Reform in Progress: Current Trends and Concerns in Developing ...

instructions and procedures for data collection were missing. This research particularly
revealed the need for implementing certain decisions:
a) Ministry of Education should make a decision that the same data cannot be
required from schools more than once. If the data are already available in the
National Statistics Office or EMIS, they should be shared within the institutions
and units placed at national level. The schools are faced with the ad-hoc tasks of
submitting certain data several times (e.g. same data are entered into EMIS,
submitted to the National Statistics Office via their system of data collection and
again by filling in some forms for certain units of the MoE).
b) Data collection systems should be seriously re-designed. For instance, the roles
and responsibilities for data entry at the school level should be clearly defined,
including deadlines for transmission of data, time periods and formats in which
data need to be produced, and other quality requirements.
c) The policy of dissemination and distribution of information produced by the
EMIS unit should be outlined and adopted (e.g. access to data as well as right to
access by different users should be regulated with certain policies and
procedures).
d) Cooperation with the National Statistics Office should be strengthened in order to
avoid duplication of tasks, ease the collection and exchange of data, and define
the same methodology.
e) MoE should precisely define technical and organizational requirements for each
school as a precondition for the entry of data into the system.
16