An innovative data collaboration project is producing new whole system insights for Adult and Community Education providers in NSW
The Adult and Community Education sector often gets overlooked when we talk about education - with universities, TAFEs and schools dominating the discussion. Yet ACE plays a vital role in supporting diverse people to overcome disadvantages and find their way into further education and employment.
Latitude Network has been working this year with a core group of 11 leading ACE providers across New South Wales to develop a common set of tools to better use their data. It’s a powerful demonstration of how social organisations can work together for their collective but also individual benefit. Social problems are system problems, and to properly address them we need sector driven and owned system change projects.
Data collaborations are system projects that enable a ‘collective intelligence’ that understands the whole and provides the evidence and shared learning to improve things.
An overview of the ACE data collaboration system we’ve built together this year
Common measures in a new survey to capture more detail about student needs and progress on key success factors - now with 27 colleges using this standard survey which is centralised and automated;
Governance group of sector leaders and data leads who have taken control of their data and jointly align their work to maximise cross-sector learning ;
Automated intake of data across 5 different datasets covering student demographics, needs, courses, units, progress, outcomes, feedback and longer term impacts on employment;
Data processed in a secure data warehouse (smoothing out all the variations in how individual organisations collect their data so we can aggregate it) ;
State of the Sector Report that aggregates data for a whole sector view - this enables novel analysis such as understanding what colleges deliver to what students in what postcodes (or SA4 ABS regions) - a great tool for planning resource allocation across a system;
Live Operational Dashboards for each college that track student needs across multiple domains (e.g. financial, mental health, transport or other issues that affect study and work) through to outcomes (how have the courses impacted students’ connection to community, skills, etc.); and
‘Deep Dive’ data analytics and Learning Labs are additional methods we will introduce to the project in 2025 that enables the data custodian (Latitude Network) to analyse the ‘big data’ of all colleges to answer complex questions, such as using machine learning to find which factors are predictive of what outcomes across the system. Â
The ability to see meaningful patterns and insights from shared data is a game changer for our colleges. Evelyn Goodwin - Manager Policy and Project CCA
By building a system together, each college benefits from best practice dashboards and analysis, and the ongoing improvement and new features that come from many brains working on the same problems. Sure you can build your own dashboards in your organisation, but by aligning with others in the same sector, you get much better thinking and tools from the ‘collective intelligence’ of the group. In addition, the organisations get the ‘bird’s eye’ view of the whole sector - which is useful for establishing benchmarks and collective planning. Having an independent data custodian / analyst helps enhance the insights further.
We feel this project provides valuable lessons for other social impact sectors outside of education. It is possible for different organisations (even if they do need to compete for resources or funding contracts) to collaborate usefully on data. And data can enable and empower a range of important decisions and innovations for a sector.
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