Right now, the summer holiday continues for students, but right now it's workshop time for principals all across the country. It's called the CPD Professional Development training, and as part of this year's session, these school leaders are learning to computerize vital information about their schools so that the Ministry can access it easier, and make timely interventions. They will be doing so using the Open Education Management Information System, or Open EMIS for short.
By having this data properly documented and managed through the Open EMIS system, the Ministry will be better able to make policy decisions on what to do with its budget, for example. The government officials would know, after reviewing the data, if they need to buy more textbooks, build more classrooms or schools, or hire more teachers.
Today, we dropped in at the training for the Belize District Principals at the Edward P Yorke High School, and we found out more:
Martin Aldana - Policy & Planning Unit, Ministry of Education
"This week we are starting our principals training across country at this location here at EP YORKE. We have sessions for Belize District primary school principals and the training is Open EMIS database that the Ministry in planning to roll out in the upcoming school year. So we are having sessions with principals to show them how to use the system. Open EMIS is basically a database. So it will be a tool that will be used by schools and the ministry to store information and to exchange information. Previous to the database we have a lot of information exchange from the schools to the Ministry and vice versa that are done through paper or some through other documents like spread sheets and so on but with the database, it would facilitate that exchange of information. The schools would use the database to enter and to store records of their students, of their teachers, of their institution and a lot of that information the Ministry would have access to that information through the database."
Felix Sutherland - Principal, St. John's Vianney Primary School
"It is very useful, as a matter of fact it will enable us to communicate with everybody involve with education in a very timely manner. Whilst we are doing the initial training the Open EMIS it is hoped will be used by parents, teachers, Ministry of Education officials and school administrators."
The training continues for the next few days.
