In an attempt to improve the quality of education provided in schools, many European countries have decentralised their school evaluation frameworks from that of a hierarchical model of school inspection to one where school evaluation now consists of a dual model of evaluation in the form of school inspection and government mandated school self-evaluation (SSE) (DES, 2012a). Inevitably, this new mode of governance has created potential challenges for different stakeholder groups This paper seeks to explore some of these challenges from an Irish perspective outlining the changing nature of school evaluation and how a new framework for school evaluation introduced by the Department of Education and Skills (DES) in 2012 demonstrates real intentionality in terms of implementation. SSE is appealing in that evaluation no longer consists of command and control accountability mechanisms via the inspectorate. Indeed, the foundations are the new relationship between state and school were based on the concept of ‘intelligent accountability’ and perceived by some as being able to counteract the inherent limitations present in both systems of evaluation if used in isolation. In other words, SSE and school inspection can be mutually beneficial to serving the school accountability agenda on the one hand and school improvement agenda on the other (Nevo 2002; 2010). In an Irish context this set of policy developments has seen the relationship between Inspection and SSE become one of a regulatory mandate where schools are required to engage with an externally devised process of SSE (DES 2012b). Although laudable in theory; there are many issues such as capacity, context, and the reliability of internal evaluation outcomes that need to be considered in order to realise the benefits of evaluation co-existence. A three stage multi-phased convergent mixed methods strategy was used. Stage 1 consisted of a survey of every school principal in Ireland in 2015. In order to moderate dissonance-reduction and further clarify the aggregated questionnaire responses, stage 2 consisted of a series of semi-structured interviews with a sample of respondent principals (n=23). Finally, using a modified version of Bushnell’s (1990) training model, stage 3 converged the previous two stages to provide an overall interpretation of the study. Initial findings suggest that while there have been some real successes in the drive to embed government devised frameworks for SSE. However, there are also unresolved issues that need to be addressed such as: systemic, in school and personal tensions; capacity; role identity; and resourcing.

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