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(:toc*:) This documents an interview held with a representative of the School Trustees Association on 18 December 2003. The STA represents boards of trustees and reflects their interests to the sector. It also contracts to the Ministry ofEducation to provide industrial relations services and a help desk for board members and principals on school administration. Summary of key pointsThere is a lot of information out there and we are starting to see initiatives that connect it up. This helps us draw out more best practice behaviours. Learning how to make best use of information resources is an iterative process — ask me again in 6 months. The STA is happy to facilitate any interface or experiment with boards and schools, or to arrange for a representative group to talk to. We can be a broker for information sharing, helping to break down the silos between agencies. Current information-related problemsSchool Smart? is a really impressive initiative, that we promote with our boards. The School Smart? programme is putting a lot of work into making information already held more available and useful. It pulls together data from various Ministry databases on rolls, stand-down rates, results and so on. Each school can access their own information, plus see aggregate information for other schools on a range of comparators. It provides benchmarks, trend analysis and projections in nice readable form.
It helps boards think strategically about their role. Their job is to ask principals the right questions; to ask the right questions, you need the right information. The next stage of development will provide what-if analysis and scenario setting. For example, using payroll data on the number of relievers, you can project the impact on costs. They are also planning to draw in NCEA results from NZQA.
While there is a lot of information “out there”, you have to be information-literate to pull it together. In general, information is not readily available unless you know where to look. TKI has a lot of useful things, for example they have contact information for every school (name, email addresses, the board chair, etc). But a lot of information is disjointed and it’s a problem searching for and finding it. It’s very hard to find information on the Ministry’s web site.
Why is the government developing an education portal when we have government online? What defines the “education sector” — what’s in and what’s out? Who defines what a student is? Citizens should have access to any information that’s held about them, wherever it is. Instead of making government online and the education portal into compliance issues, let’s focus on making it easier for people to connect information sources together. The government portal is not welcoming and its structure gets in the way of comprehension.
At the moment, there is nothing that shows you where information is held — you have to know it’s there. And people want it to be readily available when they need it. That’s why manuals and printed forms are useful; somebody has organised it into a usable form. You know something is on the Ministry’s web site because you remember seeing it, but you can’t find it again.
Future information-related opportunitiesMake data collection and dissemination more efficient and lower compliance costs. We need to see a big shift in the balance of incentives. At the moment, compliance is onerous, and nothing comes back.
Boards want information drawn together and presented in usable form; they want to provide information on one return. One principal kept a copy of all the information he received from the Ministry in one week — it was a pile 15cm high. The School Trustees Association tries to give people key pieces of information and let them choose what to follow up for more detail. We need different ways to present information so that people find and understand what’s important.
The Ministry produces a huge range of information, in many different forms, plus there is information on its intranet that is not available to people outside unless you ask for it. Some of this information is excellent — the resourcing handbook is a good example, it’s readily accessible and easy to understand. It shows what can be achieved when people work together to improve the usability of important information.
Provide schools and boards with more up to date statistical information. We need to see good, up to date, relevant information flowing back to the schools. For example, statistics about careers and salaries are 3 years old. Poor information can distract us from the core issue of how best to allocate resources to achieve good educational outcomes. Regional reviews of schools use information from Statistics when making decisions on school closures. The recent review in Southland found that more up to date information from Berl directly contradicted the information from Statistics. People can end up debating the figures instead of the educational issues. Or they make decisions using poor information.
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