Who is this template for?
This template is designed for school leaders in primary and special schools in Ireland, including the Principal, Deputy Principal, Assistant Principals, and the Board of Management. It provides a comprehensive structure to guide the whole-school self-evaluation (SSE) process.
Why use this template?
This template provides a clear, logical structure to manage your school's self-evaluation and improvement journey from start to finish. It empowers school leaders to build a cohesive and evidence-rich picture of school performance.
- Ensure Inspection Readiness: It provides a clear, structured framework that mirrors the official Looking at Our School 2022 quality framework, ensuring your self-evaluation is comprehensive, robust, and inspection-ready.
- Create a Single Source of Truth: Consolidate all judgements, evidence, analysis, and actions into one accessible online location, creating a single, dynamic source of truth for your School Improvement Plan (SIP).
- Promote an Evidence-Based Culture: Move beyond intuition by linking judgements directly to evidence. Attach documents, observations, data, and notes to create a verifiable and robust evaluation that stands up to scrutiny.
- Foster True Collaboration: Involve your entire leadership team, including Assistant Principals and the Board of Management, in the evaluation process. Share insights, build consensus, and foster a sense of shared ownership over the school's development.
- Save Valuable Leadership Time: Eliminate the need to start from a blank page. This ready-made template provides the official LAOS 2022 domains and standards, allowing you to focus immediately on the evaluative process itself.
- Translate Evaluation into Action: The integrated force-field analysis helps you identify the helping and hindering factors affecting performance, ensuring your action plans are targeted, relevant, and directly address the core issues.
How does it work?
This template follows the standard, intuitive iAbacus process: make a judgement, verify it with criteria, support it with evidence, analyse the helping and hindering factors, and build a targeted action plan. The evaluation is structured around the two dimensions and eight domains of the Looking at Our School 2022 framework.
The key areas evaluated are:
- LEARNING AND TEACHING
- Learner outcomes
- Learner experiences
- Teachers’ individual practice
- Teachers’ collective / collaborative practice
- LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
- Leading teaching and learning
- Managing the organisation
- Leading school development
- Developing leadership capacity
Gaining Strategic Insight
For the Patron, the ability to see the bigger picture is crucial for effective support and strategic planning. By having multiple schools use this consistent LAOS-aligned template, leaders can use the iAbacus 'Overlay' and 'Stack' features to compare performance across the group. This allows them to instantly identify common strengths and challenges, pinpoint schools that may require targeted support, and discover successful strategies in high-performing schools that can be shared and replicated across the network.
Clear, Professional Reporting
With one click, you can export your entire evaluation into a professional, presentation-ready PDF report. This document is visually compelling and logically structured, making it easy to share your school's story with different audiences.
- For the Inspectorate: Present a transparent, comprehensive summary of your self-evaluation, demonstrating a robust and systematic approach to improvement planning that is fully aligned with the LAOS 2022 framework.
- For the Board of Management & Staff: Provide a clear, accessible overview of agreed improvement priorities, ensuring every stakeholder understands their role and responsibilities within the School Improvement Plan.
- For Parents and the School Community: Share a reader-friendly summary of the school's goals and priorities, fostering engagement and support for your improvement efforts.
- For School Clusters & Networks: Generate comparative reports to identify best practices and common challenges, facilitating collaborative problem-solving and strategic planning across the group.
References / Source Material
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.
