School evaluation can provide schools with guidelines and parameters to follow in order to make positive changes that facilitate school development and student learning (Dahler-Larsen, 2006). This paper is the result of an analysis of External School Evaluation (ESE), an evaluation method initiated by the Norwegian Education Directorate, which is a tool for school development. ESE is an evaluation of school practice in an area chosen by the school itself, after school leaders have carried out an analysis of development needs. Two external evaluators conduct the assessment. These evaluators prepare the work by developing a Future Image—a schema that, describes signs of good practice in one chosen area,  of the school in question. The evaluators visit the school for three to four days, collect information/data due to the Future image, analyse the information, and deliver an evaluation report on their last day. The feedback the school receives from this process should contribute to its quality development. Some schools are given help by a national supervisors corps, organized by the directorate. In cases where the national supervisors are associated with ESE, they contribute with knowledge, experience, and advice to schools and school authorities, and are able to follow up after that process and start with development. In this paper we examine:

1. How does ESE contribute to school development?
2. How do external supervisors contribute?

The Committee for Quality in Primary and Secondary Education in Norway (2003), defined three areas of quality of students’ learning in a broad sense (i.e., the students’ knowledge, skills and attitudes):  results, structure, and process. The quality of results describes the desired results of educational activities—students’ learning in a broad sense. Structural quality describes the external presuppositions: the establishment’s organisation and its available resources. Process quality refers to the internal activities of the establishment—the work on education itself.

ESE aims to enhance quality of a school, and the definition of quality was used as the basis for the interview guides that were used to gather knowledge about how the different actors experienced ESE’s contribution to increased quality in process, structure, and results in schools. In the analysis and understanding of our data, we have benefited from the so-called “actor-network” approach, which is derived primarily from social studies of society and technology (Latour, 1987), but also from studies of the implementation of public policy (Buland, 1996). This perspective provides a good tool for understanding how actors build networks consisting of both human and non-human entities and actors to realize this goal. This, in turn, gives us a good foundation for understanding the importance of ESE in concrete school development. Within the actor-network approach (Latour 1987), one operates with the concept of non-human actors. Actor-network approaches analyse and explain change as a result of actors' construction of heterogeneous actor-networks around scenarios or images of reality. In relation to the school, such non-human actors can be regulations, guidelines, curricula, strategic plans, work plans, curriculum, textbooks, and research results, among others. In order to realise a project, actors develop such a network around a particular scenario, story, or narrative about a desired reality or future, and how to get there, as well as how the school's different stakeholders can contribute to achieving their common goals. ESE and the process report can be understood, therefore, as a non-human actor—an ally in the effort to develop the school in a determined direction. This underlines the fact that, to follow Prior (2011), documents do things as well as contain things, and ESE becomes an instrument for local action and change.

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