Self-evaluation as part of a culture of school imp

Declaration of ECNAIS conference, Istanbul,  16-18 April 2015
“Self-evaluation as a vital way of improving the quality of education”
A culture of school improvement has to come from inside, embedded in the schools itself.
Autonomy, one of the main characteristics of independent education, has a social counterpart which is accountability. The reflexive and systematic practices of self-evaluation contribute in a large scale to the quality of education and the quality of the information provided to all stakeholders.
As complex organizations, with highly skilled professionals, schools quality is intrinsically connected to the teachers. Self-evaluation is a way of ensuring quality of teaching.  Good quality teachers are tightly connected with the quality of learning, determining students excellency.
Self-evaluation is also about transparency and mirroring. It stimulates schools to think about their own narrative as a coherent story of their own values reflected in the school profile.

It is crucial for peer review as a part of self-evaluation that it is about concrete goals and objectives, that it is done in a safe but also challenging environment, that the expertise of the reviewer is recognized and that the reviewees are wholehearted and open minded.

There are good models for self-evaluation of schools available as we could learn from a bilateral project about self-assessment in Norway and Portugal and from a project of independent schools in Denmark.
These are the main conclusions of the ECNAIS conference on self-evaluation as part of a culture of school improvement.  The conference was attended by more than 80 representatives of national independent schools associations from 16 countries in Europe.
Each school must be engaged in a process of self-evaluation, to reflect its own vision and structure; this includes both the leadership’s, teachers’, students and stakeholders, all being an important part to the learning process.
Lectures were presented by:
Prof. Dr. Üstün ERGÜDER, Chair of the Executive Committee of the Education Reform Initiative, Turkey
Cristovalina AFONSO &  Sofia REIS about schools self-assessment: a transnational experience of cooperation through Comenius
Prof. Patrick SINS, professor Reform Education, School of Education, Saxion University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands
Simone DALSGAARD, advisor Danish Private School Association
Presentations and other outputs of the Istanbul conference "Self-evaluation as part of a culture of school improvement" are now available at the conference page.