School quality care has become important in many Western countries and a number of high quality school self-evaluation instruments has been developed and implemented to support this activity. However, little is known on the critical success factors for the use of school self-evaluation instruments. From this longitudinal study into the use of a Dutch school self-evaluation instrument it became clear that schools vary in the extent to which they are able to make use of self-evaluation results to improve school quality. The results from regression and multilevel analyses show that several factors contribute to the use of the self-evaluation instrument, including a positive attitude towards self-evaluation, the school innovation capacity, and the degree to which the evaluation results address the needs of the users. (Contains 1 figure and 10 tables.)