The Data Driven Districts Dashboard is an approachable, highly intuitive dashboard that displays education-related information to education officials at all levels in the South African schooling system. This dashboard allows for the visualisation of a broad spectrum of information, in summary as well as in detailed views, to help education officials make informed data driven decisions, which can ultimately lead to the improvement of the educational outcomes of all learners. The Valistractor is an application that validates and extracts school data for the purposes of display on the DBE Dashboard, and a key tool in improving the quality of data collected for 21^st Century data management.

The dashboard has an ever-growing list of standard reports which provide additional insights into the information at hand. The reports can be saved for offline use and provide access to information, even when no connectivity to the dashboard is available. The phase view allows users at district level and below to focus on a specific phase of the education system, and provides the ability to compare subjects within that phase. Further navigation into a specific subject provides a direct comparison between the schools offering that subject, which further informs where interventions are required. The term to date view offers a summary of both educator and learner attendance on a week-by-week basis, and the task marks for the term so far.

The data, obtained from the SA School Administration and Management System, is used to populate the Dashboard. SA-SAMS is an actively developed and maintained computer application, specifically designed to meet all School Administration, Management and Governance needs of South African Schools (Public, Specialised, Full-Service and Private). The solution assists schools, Provincial Education Departments (PEDs) and the DBE in record keeping, reporting and statistical analysis. Data is collected on a national basis by means of LURITS (the Learner Unit Record Information and Tracking System), where it can be securely accessed for further analysis (Data Driven Districts), for effective decision-making on various levels.