School boards are expected to monitor and enhance the educational quality of their schools. To know whether and how school boards are able to do so, we first of all need to know whether school boards are aware of the educational quality of their schools in the first place. Taking Dutch school boards in primary education as an exemplary case (N = 332) we developed and tested a path model using structural equation modelling to analyse the extent to which school boards discern educational quality in their schools. The results show that, in general, school boards in primary education believe that they can contribute to enhancing the quality of school education. If the school board and school(s) management stick to their governing and management roles respectively, this positively affects the extent to which the school board is able to identify educational quality in the schools it governs.