Benchmarking for School Improvement: A Practical Guide for Comparing and Achieving Effectiveness

In educational management, benchmarking is a term often used to describe a school’s performance against a national or localised average. This is not the sense in which the process has been used to great effect in the commercial sector, where benchmarking is a comparison against the best, not against the rest. In this, the first book to consider comparative benchmarking in an educational context, Kelly proposes that measuring effectiveness against a national median performance, as opposed to against another organisation which is acknowledged to be effective, is counter productive. ‘Benchmarking for School Improvement’ develops comparative benchmarking as a tool for self-assessment in schools and colleges. It is a step-by-step guide to forming profitable partnerships with other organisations and is based upon what national and international school effectiveness research tells us makes for a successful school. It is a practical guide to ‘doing’ benchmarking, linking the process to target-setting as a means of being able to gauge self-improvement.