There are 844 elementary schools in the Republic of Croatia with approximately 400,000 pupils involved in this phase/stage of education. With the aim of advancing the quality of the primary school system as well as the improvement of the effectiveness of primary school, external evaluation was introduced experimentally for two consecutive school years based on the obtained results on pupils’ achievements for a number of subjects. The main aim of this study was to explore to what extent the effectiveness of primary schools can be explained. The next important issue was to identify to what extent school success can be attributed to different features of a school that belong to the basic features that refer to the conditions of school operation (e.g., school founder type, geographical position of the school in the state, the characteristics of pupils that attend the school, etc.) as well features related to school management, the programmes at the school and in class (e.g., characteristics of the school principal, the number of programmes available at the school, the type of classes, etc.) as well as specific indicators with regard to the school climate ( e.g., the number of absentees, pupil-teacher ratio etc.) This research was conceptualised as an extensive empirical investigation to determine school success in the Republic of Croatia on the basis of obtained data in the context of external evaluation of primary education.

Burusic, J., Babarovic, T. (2007.), Eksperimentalno vanjsko vrednovanje obrazovnih postignuća u osnovnim skolama Republike Hrvatske, Zagreb: Institut drustvenih znanosti Ivo Pilar. Burusic, J., Babarovic, T., Sakić, M. (2008.), Vanjsko vrednovanje obrazovnih postignuca u osnovnim skolama Republike Hrvatske, Zagreb: Institut drustvenih znanosti Ivo Pilar /Nacionalni centar za vanjsko vrednovanje obrazovanja.