Research indicates that inspection models tend to be adapted when education accountability systems mature. Schools and their stakeholders develop evaluation literacy and innovation capacity to improve education on their own and thus have less need of being driven by top down inspections and reform initiatives (see Barber, 2004). Despite this a recent McKinsey report (2010) sparked a debate in many European countries about a lack of improvement in many education systems across the continent. The report argues that the education systems in many countries are ‘good’ but fail to improve to ‘great’ as schools are not aiming for higher achievement and fail to innovate their teaching and learning. In order to make this final but difficult phase “from good to great” various inspectorates of education (e.g. the Netherlands and Northern Ireland) have begun to experiment with polycentric inspection.

The theory underlying polycentric evaluation is that good schools can only further improvement not simply by pressure from external inspection but by collaboration between clusters of schools, communities and the inspectorate through the process of collaborative evaluation. Therefore school inspections from a polycentric perspective are external evaluations of schools and of interdependent networks of different actors who use knowledge, information and other resources to influence schools. This mode of inspection is implemented by officials outside the school with a mandate from a national/local authority, by: (1) coordinating visits to all schools and stakeholders in the network; (2) examining the quality of collaboration between schools and stakeholders in the network; (3) taking into account the perspective on school quality from the schools and the various stakeholders in the network; (4) quality assuring the networks self-evaluation of recommendations made previous polycentric inspections. The purpose of which is to: provide feedback to schools and stakeholders; disseminate good practices; and ultimately, to agree upon a shared agenda for change within the polycentric network.

This paper reports on the first phase of an Erasmus + project which is seeking to evaluate the capability of polycentric inspection and school network collaborative self-evaluation as tools in improving schools from good to great.

The authors argue that studying examples of polycentric school inspection models which have only recently been introduced in countries such as Northern Ireland, will introduce attendees to a little explored yet increasingly important aspect of European school inspection.

The project upon which this study is based set itself the task of explaining:

• how inspection organisations can inspect networks of schools/stakeholders (e.g. how to include relevant stakeholders in visits, how do roles of inspectors change);
• how can the need for centralized and standardized frameworks of Inspectorates of Education be matched to a need for adapting to local issues and concerns;
• which interventions are effective in motivating  a network of schools to improve, and what are the underlying theories of change;
• if polycentric inspections are more effective in the improvement of both low and high performing schools, compared to centralized school inspections.

Drawing from the experiences of four European inspection systems – England, Bulgaria, The Netherlands, and Northern Ireland, this paper therefore will:

a)    provide a conceptual framework within which to understand polycentrism as it applies in inspection theory and practice;

b)    contrast this mode of inspection with more commonly understood types of inspection;

c)     develop a working definition of polycentric inspection;

d)    examine the contributions of this mode of inspection to a wider reflection on the impact of existing modes of inspection within the four case study countries;

e)    outline the next steps in the research – and in particular highlighting how the concept of polycentric evaluation might best fit into the four national contexts represented in the project.

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