School improvement is about bridging the gap between the potential and actual performance in our schools and effective self-evaluation can help enormously in the pursuit of this goal.

Lisol has recently formed a develoment partnership with ESIS (a schools improvement and advisory body for 4 LEAs) to create an electronic version of their schools self-evaluation product, CRIS.

Working on the same principles as Lisol's Pathways for Schools, e-CRIS provides a single integrated platform for teachers, parents, governors, pupils and other stakeholders involved in school self-evaluation. e-Cris enables schools to record, collate and summarise their self-evaluation judgements electronically and link these to evidence stored in various media within the database.

More importantly, e-CRIS can be used to summarise the self-evaluation process results into a manageable form, for example providing a customised summary to school inspectors from Ofsted and ESTYN

e-CRIS has been created to be flexible yet with a structure that ensures the Ofsted and ESTYN requirements are met; but it also provides a powerful school planning and management tool to identify areas of success and areas requiring greater attention.