With the new year upon us, new policies are coming into effect that will impact how you must collect AVETMISS and USI in the new year.

These are changes that you should have already discussed with your Compliance Manager or audit consultant, so this update will focus on how Truss RTO implements these changes.

Note that these changes affect data collected in 2018, not the data you will report in February for your 2017 activity.

The AVETMISS changes aren't huge, but they will impact how your RTO functions. The USI rules - we feel - have now reached something that looks like their final form.

USI is now mandatory for all onshore students

In what - in the interests of industry certainty - is hopefully the last iteration of these changes, new USI rules come into effect from 2018. Broadly:

• USI is mandatory except for certain Emergency Services personnel for all Nationally Recognised Training delivered to Australian Residents
  The existing single day course exemption expires on 31 December. You will need to ensure that all your students have supplied USIs prior to commencing training, effective 1 January 2018 (unless the student is international offshore)
  
  
• You must collect a student's USI at the point of enrolment
  The student's USI should be collected upon enrolment, and NCVER/ASQA will not be permissive in 2018 reporting of gaps
  
  
• Missing USIs will prevent your 2018 data from lodging for reporting
  Previous regimes where missing USIs resulted in a warning and maybe a letter at some future date about not meeting USI benchmarks will be replaced with a blockage at NCVER that prevents you from reporting without USIs.
  
  
• You are not permitted to issue a certificate to a student who hasn't supplied a USI
  Aside from offshore international students, and the Emergency Services exemption, there's very little wiggle room with this in 2018.

If you have been taking advantage of the single day exemption, we will disable that feature effective 1 January 2018, and the system's behaviour will operate accordingly (certificates won't issue without a USI)

What you need to do:

• Check your email templates
  If your templates talk solely about not showing in the USI.gov.au Transcript, you need to update them. You must make clear to your students that without a valid USI, their certificate cannot be issued.
  
  
• Check your other external documents (including your website)
  Ensure that you make this policy clear

We will take care of the lockdown that's required to keep students from completing enrolment without a USI, however it is your responsibility as the RTO to ensure your communication to current and prospective students is correct and compliant.

AVETMISS 8.0 and National VET Data Policy 2018: Key changes that impact you

At Truss we try to make AVETMISS reporting as clean and simple for you as possible; we'll collect information from Training.gov.au to ensure that your configuration-level NAT files are correct at all times.

While there are some structural changes to files describing providers, programs, and units, we handle these and you won't need to change anything about how you operate to produce these files correctly under AVETMISS 8.

There are, however a few things that impact how you collect information from students:

• You must now report whether a student has been given an AQTF survey.
  If you are using Truss to issue survey links by email to your students, this will be collected automatically for reporting.
  
  
• You may now report two email addresses for a student
  Our Higher Education clients already use two fields for email addresses - we will make these available for 2018 enrolments for all our clients (in the admin dashboard).
  
  
• Completion Dates are now reported for your program completions (rather than just a year)
  For Accredited Courses and Qualifications, you must now report Issue Date (rather than just year). These are generated by our system automatically and/or overridable depending on your configuration, but as they've not been reported in the past, you may want to keep a close eye on them in 2018.
  
  
• Recommended AVETMISS form wording changes
  We will implement these for your electronic enrolments, however you will need to consult with your Compliance Manager to ensure your paper forms also meet the 2018 guidelines.
  
  
• VET Privacy Notice and Student Declaration
  You must ensure that your Student Handbook or other privacy policy documents meet the new standards set out in the National VET Data Policy 2018. Where you have declarations in your system, you can reconfigure these using the Booking Options tools within Subject configuration.

This end of the year is always a busy period for us, but if you do have any questions about the above please send through a support ticket or an email to support and we'll endeavour to field your questions as best we can.