Ongoing self-assessment and evaluation should be planned and form a regular part of your school’s strategic improvement journey.

Embedding evaluative processes as the high level activities occur provides an opportunity for formative evaluation.

Each activity should be analysed, evaluated and reflected upon based on collected evidence at regular intervals. Your team can monitor the progress of each activity within the tracking column.

Evaluation

Schools evaluate the impact of activities on a regular basis.

The evaluation outlines the strategies that will be used in self-assessment processes to determine the progress and impact of your strategic direction.

The purpose of evaluation is not to prove what you did but to inform what you do next. As such, it is critical to articulate the question you are trying to answer.

Question, Data, Analysis, Implication

A useful evaluative process for structuring this is question, data, analysis and implication, as follows:

• Question – what do we want to know?
• Data – what data will we collect to answer the question?
• Analysis – what facts can we extract to provide insight and meaning?
• Implication – what will we do next in light of the analysis?

Some Strategic Improvement Plan samples unpack how this can look in practice.

Reflect and reset

Another useful tool for ongoing evaluation is the reflect and reset resource.

This resource is designed for use at a ‘pause point’ in the life of a project or strategic initiative. It will help you:

• reflect on your evidence
• plan your communication with stakeholders
• identify key lessons for future planning and continuous improvement.

Track and collect evidence

Your collected evidence can be tagged to the School Excellence Framework (SEF) elements, annotated and saved in the SPaRO evidence bank by clicking on the paper clip icon under each activity. This process aligns your school planning with self-assessment and the SEF.

There are 3 types of evidence that can be collected to inform your future action: evidence of activity, evidence of process quality, and evidence of impact. It is important not to focus exclusively on impact or to use evidence of process quality or activity as a proxy for impact.

You should consider a range of data types to demonstrate implementation and progress. Scout as a source of evidence is an invaluable resource when reflecting on how the school is progressing using the SEF. See the Evaluation resource hub.

Reflective questions on evidence

• What qualitative and quantitative evidence do we need to collect to inform and monitor our progress?
• To what extent does the collected evidence evaluate the impact of our improvement measure?

Annual reflection

Your school will evaluate and reflect on the impact of your initiatives on an annual basis against the annual progress measure/s, ensuring you are on track to achieve your four-year improvement measures.

Annual reflection starts in Term 4 each year. As you reflect on your progress measures in SPaRO, your content will auto-populate into your annual report (available Term 1 Week 5). The annual report must be finalised and published by the end of Term 1 each year.

The annual reflection should also support evaluating the school’s practices using the School Excellence Framework and completing the school’s SEF S-aS.

See more on Annual reflection and Annual reflection support (staff only).