High quality education and training systems are essential to provide young people with adequate knowledge and skills and hence sustain Europe's social and economic development. Improving the quality of education and training is a constant concern in the education policy debate at both national and EU level, as testified by the common and shared objectives for education systems contained in the European strategic framework for cooperation in the field (1).The need for systems and policies that aim at ensuring and enhancing the quality of education has been widely acknowledged at European level. A 2001 Recommendation of the European Parliament and the Council strongly emphasised the importance of developing quality evaluation of schools (2). Thereafter, the importance of monitoring and evaluating the quality of education has been reiterated several times over the following years by the Council (3). In 2014, the Council invited the European Commission to strengthen mutual learning and support Member States in developing their quality assurance arrangements (4).This report offers a country-specific and comparative review of the structures, aims, and implementation modalities of evaluation of schools across Europe, in order to promote the sharing of knowledge and approaches for quality assurance in European education systems.THE FOCUS OF THE REPORT: THE EVALUATION OF SCHOOLSQuality assurance in education can be understood as policies, procedures, and practices that are designed to achieve, maintain or enhance quality in specific areas, and that rely on an evaluation process. By ‘evaluation’, we understand a general process of systematic and critical analysis of a defined subject that includes the collection of relevant data and leads to judgements and/or recommendations for improvement. The evaluation can focus on various subjects: schools, school heads, teachers and other educational staff, programmes, local authorities, or the performance of the whole education system.Within the broader field of quality assurance, this report focuses on the evaluation of schools providing compulsory education. Relying on the conceptual framework established in the previous Eurydice study on the same topic (2004) (5), the evaluation of schools is defined as focusing on the activities carried out by school staff considered collectively. Evaluation of this kind seeks to monitor or improve whole school quality, and findings are presented in an overall report that does not include individual teacher appraisal information.
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