Benchmarking for education managers

Central Governments have always collected education data to inform the formation of policies and decision making. The world wide trend of decentralising education systems is resulting in an increasing amount of source data being located in schools. In addition, decentralisation gives rise to the need for Central Government to analyse data in a manner that can provide information on the relative performance of Regional Governments or individual schools. Decentralised educational systems have a double challenge; how to collect data without placing too great a burden an schools and how to supply education leaders and managers at the school level with information that will support them in their policy formation, decision making and performance management. Drawing on experience in the United Kingdom, the paper identifies ways in which information and communication technology can meet this challenge and, using examples of recently developed software, identifies the benefits of making national information available in a format that enables schools to easily benchmark their inputs, processes and outcomes.