The main purpose of teaching and learning process in schools is to provide necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes to the children who are regarded as the future of nations.Therefore, school is considered as a fundamental organization in any society throughout the history. Every system needs to have effective schools for the sake of their social systems and democratic citizens. Effectiveness continues to be an elusive but fascinating topic to researchers of educational administration. During the past several decades the sheer volume of writing devoted to especially school effectiveness attests to its prominence in our efforts to understand and improve school organizations. School effectiveness research has gained a remarkable acceleration from virtual total obscurity to a now central position in the educational discourse that is taking place within many countries. From the position 40 years ago that ‘schools make no difference’ that was assumed to be the conclusions of the Coleman et al. (1966) and Jencks et al. (1971) studies, there is now a widespread assumption internationally that schools affect children’s development, that there are observable regularities in the schools that ‘add value’ and that the task of educational policies is to improve all schools in general, and the more ineffective schools in particular, by transmission of this knowledge to educational practitioners. (Teddlie and Reynolds, 2000). Overall, there have been three major strands of school effectiveness research : (1) School Effects Research—studies of the scientific properties of school effects evolving from input-output studies to current research utilizing multilevel models;(2) Effective Schools Research—research concerned with the processes of effective schooling, evolving from case studies of outlier schools through to contemporary studies merging qualitative and quantitative methods in the simultaneous study of classrooms and schools; and (3) School Improvement Research—examining the processes whereby schools can be changed utilizing increasingly sophisticated models that have gone beyond simple applications of school effectiveness knowledge to sophisticated ‘multiple lever’ models. (Tedlie and Reynolds, 2000). This research involved upper secondary schools in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Romania and Belgium. It was run both at quantitative and at qualitative level and it aimed at developing a list of main indicators for school effectiveness and to define a set of issues that could be used to prepare a trans-national in-service training course for school managers with the contribution of all partners of the above mentioned countries. For this purpose, two basic research questions were developed: (1) What are the school effectiveness indicators of the schools in each participating country? and (2)What are the in service training needs of school managers in each participating country?

Both qualitative and quantitative research methods have been employed for this project. In the qualitative part the general structure of educational systems were defined and their school effectiveness indicators have been listed by examining the laws and regulations of partner countries. The data of this Project was collected by Effective School Indicators Scale (ESIS) with 23 Likert type items developed by the contributions of all partner countries. The scale has six sub-dimensions including “physical conditions”, “management and planning”, “education and training”, “social life”, “financial aspects” and “relations with environment”. The purpose of the scale was twofold: (1) to get the perceptions of managers, teachers and parents toward the effectiveness dimensions mentioned above; (2) to detect inservice training needs of school managers about these dimensions. The sample of this study was consisted of 155 managers, 292 teachers and 266 parents from five European countries including Romania, Belgium, Greece, Italy and Turkey.

The “top ten” effective school indicators for all participant countries have been found as follows : (1) School climate, (2) Effectiveness of school operations, (3) Infrastructure, classes and laboratories, (4) Teaching activities, (5) ICT and the Internet, (6) Staff and human resources management, (7) Hygiene, safety and security system, (8) Management style and participated decision making, (9) Effective use of budget, (10) Guidance and counseling. The following effectiveness indicators have not found important by the research subjects: (1) Students’ behaviour coherent with student’s role, (2) Documentation, (3) School results in terms of output, (4) Parents involvement, (5) Relations with community, (6) Ability to attract financial resources, (7) Extra-curricular offer, (8) Other services to community. The in-service training needs of the school managers of all partner countries have been found as follows (decending order): (1) education and training, (2) management and planning, (3) relations with school environment, (4) financial aspects, (5) physical conditions, (6) social life.