Benchmarking is widely used around the world to improve the performance of organizations by learning best-practices and implementing them to the organizational context. The education sector is utilizing benchmarking extensively. International benchmarking programs for school systems have been introduced by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). The purpose of these programs is to monitor the performance of school systems on their own and relative to one another.

In order to investigate the contribution of benchmarking to the performance of schools and school systems around the world, research is being conducted by the Centre for Organisational Excellence Research. To assess the extent of use and impact of benchmarking in school systems a questionnaire was administered to the administrators of school systems. Twenty school systems have participated in this research including Finland, Estonia, Poland, Spain, Dubai, Czech Republic, Portugal, Iceland, Sri Lanka, Norway, Iredell-Statesville schools (USA), Chugach School District (USA), Vietnam, Sweden, Serbia, Indonesia and Belgium.

Now, a questionnaire has been designed for schools.

The link to the online questionnaire, with a completion date of 15th November 2015, is:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SchoolQuestionnaire2015

If you are responsible for a school and/or the administration, leadership or governance of a school we would be very interested in hearing from you. We would be delighted if you could participate in the research.

We would appreciate your participation.

Thank you.

Rubab Malik, PhD Researcher, Centre for Organisational Excellence Research, www.coer.org.nz
rubabmalik@gmail.com