How well are we doing?

“Towards a self-assessment framework for community schools across the globe”

Quality project: funded by Charles Stewart Mott Foundation
Training for facilitators, 20 - 24th July 2008, Odessa, Ukraine

Background information

Since January 2007 five NGOs have been funded by Charles Mott Foundation to agree a common set of standards for community schools. The NGOs are all working to support community schools in Russia, the Czech Republic, Moldova, and the UK and is managed by the fifth organisation, Step by Step in Ukraine. The project is supported by Csaba Lorinczi, a consultant working with community school programs in the region.

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About the standards

We spent a great deal of time discussing the right word to use - standards, characteristics, criteria etc. but most importantly they can be used by schools themselves as a tool for self assessment.

We agreed that even though we all work in very different systems and cultures, we share common ideas on what a good community schools, anywhere in the world, will do. We decided to set these ideas down so that schools can use them for self assessment purposes. We have written these up together with guidelines for schools on how to check their own performance against them.

We have piloted these with schools in our own countries and have amended them as a result, but we see this as an ongoing developmental process and we welcome having a dialogue with schools and those who support them so that we can further refine our thinking and our guidelines. For each of the standards there are indicators which show what these standards look like when practised.

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About the training course

In July 2008 we ran a five day training course. Participants attended from the following countries:

Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, Czech republic, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia, Croatia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Serbia, Poland, Japan, The Netherlands, Mongolia and Montenegro.

They came from non government organisations supporting the development of community schools and were trained to introduce the standards to their schools. Each country produced an action plan and over the next two or three years we will be working closely with them to help them deliver the standards and to gather information from them about how their community schools are using the standards to develop their practice.

We will keep this site up dated so that you can find out about common issues which the standards help schools identify.

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Who will benefit by attending?

This training is for people who support community schools. You will benefit most if they meet the following criteria:

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About the trainers

All the trainers are very experienced in supporting community schools and in running training programmes to help them.

They are:

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