School Self-Evaluation with Cambridge International
A guide
What is our School Self-Evaluation service?
At Cambridge International, we offer a School Self-Evaluation service to help schools with their self-review.
Why choose our School Self-evaluation service?
Our School Self-Evaluation service helps you to review your school’s performance and identify areas of strength, as well as those that could be more effective.
The service can be tailored to fit your school’s specific needs. It encourages you to use evidence and data to make informed decisions about areas for improvement and helps to strengthen relationships between different stakeholder groups at your school. We support you at every stage of the process. In this guide, we explain how each stage of our School Self-Evaluation service works.
Why is it important to give students, parents and teachers a voice?
There are three types of school improvement models:
Top-down ↔ Bottom-up
External ↔ Internal
Pressure ↔ Support
If you imagine a typical school improvement model, based on inspection, you can immediately see that it would lean more to the left-hand side of these dimensions than to the right. This is because education around the world is often driven by political and accountability motives, rather than trying to understand what is needed for all students to succeed. Research tells us that when this is the case, the impact on school improvement is limited.
The Cambridge International model, is based on self-review, and aims to give voice to parents, teacher and students. Our approach is more 'bottom-up', internally driven and structured around supporting the school, rather than passing judgement.
John MacBeath, Emeritus Professor of Education at Cambridge University, and one of the leading advocates of school self-evaluation, says:
"Let Schools Speak for Themselves".
There is a large body of research which confirms that, classroom teaching has more impact on student outcomes than any other factor in schools. Where teachers take responsibility for their growth and professional development, and are supported by the school leadership team, they are more likely to see sustained growth and continuous improvement.
For this reason, it is important for schools to hear teachers’ opinions about how well the school is performing. Schools that are more likely to have a positive impact in student learning outcomes:
- have high expectations for all
- provide a safe environment that encourages learning, growth and development
- improve students' confidence
Our evaluation surveys allow us to see how successful the school is, in doing this, and are accessible for students with English as an additional language.
Parents have a huge impact on learning outcomes. Parents who have high aspirations and expectations, and work in partnership with the school to understand appropriate challenges and standards, are most effective at improving their children’s learning.
We encourage schools to include parents in their self-evaluation process so they can hear their voice. We offer surveys for parents in a range of languages other than English.
At the end of this process, we provide schools with a report that breaks down the survey data to reach conclusions about the key strengths and areas for improvement. We also offer the opportunity to engage an accredited School Improvement Consultant.
Alternatively, we can offer advice and recommend additional Cambridge services to meet the schools requirements.
The Process
Expression of interest
The expression of interest form asks for general information about your school’s context and details of the Principal and the person at the school who will be administering the school self-evaluation surveys. Once you submit this form, we will reply with a welcome pack.
The pack includes further details of the service, template emails to help you communicate with key stakeholders and a contract which you must complete and return to us before we can begin the process.
When we receive the completed contract, an accredited consultant is assigned to continue the next steps of the process. We will share some of the information from you expression of interest form with the consultant so they can begin the initial consultation process.
Initial consultation
The initial consultation helps the consultant to understand the context of your school and its community. For example:
- The age range of students .
- Whether the school is a day school or offers boarding.
- The school's curriculum.
- More details about the teaching staff.
- The number of campuses / school sites.
- The current relationship with parents and carers, and how you communicate with them.
- Whether there is already a culture of listening to stakeholder voices and how you manage this.
- Any additional contextual information
The consultant will contact the liaison person by email to arrange a suitable time to meet via video conference and continue the consultation.
The consultant will try to understand suitable timescales for administering the surveys to avoid overlap with national holidays or exam schedules, whilst also considering the best time in the school year to gather feedback.
They will ask questions about the number of students taking part in the survey to make sure the student voice is accurately represented. There are two surveys available for students. One is appropriate from students age 4-9 years and the other for students age 9 -18 years, with a good level of English.
The consultant will also speak to you about the best way to share the surveys with parents and carers. The Parent surveys are available in the following languages:
- Arabic
- Bahasa
- Chinese
- Hindi
- Spanish
- Vietnamese
The consultant will want to know the level of English proficiency across your student and teacher communities, to know whether we will need to provide translated surveys for these groups too. If they need to be translated, we will need to allow time for this as part of the process.
If you would like to add any extra questions to the surveys, (for example, questions related to a new initiative, policy or a curriculum offering at the school), you will need to discuss this with the consultant.
Survey preparation
After the initial consultation, the information the consultant has gathered about your school’s requirements will be passed to Cambridge International, so we can prepare the surveys.
If there are no modifications to be made to the standard surveys, this process ordinarily takes one day. However, if there are additional questions to add or if translations are needed, this process can take up to two weeks.
Once the survey link is ready, Cambridge will send this to the main contact at the school.
Survey engagement
It is good practice to tell your stakeholders that you will be running a feedback exercise before you send out the survey links. It is important to explain why you are requesting their feedback, especially if this is not something you do regularly. It is also useful to acknowledge and respond to any questions before you share the survey link. You should also explain that the surveys are all anonymous and cannot be traced back to any individual.
Parents can be informed that if they have children in more than one section of the school, they will only need to complete the survey once. However, there is an opportunity for comments at the end of the survey, if they want to add anything specific.
For student responses, it may be a good idea to schedule time for all students to access a computer and complete the surveys during the school day. If you decide to share the link for students to complete the survey at home, there is a possibility they will forget, and this will impact the response rate.
To get a valid set of results, it is important to gather as many responses as possible. To help you do this, we will give you regular updates on participation rates after the links have been shared with the school community, so that you can encourage certain stakeholder groups to respond if needed.
Teachers and students are often more easily persuaded to complete the surveys, while prompting parents to engage can be more challenging. This is why it is so important that you engage with parents before you share the surveys out and explain why you need them to share their feedback.
Reporting and feedback
After the deadline, we will check to see whether the survey links should be closed or kept open for a little while longer. If participation rates are low, we can extend the deadline to allow for as many responses as possible.
When we agree with you that the surveys can be closed, we will produce the report and share this with the consultant and your school. We suggest that the school leadership team review the report together and discuss the following questions before the feedback meeting:
- Which elements of the report confirmed your expectations about the school’s performance?
- Which areas surprised you?
- What would you say are the key strengths of the school?
- Based on this report, which areas would you identify as priorities for improvement?
We will then arrange a meeting between the school leadership team, the consultant and staff from Cambridge. We allocate two hours for this meeting to allow time to go through the report in detail, discuss reflections and thoughts around the data, and to agree any additional breakdown of the data.
The consultant will be able to advise on the best way to share the survey findings with each of your stakeholder groups. You will also be able to request further consultant support if needed.
If you have requested further analysis of the data, we will share a further report containing this information with you. We will also be available to help with anything else you need at this stage.
Below are some case studies from schools that have already used the school self-evaluation service to gather feedback and help them identify areas for improvement.
Register your interest
To register your interest in our School Self-Evaluation service, please complete an expression of interest form using the link below. Once you have registered your interest, we will contact you to discuss your requirements.
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