A new peer-reviewed study by André de Waal and Marco Schreurs of the HPO Center, together with Nathalie Bos, Daphne Fiorentinos, Ed Ilgen and Leni van Zandvoort of the STEV Foundation, has been published in Quality Assurance in Education. The study examines how multi-school foundations can build sustainable school quality by looking not only at teaching itself, but also at the organizational conditions that make strong teaching possible.
Read the full publication here
Many discussions about school quality focus on what happens in the classroom. How is teaching delivered? How are pupils progressing? How are results maintained? These are essential questions. At the same time, this study shows that strong schools also need a strong organizational foundation. This includes clear leadership, reliable routines, professional collaboration, a learning culture and improvement cycles that are followed through.
The study validates the High-Performing Schools framework at foundation level within STEV, a Dutch public primary education foundation with 13 schools in the wider Amersfoort region. In total, 165 staff members completed the questionnaires. They assessed their school on the characteristics of the HPS framework and the broader HPO framework. Perceived school results were measured separately.
The findings show that the HPS framework is reliable and practically useful for school boards that want to steer more effectively toward sustainable improvement. Within the framework, three factors show the strongest association with perceived school results: the quality of the internal organization, the quality of teachers and staff, and the quality of the educational approach.
Leadership also plays an important role, especially through the conditions that school leaders create. These include the quality of routines, opportunities for professional learning, collaboration between colleagues and the way improvement efforts are followed up. Because the study is cross-sectional, the researchers do not draw causal conclusions. The pattern in the data does, however, indicate where school boards and senior leaders may find the most relevant levers for improvement.
A second important finding is that the school-specific HPS framework is more strongly associated with perceived school results than the more generic HPO framework. This makes sense: HPS is closer to the daily reality of schools. At the same time, HPO helps connect school development with a broader language for High Performance Organizations.
For school boards, quality coordinators and senior leaders, the study offers a useful starting point. The HPS framework helps make ambition concrete, identify development priorities more sharply and connect PDCA-based improvement with what teams need in everyday practice. STEV’s experience also shows that a diagnosis gains value when schools translate the results into shared routines, cross-school focus groups and sustained attention to learning and improvement.
The full study provides both the scientific validation and a practical example of how a multi-school foundation can use HPO/HPS thinking to guide school development across the foundation.