UBEC, stakeholders meet on data politicisation, others

Officials of the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) have deliberated with stakeholders on issues and challenges of basic education data management including data politicization and falsification.

The meeting on updating of 2019/2020 and sustainability of basic education database, which comprised of education commissioners, chairmen of State Universal Basic Education Boards (SUBEB) and National Association of Proprietors of Private Schools (NAPPS) took place recently in Abuja.

The meeting dealt with the challenges of poor record keeping in schools, low commitment and difficulty in obtaining data from private schools, lack of budgetary provision for data generation, non-adaptation to modern trends in data collection techniques and disarticulation of junior secondary from senior secondary among others.

The Executive Secretary of UBEC, Dr

Hamid Bobboyi, said as implementers of basic education in the country, stakeholders designed framework for continuous data collection and strived towards closing the existing gaps by providing current, accurate and reliable data for planning and decision making as well as national and global reporting.

“We should also strengthen and boost institutional capacity in data generation, management and use,” he said.

He said the 2018 National Personnel Audit (NPA) which captured data of all basic education institutions was designed and implemented by a multi-sectoral committee set up by the commission in collaboration with a number of agencies.

The NPA was concluded with production of the main report, printing of fact sheets and development of a compendium of basic education profile, Dr Bobboyi said.

Unlike the 2006 and 2010 NPAs, the 2018 exercise, covered private schools, he said, and that data generated during the exercise had revealed key performance indicators relevant for policy making.

According to him, the 2019/2020 exercise would soon commence with an in-house advance technology and universal application developed to ensure regular update and quality data.

“This is aimed at establishing a functional and sustainable Basic Education Management Information System (BEMIS) for the sub-sector, he added.

The 2018 NPA report would be released on December 12.

In his remarks, Chairman of the 2018 NPA Planning committee, Rt Rev Edwin Jarumai, said the meeting also discussed the process of transferring the basic education database to individual states for ownership as well as the training of technical staff at both LGA and state levels to selfrun the developed in-house webbased technology for sustainable data generation.