Who is this template for?
This template is designed for key staff in Scottish schools, including library staff and Head Teachers. It provides a structured framework for evaluating the school library's role and effectiveness, ensuring its contribution to the school's wider improvement goals is clearly understood and evidenced.
Why use this template?
Using this template enables your school to systematically review and improve its library services. It helps you to:
- Align with National Standards: Directly corresponds with the 'How good is our school?' (HGIOS?4) document from Education Scotland, ensuring your evaluation is robust, credible, and speaks the language of inspection.
- Demonstrate Impact: Clearly articulate and evidence how the school library contributes to key school-wide priorities, including curriculum delivery, equity, and developing creativity and employability skills.
- Empower Library Staff: Provides library professionals with a clear, strategic tool to lead on their own self-evaluation and demonstrate the value of their service to senior leadership.
- Foster Collaboration: Creates a common language and understanding between library staff and senior managers, facilitating productive discussions about resource allocation and strategic planning.
- Drive Meaningful Improvement: Moves beyond simple stock-takes to a deeper analysis of the library’s role in learning, teaching, and pupil wellbeing, leading to targeted and effective improvement plans.
- Prepare for Inspection: Gathers all relevant judgements, evidence, and analysis into one place, making it simple to generate a professional report for inspectors.
How does it work?
This template follows the standard, intuitive iAbacus process: make a judgement by sliding a bead, verify it against the criteria, support it with evidence, analyse what's helping or hindering progress, and build a targeted action plan.
The evaluation is structured around the following key 'Areas':
- 1.5 Management of resources to promote equity
- 2.2 Curriculum
- 2.3 Learning, teaching and assessment
- 2.7 Partnerships
- 3.1 Ensuring wellbeing, equality and inclusion
- 3.3 Increasing creativity and employability
Clear, Professional Reporting
When it's time to share your findings, this evaluation can be exported as a polished, visually compelling PDF report with a single click. This report provides a clear summary of the library's contribution to the school's work, making it an ideal document to present to an inspector as evidence of your rigorous self-evaluation and planning processes.
References / Source Material
- Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC) - How good is our school library?
- Education Scotland - How good is our school?
How to Get Started
New to iAbacus? Discover how this template can support your improvement strategy. Book a personalised demo or start a free trial to explore the full platform. Visit www.iabacus.com to learn more.
Already a subscriber? You can find this template in the template library within your iAbacus account. Simply log in, create a new abacus, and select it from the list to get started.
