Building High Performing Schools: A Case Study

It has long been recognized that education plays a crucial role in the development of a nation and its people. Therefore, it is logical that there is much interest in increasing the quality of the education system. Schools are a significant representative of this system, and in recent years, there has been growing attention to the concept of the high-performance school. These schools play a special role in cultivating an environment with the best teachers that challenge and develop students both academically and socially, promoting excellence. This article specifically focuses on the question of how the internal organization and management of a school can be elevated to the level of high-performance using a quality improvement framework. After identifying from the literature a potentially suitable framework for the transition of a school to the high-performance level, we applied this framework to a case school using a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to collect data. Finding is that the selected high-performance framework can indeed help schools evaluate their current status relative to the high-performance level and guide them in the right direction towards excellence, by providing practical points for improvement.