The Evidence Base for School Inspection Frameworks

This article describes how Inspectorates of Education operationalize different inspection goals (control, improvement, liaison) in their inspection indicator frameworks. The paper provides an overview and examples of the indicators used across a number of countries and how these are incorporated in inspection frameworks to evaluate and assess schools with the purpose of control, improvement and liaison. We shall describe the inspection and assessment of the processes and results of schooling (which includes making expert judgements), and compare and contrast them with inspection frameworks that focus on controlling input requirements and checking compliance to legislation. We will discuss the value and adequateness of different frameworks in the light of recent school effectiveness research. The results collected suggested that teaching/instruction level conditions, such as high expectations, a challenging teaching approach, an orderly learning environment and clear and structured teaching are more important than school level conditions in improving student achievement. Most inspectorates however do not explicitly evaluate teaching or teachers on a classroom/subject or grade level, preferring instead to evaluate school level conditions and general instruction characteristics or teaching patterns such as learning time, school leadership and school climate. A final «council» to further and future developments of national school inspection frameworks is therefore the relative emphasis on school organizational as compared to teaching and learning, or didactic standards. A prudent warning could be for designers and adaptors of inspection frameworks not to lose sight of the primary process of teaching and learning.