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(:toc*:) This page documents the notes of interviews with Education Review Office staff, held on 4 December (Analysis and Policy) and 9 December (Review Services). Summary of key pointsEducation websites should be structured in similar ways, to make it easier for people to find information. Bring more consistency to how education agencies store and present information. Recognise that there is a wide range of information capability, but we all still need the information. We could share more information — we are all in the public service. There is a lot of goodwill between agencies, but unnecessary barriers to access — we need to tell people that it’s OK to share information. Explain ESAF and other IT initiatives in English — there is too much technical language. Current information-related problemsWe don’t know what information others hold, and even if we do know, we can’t necessarily get it from them easily. The Ministry of Education has a lot of information on the Internet, but it’s hard for other agencies to find it. Or to find it again, when you know you saw it there just the other day. Going to the Ministry to get information for a project, we might have to talk to four people to get all the relevant information, from different parts of the organisation that apparently don’t talk to each other. “Where do we go to find out about NCEA or Te Kōhanga Reo”? When we want to look up policy information on the Ministry’s website, we know the title, but a search doesn’t return it — there appears to be no logical organisation to the content.
NZQA has lots of great information, but knowing how to find, understand and use it is a problem for us. Being able to use NCEA information is crucial — it’s the only outcome information we have for schools. It’s easy to go down a wrong track and waste hours. Sometimes we can’t even verify whether statements are factually correct or have been superseded. Information useability is a real problem — how well the information has been put together for its intended audience.
We can never be sure how up to date, accurate and complete the information we use is and this puts us a risk. We have to be sceptical of what we find and look for other corroborative detail. It can take a long time to track down and verify all the information relevant to a particular topic.
ERO information holdings are largely paper and there are problems making best use of this in the wider sector. All the information we receive from schools is on paper. Much of this would be very useful to the Ministry of Education. The Ministry has developed its own mechanisms for analysing our reports. This is a secondary analysis.
The Ministry send us what they want to send us. It all depends on relationships — if somebody leaves or changes jobs, the information flow often stops. It is not automatic on a department basis, more a personal one at times. Sometimes people in different parts of the Ministry don’t appear to talk to each other, so we have to maintain links with many different areas. This makes more work for us, both getting information from them and providing information to them.
Future information-related opportunitiesEstablish more shared sector databases, especially for sector contact information. We each set up our own agency databases of contacts — resource teachers, cluster coordinators, school principals, presidents of national executives, and so on. There are no ethical or privacy issues around this information; it’s too much of an overhead to keep the information up to date. It would be great if there were a shared contacts database that we could go to when we need a phone number, email address, or when we need to find out who the contacts are in a particular subject area.
When we deal with agencies like the Ministry or NZQA, we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t understand how these organisations work internally, so we don’t know who the right people are to talk to about a given subject. We should be able to find out from a contacts database who the key contacts are in each agency for any type of information. At the moment, we can’t be sure we have talked to all the right people, so may be working with an incomplete picture.
Establish shared sector calendars for schools, so we can all see who is visiting when. This would help avoid duplication and help to make the best of visits by agencies to schools. More electronic communication with schools would make them and us more efficient. We need to raise schools’ capability and awareness of the potential for electronic communication to make them more efficient. Schools need to put a great deal more effort into the provision of an implementation of ICT to take advantage of all it can offer — both in administration and in teaching and learning.
Set up a shared sector data pool, with online access in every agency and every school. Let people help themselves to information they are authorised to see. Make it easy to match data across collections, based on school name. Let’s collect information once and let’s make it available electronically so we don’t have to re-enter it. Let’s make it easy for people to add data to the pool in a way that enables what-if analysis, combining information from different sources. Let’s help schools understand and improve their own performance, based on good information.
A good start would be if we had access to the Ministry’s Intranet, and the information was organised in a way that makes it easy to find what you are looking for. We need greater consistency with how we organise and present information — at the moment, it’s too hard to find things. TKI is great — it’s easy to find things.
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