow-on effects for us and for other TEOs.

To manage this, we don’t accept resubmissions of August or December SDRs unless we have approved the resubmission (which we will do only in exceptional circumstances).

We will accept resubmissions of the April SDR during a set period (which we will let you know about each year) to allow you to review your educational performance indicator (EPI) data. Outside this set period, we will only accept resubmissions of the April SDR in exceptional circumstances.

We will treat all resubmissions outside published timeframes as late.

‘Exceptional circumstances’ are circumstances that are genuinely unforeseeable and which you could not have proactively managed. These are examples of circumstances that we are unlikely to consider exceptional circumstances.

• Data issues identified during or after the sale and purchase of a TEO. If your organisation is purchasing a TEO, it needs to be confident that the TEO’s historical SDR data is accurate.
• Student Management System software errors. You should submit trial SDRs early to identify and address any issues well in advance of the final submission deadline.
• A change of Student Management System (SMS) resulting in errors. If your organisation is changing its SMS, it needs to be confident of doing so without the risk of error.
• Errors made by a staff member which were only identified at a later stage. Your organisation is responsible for ensuring that your staff members submit accurate data. 
• You have not checked your organisation’s EPI data from the April SDR in time. You are responsible for reading and responding to our announcements about when data is available for you to review.

If you don’t provide a timely and accurate SDR, your current or future funding may be affected.

If you continue to submit inaccurate, incomplete or late data, we may introduce an extra monitoring process. For example, you could be asked to use an external auditor to confirm that your data is valid and accurate before you submit each SDR.

Our Stop Gate helps us manage late submissions and resubmissions of a full set of files. This means you need to submit a full set of SDR files by the due date for each round.

We will decide whether or not to approve a submission outside of the SDR round on a case-by-case basis. You can also resubmit your data if we find an error after submission, with our permission.

The process is as follows:

This does not affect the SDR validation, processing and submission process. You can still submit course register, course and qualification completion files at any time, and we encourage you to do so, particularly after the December round so we can confirm your EPIs as early as possible.