Abstract
A cadre of school inspectors with different backgrounds visit thousands of schools annually in Sweden as is also the case in several other European and other nations. Do these inspectors believe that they ‘make a difference’? In this chapter we elaborate on inspection effects as they are perceived by Swedish inspectors and inspection managers at different levels of the Inspectorate, and on the policy problems the creation of the Swedish Schools Inspectorate (SI) was intended to solve according to, on the one hand policy documents and on the other hand problems reported in interviews with inspectors and inspection managers. Central to inspection practice are the ‘assumptive worlds’ of the inspectors and managers at the Inspectorate, i.e. their notions of school inspection. Both groups’ notions of the policy problem inspection is to solve, agree with national intentions and motivations the managers stressing the declining school performance, and the inspectors emphasising the lack of equivalence between schools and municipalities. Analysis of interviewees’ notions of what problems are indeed solved, points foremost to different types of implementation problems at all levels in a top-down ‘chain of governing’, also noting problems within the national level.
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Notes
- 1.
The governing bodies are either municipal school boards or independent school boards or companies (often big concerns and sometimes non-profit organisations based on a specific pedagogical idea, like Montessori).
- 2.
In the case of the Swedish School Inspection model, a program theory analysis was done by Gustafsson and Myrberg (2011).
- 3.
Educational equivalence is one of the key words in an analysis of texts concerning school inspection in Sweden (see Lindgren et al. 2012). There is also an extensive discussion of the concept of educational equivalence in the Swedish context, focusing on its meaning and also its translation. There may be good reasons to translate the concept to equity rather than equivalence in some instances (Englund and Francia 2008; Francia 2011). However, the official Swedish translation is equivalence.
- 4.
This part is based on an earlier paper where we analysed inspectors’ and inspection managers’ notions of inspection effects (Hult and Segerholm 2012).
- 5.
A municipality is a geographical as well as a political and administrative entity in Sweden that impose local taxes on the citizens to get public resources in order to provide for public education, elder and social care, culture and leisure as well as local infrastructure. There are local elections and the results lead to a proportionate distribution of members in the local parliament. All policy areas have a board that is accountable for decisions made for that policy area. However, the local parliament is ultimately accountable and responsible for political priorities and distribution of resources to different policy areas.
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Acknowledgements
The Swedish part of Governing by Inspection (no. 2009-5770) was financed by the Swedish Research Council and the UK part by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The authors also acknowledge the close links and collaborative work with the projects Swedish national school inspections: introducing centralised instruments for governing in a decentralised context (financed by the National Research Council, project no. 2007-3579, project leader Dr. Linda Rönnberg), and Inspecting the ‘Market’: education at the intersection of marketisation and central state control (financed by Umeå University, no. 223-514-09), project leader D. Linda Rönnberg.
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Hult, A., Segerholm, C. (2017). Making a Difference? The Voices of School Inspectors and Managers in Sweden. In: Baxter, J. (eds) School Inspectors. Accountability and Educational Improvement. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52536-5_6
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