The department of education will soon be able to track every learner in South Africa throughout his or her schooling. This will allow it to understand better when and why children drop out and how they progress from year to year.
The education management information systems (Emis), a unit in the department that deals with monitoring, support and evaluation, is re-tooling its systems to enable it to track individual learner movement and drop out patterns.
Called the national learner unit record information and tracking system (Lurits), the new system will improve the unit’s capacity to provide the department with fresh and reliable information and ensure optimum use of data for planning and decision-making.
The current model, according to the unit’s head Firoz Patel, collects aggregate data that ”cannot sufficiently explain changing enrolment, completion, retention and drop-out patterns and cannot track individual learners in the system”.
The department has battled for a long time to provide a scientific explanation as to why multitudes of learners exit the education system prematurely.
But Patel said Lurits will enable the department to ”engage the matter of dropouts” once the system is fully functional by 2011. He said the department will give priority to learners in the compulsory age or grade band – between the ages of seven and 15 – who have not enrolled at any school or have not completed grade nine.
The department will consult other role players, such as social workers, the department of social development and community development workers, to ensure learners within these age categories get back into the education system, said Patel.
Where learners are over the age of 15 or have completed grade nine, ”it would have to be ascertained whether such learners are enrolled in other education institutions such as public or private FET colleges and, if not, encourage such learners to enrol either at a school or other appropriate institutions”, he said.
Patel said the new learner tracking system ”will be capable of examining and describing both nationwide trends happening across provinces and institutions, as well as developments within provinces and within institutions”.
He said the system will enable the department to keep comprehensive details on each learner, as well as answer ”pressing questions” on dropouts and retention rates. The system will be flexible and adapt to education information needs.
Lurits is web-based and is located physically at the State Information Technology Agency (Sita) in Centurion but schools can access it to upload data from school sites, districts sites and provincial offices. Provincial Emis units will have to implement the system in the provinces and will administer the data for their schools on the system.
The tracking system contains a ”sophisticated user management module”. Each user or school is given a username and password. But schools cannot load their data directly into the system because this will be done at provincial level. Lurits data will be sourced from schools’ records or their computerised administration systems, said Patel.
He said each learner who is registered on the system will be given a unique learner tracking number that remains with the learner throughout his or her school career.
The system will be customised to cater for schools with computerised administration packages and those that still use a paper-based system.