All children have the right to the best available education and to grow up in a supporting school environment. School effectiveness can be viewed in terms of academic performance but other aspects of the school experience are important for overall school quality. Today assessment and evaluation are becoming important for accountability and quality control in increasingly widespread activities in education throughout the world. The focus of such assessments can greatly impact emphasis in interventions and policy as well as budget allocations and choices in daily activities within schools. The validity and reliability of methods for internal and external evaluations is critical for cost allocations and success in improving school experience and outcome for students.

The paper introduces an evaluation procedure for primary and secondary schools, developed in Iceland for the past 5 years for comprehensive evaluation of non-academic outcomes. It is meant to help school authorities evaluate the efficiency of their schools and continuously monitor progress and also provide educational district authorities reliable ways to emphasize school accountability.

The approach has three web-based survey systems. Three major stakeholders, students, parents and teachers, provide information to school authorities who have access to regularily updated results on month-to-month basis. Information is provided on different aspects of student engagement, wellbeing and school climate; parent engagement in the school, participation in the studies and attitudes towards the school; as well as teachers‘ attitudes to the school, teaching practices and professional development.

Results are compared to previous months in the school and a national average to give indications of change within the school through time and the comparative status of the school. Surveys contain separate psychometric scales with each scale comprising 3-9 questions and individual questions with both forced choice and open responses. Many of the questions have been developed as part of international research in  PISA (OECD, 2006), IEA´s PIRLS (IEA, 2012) and TALIS (OECD, 2011) and also other research projects both national and international.

Concerns about applicability and relevance of content, assessment quality and statistical properties are addressed, as well as the issue of continuous and comparative evaluations in basic schools and how longitudinal and cross-sectional evaluations can be used for evidence based school improvement. The merits of the above approach are dicussed in relations to fundamental issues for theoretical developments  in school evaluation and compared to current trends in outcome measures and educational effectiveness.

OECD (2009). Creating Effective Teaching and Learning Environments: First Results From TALIS. Paris: OECD. OECD (2011). OECD PISA online Retrieved 13 June, 2011, from http://www.pisa.oecd.org IEA (2012). TIMSS and PIRLS online Retrieved 30 January, 2012, from http://timss.bc.edu/