School education: European cooperation in quality evaluation. Recommendation

PURPOSE : Proposal for a Recommendation on European co-operation in quality evaluation in school education. CONTENT : The proposal sets out recent Community action in this field, notably a pilot project conducted in 1997. It emphasises the diversity of European education and training systems and states that Community action in the field could have an added value in so far as the exchange of information and experiences puts national systems in a new perspective and might inspire innovations. The proposal makes several specific recommendations and explains their aims : The Commission recommends that Member States support the improvement of quality in school education by: - Supporting and, where appropriate, establishing transparent quality systems, primarily with the aim of encouraging school self-evaluation, as well as clarifying its purpose and the conditions for its exercise. - Supporting and developing systems of external evaluation - Encouraging the involvement of all school stakeholders in the evaluation process - Supporting training in the management and use of self-evaluation - Supporting schools' capacity to learn from each other nationally and on an European level - Promoting European networking - The Commission will establish a database containing information on tools for self-evaluation and examples of best practice. It will be available on the Internet. Triennial progress reports would be presented.�