The process of school decentralization has continued in the Czech Republic in the last two decades. It means that the school administration has changed. The role of communities has grown and the role of state has been diminished. Headmasters have more responsibility now. Consequently, concerns and questions about evaluation of the school quality have been raised. Under the new School Act of 2004, schools are obliged to give a self-evaluation report every two years, but many schools don´t know how to do that. Self-evaluation has become part of a more complex question of school improvement (Hopkins 2001). We have prepared a research project the aim of which is to find out how well the schools are able to work on their own development and evaluate it (research question). The main objective was to devise a model framework that would help school administrators to develop the school in a systematic way. We called the framework the School Improvement Plan (SIP). Twelve school headmasters identified priorities. They used SWOT (Strengths-Weakness-Opportunities-Threats) analysis in which all teachers in the school participated. Then they organized the priorities into a given structure: partial objectives, means of reaching the objectives, and evaluation tools, including indicators. After finishing the first written version of the SIP, the headmasters sent it to two colleagues from another school in order to get an expert opinion from a “critical friend” with recommendations for accomplishing the plan (MacBeath, McGlynn 2002). After the expert opinion process the schools started their School Improvement Plan. During its implementation they monitor the meeting of objectives and in the middle of the school year 2007/2008 they write a partial self-evaluation report. Preliminary findings show that headmasters are quite able to formulate the improvement objectives and means of their accomplishing. However, there are substantial challenges with regard to the seeking of the tools of evaluation, formulating the criteria and quality indicators. We used theoretical and conceptual framework of “school as learning organization” (OECD 2003), revised Bloom´s taxonomy of the educational objectives (Krathwohl, Anderson 2001) and “translating research into action” (Marzano 2003).

The research sample consists of twelve elementary schools in Prague. Some criteria for choice were given beforehand. The essential part of the project was openness and willingness to share experience. The project was running from May 2006 to September 2008. We helped and supported headmasters all the time. We did several content analyses of the written SIPs involving both qualitative and quantitative methods. Moreover, we used interviews with headmasters and teachers as well as observations in the schools.

Expected outcomes will describe how the headmasters are able to prepare, implement and evaluate the School Improvement Plan, including the frequent mistakes and challenges in the self-evaluation process.