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DATA EDITING AND CHECKING BY JURISDICTIONAL AGENCIES

The ABS requests that jurisdictions carry out the following validation processes:

• Validity checks: Ensure that values entered for each data element are valid. The valid range of attributes or codes for each data element are specified in the ECEC NMDS and should be followed unless prior arrangements have been made with the ABS for alternative formats to be supplied.
• Range checks: Ensure dates are within an acceptable range for the required data.
• Frequency counts: Undertake frequency counts on values for all data elements to identify invalid codes and also unexpected or unusual frequencies for particular codes. Frequency counts provided by jurisdictions are used by the ABS as an initial data consistency check.
• Logic checks: Ensure internal consistency between responses within individual child records. In a child URL file for example, the 'preschool service received indicator' cannot be 'Yes' if the 'preschool service enrolment indicator' is 'No' for a given service provider. In an aggregate service provider file, the sum of Indigenous enrolments and non-Indigenous enrolments must equal the total number of preschool enrolments (including valid 'not stated/inadequately described' domain values).
• Additional URL quality checks (child level):
  • Sex: Ensure the appropriate numeric attribute value is used, as per the ECEC NMDS (i.e. 1 or 2, not 'M' or 'F').
  • Area of Usual Residence: Ensure the Collection District (CD) geo-code of the child is used, and not the CD geo-code of the service provider. If the child's address is known but the CD code is not, jurisdictions should provide the child's full address to ABS to enable accurate coding to CD.
  • Maximum preschool program hours available per week: Ensure that the hours available to the child per week are reported. The maximum hours available to the child may be less than the opening hours of the service, but may exceed the number of hours the child is enrolled for or attended during the reference period.
  • Statistical Linkage Key (SLK581): Ensure that the 5-8-1 format for letters of family name, given name, date of birth and sex are used so that episodes of duplicates within sectors and across sectors can be identified by the ABS. An example SLK for a female child named Jane Smith, with a date of birth of the 01/01/2007, would be MIHAN010120072.
    • Family Name: Ensure that the 2nd, 3rd and 5th letter of the child's family name is used for the SLK. If the child’s family name includes non-alphabetic characters - for example hyphens, apostrophes or blank spaces - these non-alphabetic characters should be ignored when counting the position of each character. Regardless of the length of a person’s name, the reported value should always be three characters long. If the legal family name is not long enough to supply the requested letters, then agencies should substitute the number ‘2’ to reflect the missing letters. The placement of a number ‘2’ should always corresponded to the same space that the missing letter would be placed within the 3-digit field. If a child’s family name is missing altogether the agency should record the number 999 (not 222).
    • Given Name: Ensure that the 2nd and the 3rd letter of the child's given name is used for the SLK. Regardless of the length of a person’s given name, the reported value should always be two characters long. If the given name of the person is not long enough to supply the requested letters, then the number ‘2’ is substituted to reflect the missing letters. For example: If the person’s legal name is Jo then the value reported would be O2 because the 2 is substituting for the missing 3rd letter of the given name. The placement of a number ‘2’ should always corresponded to the same space that the missing letter would be placed within the 2-digit field. If the person’s given name is missing altogether, the agency should record 99 for the two spaces associated with the given name.
    • Date of Birth: Ensure that date of birth is represented by 8 numeric characters that comprise DDMMYYYY.
    • Sex: Ensure that sex is coded to a single digit code in accordance with the ECEC NMDS.
• Duplicate record: Each child (URL) should ideally have one record of attendance for the reference period unless clearly linked by a statistical linkage key to multiple service providers. The ABS will request clarification from jurisdictions for all instances of a child SLK that has multiple service providers or multiple addresses.
• Missing data: Ensure there is no missing data. Where information is unknown, the appropriate attribute value for 'unknown' or 'inadequately described' should be used rather than leaving a cell blank.