Student Administration and Management System overhauled in NT education budget 2024

A NT tech overhaul for education administration is about to make teachers’ lives easier. Here’s how.

An overdue admin overhaul in NT schools will allow teachers to invest more time into lesson planning and enable early academic intervention for students falling behind in their studies.

It comes as the NT government commits $34 million to redesign the Territory’s Student Administration and Management System over the next three years.

Education Minister Mark Monaghan said the system had reached the end of its life after 23 operational years.

“What this (new) system will do is tell us early on when a child starts to fall through the cracks so we can intervene early,” Mr Monaghan said.
“The new system will also hold data such as their location, achievements and performance and their wellbeing, consolidating data from a range of sources that better support students to engage with education.”

The rest of the country has already modernised its administrative technology in schools.

Education Minister Mark Monaghan.

Australian Education Union NT president Michelle Ayres.

Australian Education Union NT branch president Michelle Ayres said the announcement came after “extensive” discussions with the Education Department about how to alleviate school staff’s workloads.

Ms Ayres said she hoped the new system would allow teachers to do “what they’re good at, which is educating children”.

“We’ve got to make sure that our systems are being upgraded to handle the improvements that we’re making,” she said.

Ms Ayres said streamlining student results, attendance data, and other “red tape” admin would drive more accurate data collection as well as free up teachers’ time.

“There needs to be a level of recording and data, and there needs to be integrity in that... as part of education,” she said.

“We just need to make it as easy as possible for our teachers to be putting that data in... because at the end of the day, data is only as good as what we can use.”

But Opposition Education Spokeswoman Jo Hersey remained sceptical of the government’s plan to bring the archaic system up-to-date.

Mrs Hersey said Territory Labor “cannot be trusted to deliver new IT systems”, slamming the shift to SerPro and Acacia as a “colossal failure”.

“The CLP want to see better student outcomes with better administration systems in place, ultimately freeing up teachers’ time to focus on teaching students,” she said.