TEQSA Modernises Its Annual Higher Education Risk Assessment

3 min read | Posted Aug-2026 | Geoff Morgan

At a Glance

Client: Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA)

Challenge: Annual risk assessment for ~180 providers relied on ~30 chained SQL stored procedures and manual Excel processing slow, error-prone, hard to debug or maintain.

Approach: Uplifted databases to Azure with Data Factory pipelines, automated manual data transformation, eliminated chained stored procedures and hard-coded mappings, replaced Access with a Power BI-embedded Power App, added data quality checks and a governance framework, and built a new analytics environment with documentation.

Outcome: Faster turnaround, less manual effort, higher accuracy, real-time rating updates, and a modern, documented solution with improved executive reporting.

About TEQSA

The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) is Australia’s independent national quality assurance and regulatory agency for higher education. TEQSA’s purpose is to protect student interests and the reputation of Australia’s higher education sector through a proportionate, risk-reflective approach to quality assurance that supports diversity, innovation and excellence.

The Challenge

TEQSA undertakes an annual risk assessment to students, and financial position, for Australia’s approximately 180 higher education providers and universities. Multiple datasets from external agencies are combined to calculate risk ratings across 19 indicators.

To do this, TEQSA used around thirty chained SQL stored procedures, running on-prem, to stage data and calculate indicator values and ratings. The values and ratings were displayed in a Power BI report made up of around 70 visuals.

Revenite was initially engaged to provide technical assistance with SQL and Power BI for TEQSA’s annual risk assessment. On completion of the assessment, Revenite was asked to provide an executive summary highlighting current process risks and improvement recommendations:

“…processing of external data is currently a time-consuming manual exercise that is prone to errors, not easily deciphered, updated, or debugged. There is a real risk that current, or future TEQSA data engineers cannot understand and rectify issues in time for TEQSA to complete the annual assessment.”

Revenite was subsequently engaged to implement the recommended improvements ahead of the assessment.

The Approach

The improvements for the assessment that were completed, tested, and documented in time included:

Uplift on-prem databases to Azure
Azure Data Factory pipelines
Automation of manual Excel data transformation.
Elimination of chained stored procedures (spaghetti code)
Elimination of hard-coded mappings.
Replacement of Microsoft Access with Power BI embedded Power App
Data quality standards and checks
Recommended data governance framework.
Creation of TEQSA’s data analytics and insights environment with guidelines and best practice documentation.

The Outcome

The uplift delivered a range of benefits for TEQSA:

Reduced assessment turn-around time and manual effort
Increased accuracy and reduced issue resolution effort
Real-time rating adjustment updates (reduced manual effort and improved user experience)