Schools are increasingly expected to take responsibility for aspects of educational quality assurance. The fact that governments obligate their schools to conduct a school self-evaluation (SSE) is illustrative in this regard. Amongst other aspects of the process of SSE, attitudes towards school self-evaluation are expected to play a critical role in predicting the quality of such SSE’s (Love, 1991; McBeath, 1999; McBeath, Jakobsen, Meuret & Scratz, 2000; Van Petegem, 2001). High quality SSE does not only require technical self-evaluation skills of schools but also a positive attitude towards SSE (Cheng, 1990; Kells, 1995; Van Petegem, 2005). SSE can only work if a suitable climate exists in the school. The entire school team – both teachers and principals – have to be aware of the usefulness of SSE (McBeath e.a., 2000). Generally, the attitudes of principals towards SSE are positive. Dutch principals, for instance, experience SSE to be a useful and instructive undertaking. In their opinion SSE results in a reliable picture of the schools functioning (Blok, Sleegers & Karsten, 2005) but also costs a lot of effort. McBeath et al. (1999) come to similar conclusions after studying European schools while conducting a SSE. At this point we don’t know whether teachers share this positive attitude with their principal. There are indications that they don’t. Van Petegem et al. (2005, p. 288) found that ‘teachers attitudes towards SSE are often quite reserved’. In order to broaden the existing knowledge base this paper focuses on the following two research questions: (1) What are the attitudes of principals and teachers towards SSE? (2) To what extent can differences in attitudes be explained by characteristics of the functioning of schools? In our study, we used an existing instrument to measure attitudes towards SSE (Blok e.a., 2005). It exists of 12 opposite phrases such as ‘SSE does not tell us much/ SSE teaches us a lot’ and ‘SSE is subjective/SSE is objective’. Our hypothesis was that differences in the attitude score depend on characteristics of the school context. The concepts ‘organisation-effectiveness’ and ‘the school as a learning organisation’ serve as main points of view in this regard. Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983) operationalize the effectiveness of a knowledge system on the basis of four effectiveness perspectives (‘open system model’, ‘human relations model’, ‘internal process model’ and ‘rational goal model’). For the ‘learning organisation’ we appeal to the integration of three theoretical frameworks: (1) the (social-)constructivistic approach to the learning of individuals (De Corte, 1995), (2) single and double loop learning (Argyris & Schön, 1978; Swieringa & Wierdsma, 1990), and (3) the process of knowledge creation by Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995).

An online survey was administered. 2716 respondents (principals and teachers) in 96 schools (primary and secondary) filled in the questionnaire on (1) their attitudes towards SSE and (2) the different aspects of the functioning of the schools. All 96 schools conducted a SSE during the past two school years. In order to decompose the attitude scores of respondents in a individual and school component a multilevel technique was used when analysing the data (using MLwiN).

The results show that the respondents have rather positive expectations towards SSE but that SSE is not a popular activity. Respondents argue that it is time consuming, subjective and difficult to undertake. One could say that they subscribe to the results of SSE but fear the process. Principals have a more positive attitude than teachers. The ML-model respectively explains 30% and 32% of the variance at school and individual level. The attitudes of respondents are found to be influenced by the extent to which schools meet the characteristics of organisation-effectiveness en by respondents’ perceptions of learning at the individual (social-constructivistic) and school level (single vs. double loop and knowledge creation). The results also indicate that there is much variation between respondents within schools. 7% of the variation is situated at school level. These results have some important implications for educational policies. The discussion at the end of the paper focuses on these implications.