Transparency of appropriate education leaves something to be desired
Only half of the partnerships for appropriate education actively put the complete financial statements for 2016 online. Just under thirty percent has no or an outdated financial annual report on their website.
Source: Pixabay
This is evident from an inventory based on more than half (79 out of 152) of the SWVs in primary and secondary education at the end of October and November. That is four months after the annual figures were submitted to the ministry. One fifth of the SWVs have published a limited form of annual financial reporting, but not the full annual accounts including the 2016 financial statements.
| Inventory 79 of the 152 partnerships | |
| Unabridged annual accounts 2016 are online | 42 swvs |
| Limited financial report 2016 online | 14 swvs |
| No or outdated financial statements | 23 swvs |
Source: websites of partnerships
Upon inquiry, the documents will be emailed. Sometimes the publication has "escaped the attention", and the annual accounts are still put online. Sometimes it is a conscious choice because partnerships believe that the annual accounts do not give a good picture of their finances, because the rules for annual reporting are not yet geared to SWVs.
Since last year, the Ministry of Education has been working on legislation that must make the publication of annual reports by educational institutions mandatory.
Dashboard
A worrying development is that some public information about partnerships has moved to a closed environment. In a protected dashboard, which is managed by boards, partnerships can compare themselves.
The Ministry of Education has recently had a clear public website (swv.passendonderwijs.nl/po en swv.passendonderwijs.nl/vo) with key figures on budgets and student development per partnership, silently stripped of these data. Anyone who wants to view the data must request it from the ministry.
Deprecated
In an initial response the Education Magazine an OCW spokesperson stated that the key figures were a 'temporary service' and that there will be a public section in the management dashboard. Secondly, she adds that the website would not be visited often, that the information would be out of date and would also be duplicated. In addition: 'We cannot publish the data on the dashboard ourselves, they belong to the councils.'
According to a spokesperson for the PO Council, there will be no public access to the dashboard for the time being. That would mainly have to do with privacy rules. According to the spokesperson, the public key figures website is indeed missed by interested parties. 'Our most recent consultation revealed that OCW still receives a lot of questions by e-mail about the key figures.' However, it is being examined whether part of the data could be published via DUO.
To merge
DUO is already publishing an increasing amount of data about educational institutions via data files. That is a good development. Although these data are not equally easy to use for everyone: for an image of a specific partnership, it is necessary, for example, to combine several data files.
The Court of Audit wrote last spring expect little from the dashboard in terms of transparency.
