The Education Development Management Unit (EDMU) is continuing its thrust to further strengthen administrative data systems within the education sector for better decision-making. To facilitate this, the EDMU has sought to strengthen capacities at the Ministerial level for improving the collection and use of data at all levels of education systems within the OECS.
This targeted approach will result in sustainable changes in education statistics across the region. While concerted effort has been made to improve the use of data at a macro-level and incremental gains have been made, the region still has much work to do to entrench the use of data in decision-making at the national and school level. To date, development efforts have included:
1. Improving the capacity of Ministries of Education to effectively and efficiently use data for planning, implementation and evaluation of evidence-based policies and programmes in education;
2. Defining key terms to describe indicators to ensure that the data collected is comparable across the region;
3. Strengthening the monitoring and evaluation capacities of Ministries of Education to improve accountability, results and management in education; and,
4. Publishing of the first and second regional digests and five national digests.
During the 2014/2015 year, several other ongoing initiatives were undertaken aimed at strengthening data systems and the quality of the data reported. These include: