Education programme to improve data collection

The National Education

THE education sector in East New Britain is the first province to launch the “My school application” (MSA) programme.
Education officials and teachers from schools within the four districts came together on Friday to launch MSA at Malaguna Technical Secondary School in Rabaul.
More than 300 teachers from secondary, primary, elementary schools, as well as the technical vocational education training (Tvet) centres, attended the launch.
ENB administrator and provincial education chairman Wilson Matava, education adviser Hubert Wangun and other senior officers were there to witness the launching.
Education management information system (EMIS) officer John Kusunan gave an introduction into MAS to all the teachers and officials.
He said the purpose of the new technology was to improve the quality of data collection in real time bases.
Kusunan said MSA would support the department to make decisions on the growth of education in the country.
“The MSA replaces the current paper-based national school census (NSC) forms,” he said. “This reform is based on the data quality issues the department is facing, which impedes timely policy, planning and budgeting decisions.
“The MSA addresses efficient and real time data collection while in the past the data collection was delayed by a year.”
Kusunan said all school data goes through four stages of data validation and reliability checks either electronically or manually which were;

  • Principals and head teachers upload school data and send to the zone school inspectors;
  • zone school inspectors and coordinators check and verify the data, then sends to the ENB census coordinator for next level verification;
  • ENB census coordinator verifies data and sends to the education advisor for final verification; and,
  • Adviser approves the school data and sends directly to the department national data base which is EMIS.

Tablets, phones and SIM cards would be purchased by schools using the tuition fee free funds but the SIM card would be registered under the education name.