EQAP Director Michelle Belisle is flanked by UNESCO Pacific's Gail Townsend and Fiji senior education officer Sandeep Singh

Education analysts have been reminded they have a moral obligation to ensure relevant statistics are available for decision makers to use for quality decisions.

This was strongly highlighted at an education data workshop in Suva organized by UNESCO and the Educational Assessment and Quality Programme of the Pacific community.

EQAP Director Michelle Belisle says education officials who work with data have been reminded that they play an important role in the lives of people.

We can have all kinds of charts and tables and databases full of numbers and all of those kinds of things but unless it’s in a form that’s really usable by the people who need to make decisions, unless they can really see the story behind the data to help inform whatever decision they are making whether it’s about hiring more teachers or whether it’s about making more change to the curriculum or anything else within education.

Education Ministry’s Senior Officer Sandeep Singh says figures and statistics must not only be printed and distributed but analysts must find ways to translate it, package it and share it with policy makers.

So there’s a better visual representation of a data where it’s telling a story and it helps especially the top level management and stakeholders to basically see at a glance what the status of the education sector is.

Meanwhile, the week long workshop was aimed to build capacity in education data analysis as most pacific countries have fully established their own information management systems.