Abstract
This book presented the methods and modalities of effective school inspections, summarizing the current evidence base and discussing issues of validity and reliability of school inspections in relation to school effectiveness research. In our book we have focused on inspections of single schools which are currently dominating the landscape of both research and practice. As we discussed in Chaps. 1 and 2, school inspections have a duty in keeping national government informed about the quality and standards achieved in the areas inspected and their frameworks to assess school quality are common to all schools and nationally defined. The current landscape is however changing rapidly and these centralized top down inspection models are becoming increasingly outdated and unfit for their purpose of improving education quality in a more decentralized and fast changing system. This chapter will start with a brief outline of the changes we have seen over the past decades, outlining recent reforms in England, the Netherlands and Northern Ireland to strengthen lateral improvement and governance models of networks of schools. The main part of this chapter will then reflect on these changes for school inspection systems, using Alkin’s (Evaluation roots: a wider perspective of theorists’ views and influences. Sage, Thousand Oaks, 2013) framework of evaluation theories to depict the shift from inspections of single schools to newer models and methods that would fit such lateral networked improvement. Examples from inspection models in England, the Netherlands and Northern Ireland will be used to illustrate these shifts.
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Notes
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Detailed descriptions of these three case studies can be found in Ehren et al. (in preparation)
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Ehren, M.C.M. (2016). Emerging Models of School Inspections; Shifting Roles and Responsibilities. In: C.M. Ehren, M. (eds) Methods and Modalities of Effective School Inspections. Accountability and Educational Improvement. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31003-9_7
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