This proposal, focusing on the analysis of the effects of the external evaluation of schools, provides an insight on school managers’ degree of satisfaction with this process in Portugal.

In educational policies, evaluation, particularly schools’ self-evaluation, is associated to concepts such as efficacy, efficiency and quality. Expressed in the recommendations of several governments and international organizations is the idea that the crisis of education is the main cause of national economic and social crises, given that students’ poor school results are correlated with cases of exclusion. Having excellence and competitive edge in mind, so characteristic of economic rationality, we can wager that the efficacy and efficiency of educational systems are achieved by monitoring the results obtained by schools.

As such, the change of educational public policies’ regulation modes in Europe is not a strange matter. Due to the social, political and economic modernization of the past decades, European States have felt the need to create and/or strengthen their inspection systems. From the 90’s onward, there has been a significant rise in inspecting action on several European countries where the public sector is at stake.

International research on public policies of Educational Inspection stresses that the debate regarding school evaluation has become a central point. As a clear example of the inspecting action, Devos and Verhoeven (2003: 403) report that in Belgium, political deciders feared that a greater autonomy could lead to a deterioration of schools’ quality, hence the need to verify the achievement of the laid out goals –  a job undertaken through inspection.

In addition, due to issues related to school management, or to materialize responsibilities assigned to schools, many EU countries have tried to implement self-evaluation systems. Schools are therefore provided with indicators or guidelines in order to undertake this self-evaluation process, although many times without the desired consequences. For example, Meuret and Morlaix (2003: 54), stress that although French schools are encouraged to develop an “evaluation culture”, only about 5 % of them actually use the tools provided.

In Portugal, the publication of Law no. 31/2002, December 20^th, brought political and social visibility to schools’ external evaluation, and in 2007 the General Inspectorate of Education and Science, IGEC (Inspeção Geral da Educação e Ciência), launches the School External Evaluation Program, SEEP, which is based on processes presented with the intention of contributing to the improvement of school operations and education, articulating with the self-evaluation and the regulation of the educational system.

If we look at the typology of evaluation models proposed by Alaiz (2007), which reduces the multiplicity of existing reference frames, practices and procedures to two major types of external evaluation models, “structured” and “open”, we can posit that the proposal of Portuguese political-legal frame is closer to the first type of model (“structured”), from the outset by the clear reference to EFQM’s model as the basis of IGEC’s reference frame. Indeed, the SEEP is based on School Integrated Evaluation (a previous program in Portugal that lasted from 1999 to 2002), on EFQM’s model and on the Scottish model “How Good is our School”.

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