The data is pulled together to help the minister, the school principal, as well as the district official to plan better
If information is power or, as often likened, gold, then the Department of Basic Education (DBE) sits with vast deposits of the precious gem.
It has all the information it may possibly need to steer the path of the learner to success from start to finish of the school journey.
An organisation called the New Leaders Foundation runs what is termed the Data Driven Districts (DDD) programme whose sole aim is to make the necessary data available to the whole family of basic education – from the department, the school district officials and the teachers on a dashboard accessible to all.
The foundation has been doing this for almost a decade now and before you ask how Minister Angie Motshekga is not getting things right, as her detractors would want us believe, here’s the catch: all they get is the data, what they do with it is absolutely outside the control of New Leaders Foundation.
Manoj Chiba, Managing Director New Leaders Foundation – a visionary, if ever there was one, puts it in this analogy. He has a bag full of these analogies. He says the Department is a baker, who needs to bake a cake. The Department knows how to bake the cake “they are the experts,” Chiba says. “What we do is provide the ingredients.”
Chiba hauls out another example. “Say the Department wants to cross a bridge from Point A to Point B. We can build that bridge but once they get to the other side, they are on their own. They know what to do.”
Whether or not the DBE ‘knows what to do’ is clearly debatable. But the fact of the matter is that, as social partners, the New Leaders Foundation is certainly putting its shoulders to the wheel to help make schooling enjoyable for the learner.
He explains: “While a lot can be learnt from the mass of data that is analysed and extracted from the DDD Dashboard each month, the real impact is to be found in the offices and classrooms of the education officials and teachers who are using these insights to shape the lives of our country’s learners.”
Chiba says the work is exciting, and helpful: “The basic tenet of any department is that if you can’t measure, you can’t manage. What we give you is visualised data, aggregated at the school level, province level, [we tell you] what is really happening.”
Chiba is certain the end-user of their services,“will have a sense of what is happening”.
They gather information on such varied school activities as learner attendance, teacher attendance, school marks, and so on.
Such elements allow the foundation to better understand the beast known as schooling. The data collecting is done so that the minister, the school principal, as well as the district official can look at it to plan better, Chiba says.
From this information, the authorities can pick up which subjects the learners are struggling in. The data can show, over a period of time, how the learners and their schools have been performing in their tasks. “It gives you a data perspective that you can then have a bigger discussion thereafter,” Chiba says.
They do this for 11, 2 million learners at the moment, nationally. The Western Cape is the only province for which the Foundation does not have full data.
The ultimate aim is to improve learner outcomes, says Chiba. “It allows you to go down to the individual learner.”
But the Foundation can only provide the data, the rest is up to the authorities: “We’re not specialists, we won’t tell you which intervention you need; you are the expert.”
Ayanda Mtanyana is CEO of data innovation within New Leaders Foundation. He used to work with the social partners of the DBE, like the philanthropists and companies with CSIs. He talks the same language as Chiba. “The DBE has data about their school that is visualised in the dashboard.
His work entails mining the data to help the education authorities maximise the impact of the work. Mtanyana says they will encourage teacher development, for example, because “teachers are the biggest contributors in helping the learner do well”.
Their work will tell them how teachers move between schools, “because there’s teacher attrition”, and they will gather the data around those interventions. “Part of what we do is work with social partners to look at interventions.”
Catch them young, that’s the ideal, Chiba concurs, “but we like to focus ultimately on results, we focus on Matric results. We look at the learner through their schooling work, in his school, in his class, in his district.”
But there are constraints Chiba says, “with the data we collect, it helps give them insights on where to focus. We only collect anything related to the learner and his education. We can tell you that a learner dropped out at Grade 3, but not tell you why. We do not collect that info. We can tell you what happened at the school – teacher attendance, subject marks, etc.”
Mtanyane notes that Limpopo was failing consistently. “We don’t have the data speaking to the underlying issues. Why certain schools are underperforming. But we do know what we collect, what’s the average age of the teacher, if there are teachers retiring, and what the qualifications of the new breed of teachers are.”
Chiba says “what we have access to is the learner. What we don’t see is what happens to the learner before he comes to school. We’re trying to understand what happens at school.”
Those teachers and school authorities who have used the dashboard can only sing the praises of the data-driven districts programme.
The Minister has the wherewithal. She has the ingredients; it is then up to Minister Motshekga to bake the most delectable cake!
Sunday Independent