Eureka! Institutional Repository

The provision of effective and quality education is in line with the social, cultural and economic change that today's society persistently undergoes and it is linked to citizens’ personal and professional growth. The last decades the improvement of education’s efficiency and effectiveness, in a holistic way, has been at the forefront of the European and international studies and its attainment is associated inextricably with the evaluation and assessment of all its elements. The administrative organization of education plays an important role in this as it is directed to a more democratic, open and autonomous management models, especially in smaller management units, which are the schools. In a centralised and bureaucratic educational system, such as that of Greece, inserting a self-evaluation system seems to be more complicated, since up to 2002 any modernist evaluation system was non-existent. In an effort to align with the requirements of the European Union for improving the Greek education and educational administration, Greece established with the L. 3848/2010 evaluation standards in schools. A pilot application of self-evaluation followed in 2013, which received various expostulations from the teachers’ Unions and the teachers themselves, fearing that this evaluation system has inspection characteristics. The application of the self-evaluation programme had no continuity despite its obligatory character. Greece’s last attempt to introduce self-evaluation in schools is with the L. 4547/2018, its application of which is about to be implemented. This research studies the views of the school principals of primary education about the role of self-evaluation (collective internal evaluation) concerning the improvement of schools’ administration. A key element of self-evaluation is the collective decisions of the school staff regarding the annual planning, organisation and operation of the schools, under a more democratic and participatory management. The investigation is trying to determine to what extent the self-evaluation can help in a more efficient and qualitative way the planning of school life, the support and professional development of teachers.