The national Department of Education (DOE) will spend more than R150 million, over the next three years, on its new scholar tracking system for schools.
In her annual budget address to Parliament last week, education minister Naledi Pandor stated her department would spend R21 million on the Education Management Information System (EMIS) during the 2008/9 financial year.
Subsequently, her department has clarified this forms part of a total allocation of R150 million over three years for the project to be rolled out nationally.
"The EMIS improvement project at national level focuses on the development of systems to support the Education Management Information System as a whole," says Firoz Patel, deputy director-general for system planning and monitoring in the DOE.
"The priority EMIS improvement project is the development of a central Learner Unit Record Information and Tracking System - Lurits - to house the biographical details of each learner and educator at ordinary and special schools in the country, and to track the movement of learners from school to school throughout their school careers."
He explains that the central, national system is to be linked to the SA-SAMS computerised administration system, which runs at school-level. The DOE is being partnered by the State IT Agency (SITA) on the project, and SITA has been responsible for the full project lifecycle.
Patel says SITA will assist the DOE in rolling out EMIS as of June, with the system currently being in the "transition to production" phase. The programme is expected to be fully operational by March 2010 and will be maintained by SITA.
"Provinces will cover the costs for the SA-SAMS roll-out to schools, including support and training, and the implementation of Lurits from the EMIS improvement funds," says Patel.
Spending more
In addition to EMIS, the DOE will initiate an EMIS Enhancement and System Development Project. This has had R26.4 million allocated to it for the medium-term financial period between 2007 and 2010.
Patel explains this money is to be spent on a data quality audit (DQA), which constitutes a 10% audit of all education institutions funded by the state in provinces. It is being conducted to verify the submission of these institutions' statistics.
"The DQA implantation is currently being implemented by Khulisa Management Service (project implementation), a service provider who has formed a consortium with PricewaterhouseCoopers (project planning) and Basic Blue (fieldwork) to undertake the task over the medium-term financial period."
Furthermore, Patel says the DOE is developing a data warehouse for the EMIS data to be made available to all DOE managers via a business intelligence reporting layer.
The system is also in transition to production phase, and will be in production from June.
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