The trends of deregulation and increased autonomy for schools go together with increasing expectations concerning schools’ internal quality care activities (Scheerens, 1996). These quality care activities often take the form of school self-evaluations. While self-evaluations in some schools lead to valuable results, research shows that this is less or not the case in other schools. The professionalism required in order to perform a self-evaluation simply cannot be assumed to be present in all schools. This raises the question of how differences in the conduct and quality of self-evaluations can be explained. This study examines to what extent the results of self-evaluations are determined by the self-evaluation process, by characteristics of the functioning of the school and by the support received.

Based on existing research literature, the paper identifies factors which are expected to have an impact on the conduct and outcome of self-evaluations. For many factors there is to some extent (empirical) evidence (such as school culture, attitudes toward self-evaluation, learning activities in the school). Yet it is not yet known what the specific contributions of these different factor are. Therefore, the following two research questions are set forward: (1) To what extent can results of self-evaluations be explained by (a) the conduct of the self evaluation and (b) the support received? (2) To what extent can the conduct of a self-evaluation be explained by (a) characteristics of school functioning and (b) support received?

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