Scotland has started a collective endeavour to build an empowered, connected, self-improving education system to achieve excellence and equity for all children and young people as set out in the National Improvement Framework.

In an empowered school led system, school leaders should be part of the collective leadership of the system as well as leaders within their own organisation.

Scottish Borders Council is committed to the delivery of a high-quality education service for all children and young people. This is underpinned by a commitment to work in partnership with parents and communities. Our vision is to embed a culture of continuous improvement which ensures our children and young people are achieving the best possible outcomes.

Achieving Excellence in Learning # play your part, the council strategy to Raise Attainment for All comprises six key frameworks: Teaching and Learning, Literacy, Numeracy, Learning Together (Parental Engagement and Family Learning), Inclusion and Quality Improvement. Each of these frameworks is informed by data, research and strategies known to be successful in pursuit of the overarching aim of raising attainment. This strategy details the actions required by all to ensure consistent, high quality teaching and learning in schools and centres.

This quality improvement framework seeks to support and enable Head Teachers to take responsibility and be accountable for their own improvement journey.

Effective self-evaluation is a rigorous process which identifies a unique and valuable picture of what is having most and least impact on learners, in a single class, across a school, learning community or a local authority. It should take place within an aspirational culture of ‘How good can we be?’

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?

HGIOS 4 Education Scotland 2015