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With Sudanese Educational Inistitutions for a New Era
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Topic of the Week
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Dr. Amna Farah
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The Importance of Country Educational Statistics.
Country Statistical reports by sector are crucial indicators ,for strategies,policy planning and program design mainly in the educational sector.
The altimate goal is to fulfil the needs for information abd data to plan for a better educational system cooping with quality of eduction training and skills required and aquired by the country human resouces for planning ,executing and following up with Sudan development Plans for 21 Century.
The knowledge, skills and capabilities needed to meet the challenges of the 21st century depend upon education systems that distribute learning opportunities equitably and that make efficient use of human and financial resources. Accurate, reliable and timely education statistics are fundamental to enabling education systems to achieve these aims.
For many countries and Sudan as our concern, still struggling to break out of widespread poverty and to achieve primary education, statistics provide a measure of progress, enabling them to set priorities for using scarce resources. For designing programs for the required cadre of human resouces for national development priorties. Education statistics help governments to respond to the ever-quickening pace of national and regional development ,globalisation, technological advance and economic change.
The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) is the guardian of international education statistics. At the heart of the Institute's mandate is assistance to Member States to collect, analyse and disseminate internationally-comparable education indicators that inform policies and monitor their outcomes. Since its creation in 1999, the UIS has carried out far-reaching consultations with both national and international users and producers of education statistics to identify information needs and to develop a strategy to meet these needs. In addition, the UIS has led a series of technical workshops across the globe which have raised awareness of data collection methodologies and tools, and provided a common framework for harmonising national education data.
As a result, response rates to the UNESCO questionnaire have improved and, very importantly, the indicators are becoming more timely and comparable. However, the UIS is still facing many challenges. One of these is to consolidate the quality of existing education data to ensure that they are better aligned with today's indicators. This is vital for the accurate monitoring of progress. Another challenge is to incorporate education data from different sources to achieve better estimates of missing data, which represent a considerable gap in our knowledge. For the first time, as part of the WEI programme, the UIS together with its partners will soon be collecting, as a complement to aggregated administrative data, individual- and school-level data that will inform national policies based on a comparative approach.
This new annual digest is a solid first step in the process of making data more useful, bringing together data on education systems throughout the world on a comparable basis. Data are collected and presented according to the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED97). This comparative framework allows countries to benchmark their progress against neighbouring or similar countries and provides a lens to interpret the outcomes of education reforms from different parts of the world. The digest reports data for the school years 1999/2000 and 2000/2001.
For Sudanese Professtionals concerned with education please Take global education Digest that compares eductional systems accross the globe to catch up with the development patterns mainly in relation to suitable and appropriate knowledge and skills that can make our human resources eligible to compete in the labour market and able to handle technologies and its advances ,so that our products will find their way in the regional and global markets. Education Digest digest also presents analysis of a current topic relevant to the state of global education statistics. In this issue the focus is upon measures of primary access, participation and completion, which comprise the main indicators used to monitor progress towards international development goals. cooperation and commitment of national statisticians worldwide, whose valuable contributions and comments have greatly enhanced our understanding of their education systems.
is highly appreciated for natioanl ,regional and global mutual benefit.
