The government supported National Schools Interoperability Program (NSIP) adopted and maintains the Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF) as the preferred mechanism for exchanging data between entities in the schooling sector. NSIP has used this framework to guide its activities, including providing support and advice to school education stakeholders and developing reference materials. This work has been integral to supporting national, state and sector initiatives, such as NAPLAN Online and classroom-based assessments.
The New Zealand Ministry of Education, Tertiary Education Commission, marketplace providers, and NZ Qualifications Authority, has developed their own version of the SIF framework to support The Ministry’s Te Rito information sharing project. The Te Rito project is intended to save schools and teachers time and improve accuracy and efficiency, by enabling effective, secure sharing of information between schools, and providing a way for important learner information to travel with the learner throughout their education.
The North American Access 4 Learning (A4L) Community, and its special interest group the Student Data Privacy Consortium (SDPC), is a unique, non-profit collaboration composed of schools, districts, state agencies, US Department of Education, software vendors and consultants. The Community is “Powered by SIF/Unity” as its major technical tool to help manage learning data simply, securely and in a scalable, standard way regardless of platform. The SDPC is designed to address the day-to-day, real-world multi- faceted issues faced when protecting learner infor-mation by setting common expectations between market providers and end users.
The A4L UK Community collaboratively developed the SIF Implementation Specification (United Kingdom) defining a set of data objects supporting the United Kingdom’s interoperability requirements for the education, skills and children’s services sector. This draft combines a data model with established infrastructure protocols to support United Kingdom-specific namespaces and defined critical data objects.