Looking Inwards
How good is our school? is a toolkit for schools to use to engage in evidence-based analysis of what is working well and what needs to improve and have greater positive impact on learners. Use of the framework by staff in differing roles across your school and with partners including colleges, universities, employers, local authorities and Education Scotland will further strengthen your evaluative work. Excellent schools have robust internal approaches to self-evaluation and also value the objectivity which external partners can bring. Excellent schools understand that self-evaluation should be an ongoing process. They continually reflect and evaluate their work and use the evidence from these activities to plan future improvement. Thus, the direction for future improvement comes from the school and its partners. This is the definition of self-improvement
Self-evaluation: looking inwards
The significant relationship between effective self-evaluation and school improvement can also be seen as an “inwards, outwards, forwards” approach to help you and your partners answer the questions which remain at the heart of self-evaluation:
- How are we doing?
- How do we know?
- What are we going to do now?
Through this approach, you will look inwards to analyse your work, look outwards to find out more about what is working well for others locally and nationally and look forwards to gauge what continuous improvement might look like in the longer term. How good is our school? is intended to support you and your partners in looking inwards to evaluate performance at every level and in using the information gathered to decide on what needs to be done to improve.
