We finished our self evaluation report on education in East Lothian yesterday. It’s been a big job but one of the most worthwhile tasks I’ve ever engaged in. We had to pull together the separate evaluations of seven thematic groups which covered:
- Early Year and Childcare;
- Learning and Teaching;
- Stakeholder Involvement;
- Resources Management
- Additional Support for children, young people and Families
- The Cluster Approach; and
- Wider Achievement.
We involved over 150 people as members of the self evaluation teams, which included all of our headteachers, many parents, young people, elected members, senior officers from other council services, community representatives and members of staff from education and community services.
Without any doubt it has been one of the most rigorous evaluations I’ve seen and has identified a range of things we can do to improve the quality of our service to people in East Lothian.
I’d love to see something similar being undertaken in a school, where all stakeholders are part of the evaluation process. This is very different from consulting or gathering opinion from these stakeholders, which is common practice in many schools and countries. What I’m talking about here is that these stakeholders help to make the final judgement on the effectiveness of our collective practice.
I hope to publish a link the report here in the next few days which was written using Google Docs. In the meantime thanks to all those who helped to make the process such a success.