This paper documents and critiques dominant modes of educational accountability world-wide that have tended to be top-down, and which use tests or standards to hold school systems, schools, principals and teachers to account. A brief survey of the history and functioning of these modes of accountability in education, particularly in Anglo-American school systems, will provide the background to our case study. We will argue that such a top-down, test-based approach needs to be complemented by giving schools and their communities the opportunity to provide accounts of their multiple achievements beyond merely test results, quantitative data and standards compliance. The paper will thus work with two discursive constructions of accountability: being held ‘to account’ and being enabled to give ‘an account’. The paper will then draw on a large research project conducted with a team of researchers in a regional area of Queensland, Australia, in conjunction with the State Department of Education and over a three-year period. Here, we worked with principals, teachers and students in eight schools, along with the schools’ communities, to construct a new mode of what we called ‘rich accountabilities’, which is educative in intent and which keeps the broadest purposes of schooling in mind. The paper will outline the partnership processes utilised in the development of this new mode of accountability, including the creation of a community-based Learning Commission. This approach drew heavily on the ‘competency group’ model developed by Sarah Whatmore and her colleagues at Oxford, which brings together professional and local expertise to seek solutions to local problems. The partnership mode of accountability that we developed will be outlined. This mode included two-way horizontal school-community relationships, and the opportunity for schools and their communities to speak back to systems about ‘opportunities to learn’, and thus demand the resources necessary to achieve the outcomes by which the system is holding them to account. This approach works together being held to account and giving an account, and both quantitative and qualitative data, and stresses the importance of collaborative partnerships.

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