Abstract:

The concepts of school policy and school climate are two of the main points of the modern educational dialogue. Both of them are closely linked to two additional main educational points: the effectiveness of the school organization and the quality offered. Firstly, the school policy may concern various aspects of the structure and function of a school unit, such as the quantity and the quality of teaching, the provision of learning opportunities, or generally the policy concerning the school as an environment of learning. Secondly, school climate is a wide psychosocial and pedagogical term, an individual and collective sense of school life; it has been linked to the approaches of quality in education and has been studied as a factor of school effectiveness. Our research, which was conducted in Athens -99 teachers and 564 students of primary and secondary education have participated-, was based on the assumption of linking these two concepts, an assumption that is verified by making the school climate dependent to specific aspects of school unit policy. We were led, thus, to a humanistic and student-centered re-signification of school effectiveness and quality in education, linking them with the Greek school and with the school as a system and educational organization. Links have also been created between the above concepts, in a manner to co-evolve, to function together and to synthesize, both of them, a proposal not for a new improvement or effectiveness index, but for educational development of school unit within the meaning of the “quality of school life”. “Quality of school life” is seen as necessary to be a priority and therefore to be ensured at a school level. Certain factors have emerged, which, when they are part of school policy, they are positively related to the emergence and promotion of concepts that introduce school climate, promoting “quality of school life” and characterizing the school unit as effective, not in terms of student performance but in terms of psychosocial and pedagogical dynamics.