Keep Soaring: Developing a Strategy for School-Led Self-Evaluation

The concept of self-evaluation was initially introduced to schools as a means of driving the agenda for school improvement. As inspection regimes developed around the world, the accuracy and robustness of a school’s self-evaluation began to inform judgements on both the effectiveness of the school’s leadership and the school’s capacity for further improvement. This approach meant that self-evaluation became intrinsically linked to external evaluations, most typically inspection, and therefore became a necessary evil for many schools to undergo at regular intervals. The problem with this is that when viewed purely in this way, self-evaluation becomes an event that creates a bureaucratic burden and additional workload with little meaningful return for teachers and students.

Experience has shown that when school leaders change their approach to embrace and integrate self-evaluation into the day-to-day life and work of a school, they begin to see tangible value benefits for all stakeholders that go far beyond the original perception of simply judging what the school is doing well and where it needs to develop and improve. In these schools, self-evaluation is not simply an event triggered by an external stimulus but is a continuous cycle of reflection and analysis that has a very specific purpose.

We all know that schools are complex dynamic organisations that need to be able to adapt to ever-changing circumstances. In fact, the only real constant in most schools is that change will happen … student populations, parental communities, staffing profiles, curricular requirements, governance and legislative demands, to name a few. As a result, the success of a school often hinges on the ability of its leaders to filter competing demands and influences to make the right decisions and take the right actions, at the right time, in the context of their own school. This school-led approach is critical and hinges on principals having confidence and credibility in their self-evaluation process and the people that carry it out.

The Keep Soaring philosophy for self-evaluation has evolved from our work with schools over the past ten years, and in particular with schools subjected to frequent external evaluations, such as those in the UK and UAE. We aimed to strip away the layers of jargon and bureaucracy and create a streamlined approach that made self-evaluation a truly valuable part of a school’s work, rather than a bolt-on process where schools simply went through the motions. To achieve this, we believe that a school’s most senior leaders must be explicit about the why and what of self-evaluation with a shift in thinking and focus from how they will do it. They must shar

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