Lessons from high school admissions system rollout

Since its launch in 2017, the National Education Management Information System (Nemis) system has been able to meet the goal of managing and automating education data and other related administrative functions. From the outset, the main objective of Nemis portal has been to help the Ministry of Education to gather accurate and real-time information on learners and learning institutions.

Since its inception, the system, as is typical with any new technological intervention that is deployed en masse, has had its fair share of bottlenecks ranging from data incompleteness, technical incapacity of users to lack of synchronisation with data on the Integrated Population Regulations Systems (IPRS).

Launched in 2015, the IPRS was intended to store data of all Kenyans at a central location for easy electronic access by institutions, including private corporations that provide crucial and sensitive services.

The Ministry of Education released a guide on Form One admissions for schools using Nemis to guide school principals on admission criteria. There, however, was a backlash for a variety of reasons and this offers valuable lessons to pick from as we drive forward in adopting a culture of data driven decisions in both public and private corporations. The first lesson is that digital transformation is driven by consumer education.

The ministry directed that all admission letters for three categories of schools, apart from sub-county schools, must be downloaded from the Nemis website. Bearing in mind the remote location of the parents and their level of digital literacy, it will be worthy for the ministry to look at the data from the portal and ascertain how many parents actually downloaded as directed.

There was a need to provide education through mass media to the parents on how to go about download the forms prior to enforcement of the directive. A second lesson is that behavioural meta-data can help shape decisions. What story does the data speak? From the previous data in the ministry possession, what is the admission trend? Do students report to the schools that they have been selected?

For those who don’t, how do they settle on the school they eventually report to? For the schools that have a substantial number of no shows, how do they fill the void? Who is the key decision maker in the selection, is it the student or the parent?

A third lesson is on the dynamics of algorithmic versus humagorithmic selection. The ministry states that the selection process is computer generated. Well, but the data is input by humans and the algorithms are tuned by humans too. To what extent do the human and algorithms work together? Does the selection criteria match the parents preferences? How involved are parents during the selection criteria?

A forth lesson is on location intelligence. How well does the Nemis make use of geographical information mapping. In the spirit of regional balance and cultural adaptation as a criteria, it would be worthwhile to analyse longitudinal impact of education performance of learners from different environment for future placement considerations.

There are reported instances of pupils were selected to join day county day schools or mixed schools far away from student residence. Which in practicality forces a parent to rent a house for the student.

TIMOTHY ORIEDO, Data scientist, Predictive Analytics Lab.