Quality of school life: Development and preliminary standardisation of an instrument based on performance indicators in Scottish secondary schools

Improvement of the services offered by secondary schools in the UK has been a major concern for the educational authorities. One of the most widely ac cepted ways to test the quality of school services is the performance indic ators' approach. Performance indicators, as they stand, are quite complicat ed to use. Many of them could be criticised for not considering pupil's vie ws about their school but rather gathering "adult-centred" information, sin ce it is teachers and not pupils who do the assessment. Therefore, a new st udent scale has been developed, based on performance indicators, and its pr operties are described as follows. The new Quality of School Life scale has shown good psychometric properties and it has proven easy to use and admin ister. It has been shown to reliably and validly measure pupils' views abou t their quality of school life and school satisfaction. Results are discuss ed in relation to potential future use of the scale by educationalists.