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Introduction
In June 2004 the Scottish Executive launched the publication Evaluation as part of the School Estate Strategy series Building Our Future: Scotland's School Estate. It offers guidance on evaluating and learning from completed school projects. In particular, it is intended to assist Local Authorities in evaluating how well a completed school building project meets the needs of pupils, staff, parents and the wider community. The evaluation process is highlighted through a case study evaluation of a primary school.
There is a growing emphasis being placed on the importance of evaluation as both a quality and continuous improvement tool. One year on from the publication of the document, the Scottish Executive is pleased to take further steps to support Local Authorities' evaluation work on the school estate. Representatives of the Scottish Executive have recently participated in an 'expert group' meeting on Evaluating Quality in Education Facilities which was run by the OECD's Programme on Educational Buildings, in Lisbon. We have also funded a further evaluation case study, this time at a secondary school, and the outcomes will be published shortly.
Building on this, and in order to share developments and experiences of schools evaluation with local authorities, the Scottish Executive organised a one-day workshop on Post Occupancy Evaluation ( POE) of schools on 10 June 2005 at Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh. The first half of the workshop comprised presentations from Eileen Gill (Scottish Executive, School Estate Branch), Chris Watson (People Environment Studies), Keith Thomson (Scottish Executive, School Estate Branch), and Colin Proctor and Paul Crilly (Gardiner and Theobald). In the second half of the workshop, delegates broke into smaller discussion groups to share their experiences and present their views.
The workshop was deemed by participants to have been a success. We are very pleased that 24 out of 32 Local Authorities were represented, and that so many issues were aired and discussed on the day. It was encouraging to find an overwhelming consensus that evaluation is both valuable and necessary to ensure a continuing improvement in the school estate. We hope that this event has assisted authorities in developing their existing evaluation programmes and in addressing some of the challenges which need to be overcome to make evaluation of school buildings a mainstream activity.
One of the main themes to emerge from the discussions was how information and best practice could be shared more widely amongst authorities. To capture and disseminate key issues which emerged from this event, we are publishing this workshop report and circulating it widely to school estate stakeholders.
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