System of Uniform Reporting on Preventive Activities of Schools

 

The system is being developed and implemented in cooperation of the National Institute for Education, the Department of Addictology of the 1st Faculty of Medicine at Charles University in Prague and the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports. It is basically an electronic form serving for automated transfer of data on implemented preventive activities of each school. The data are mostly filled in the form by a prevention methodologist of each school and subsequently they are available to the counselling centres and regional authorities.

The purpose of creating and supporting an on-line system of uniform reporting on preventive activities carried out at Czech schools is to unify the content, volume and methods of monitoring, to establish a uniform structure of reports on preventive activities and to provide the schools with an effective tool for (self)evaluation of implemented activities.   

The main objectives and benefits of introducing an on-line reporting system for preventive activities include simplifying the work for the school prevention methodologists as well as the prevention methodologists based in pedagogical-psychological counselling centres, simplifying the process of gathering and processing data on implementation of school preventive programmes and facilitating the comparability of data across districts and regions of the Czech Republic.

The core of the system entails a questionnaire broken down into 7 thematic sections to be filled in by the school (or more specifically by the school prevention methodologist). Data gathered in generic form from the schools are provided to the relevant prevention methodologists based in the pedagogical-psychological counselling centres. Summary information on gathered data is aggregated for each counselling centre in the region and made available, in the form of separate access, to the regional school prevention coordinators. The aggregate data for individual regions and the Czech Republic as a whole is accessible for MŠMT, specifically the staff of the Department of Prevention. Special access modules at individual levels, according to the position of individual units in the hierarchical pyramid, were always first proposed by NÚV and subsequently, in cooperation with relevant users, piloted and adjusted in order to best fit the needs of the practice.  

At the end of 2016, a systematic evaluation of the steps taken to date and the current state of the reporting system was carried out. Reporting system users at all levels, i.e. school prevention methodologists, prevention methodologists based in the pedagogical-psychological counselling centres, regional school prevention coordinators and the staff of the Department of Prevention at MŠMT expressed their satisfaction with the current state and progress made in 2016. However, there are still several technical and content related issues brought up by the users that need to be adjusted.

Based on the evaluation and the feedback collected, NÚV gathered a number of suggestions for further adjustments and development of the reporting system in terms of its technicalities as well as content (rephrasing some questions, condensing the questionnaire). These suggestions will be dealt with in 2017, as a working group for the system review will be set up in cooperation with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports and other specialists and the implementation of specific modifications and adjustments will be discussed in order to make the reporting form more concise, clearer and user-friendly.