Many countries around the world have implemented Performance-Based Accountability (PBA) policies in education through standardised assessments and quality assurance instruments or mechanisms (Verger and Parcerisa 2017). One such instrument or mechanism corresponds to school inspections, which generally consist of visits from external actors (inspectors) to collect and produce information to evaluate schools’ performance and deliver guidelines for improvement based on standardised quality criteria (Ehren et al. 2015). According to Munoz-Chereau and Ehren (2021, 10) inspections “are performance systems conceived as a key accountability mechanism to govern education” and they “occupy the middle ground between policy and practice”. 

As a PBA policy instrument, school inspections usually attempt to prompt change and improvement by setting expectations based on norms and standards, providing performance feedback through evaluation, recommended actions and potential consequences, and enabling stakeholders’ pressure by making the information publicly available. However, inspection models have shown mixed results in terms of promoting improvement, in addition to several negative consequences over curriculum, teaching and learning, practitioners’ professionalism and schools’ culture (de Wolf and Janssens 2007; Penninckx et al. 2014).

In Chile, a country well-known for its PBA policies, inspections take a prominent part in the National System of Education Quality Assurance (SAC). This system, implemented in 2011 (Law 20.529), establishes the basis for evaluating schools’ effectiveness and is considered the core of the country’s PBA policies (Falabella 2021; Parcerisa 2021). Depending on the outcomes of a series of standardised academic and non-academic metrics, schools are ranked and ordered from highest to lowest performance in four categories: High, Middle, Middle-Low and Insufficient. Inspection visits are carried out by a panel of Quality Agency inspectors in schools considered low performing (i.e., Insufficient) with the purpose of guiding their improvement (Munoz-Chereau, González, and Meyers 2022).

Evidence about SAC’s effect on schools has mostly concentrated on results measured by schools’ outcomes in standardised evaluations (e.g., SIMCE tests) or the (expected or unexpected) consequences of performance categories in schools’ practices, however, evidence specific about inspection visits in Chile and their consequences is still scarce (Bravo Cuevas 2019). Moreover, international research about PBA policies focuses mostly on their effects on practices and results, but rarely on what scholarly literature identifies as the affective dimension. The affective dimension can help understanding actors’ level of acceptance of the inspection process in general, and their capacity to act on the feedback provided to improve individual and school practices (Quintelier, De Maeyer, and Vanhoof 2020). This dimension follows what Grek, Lindgren, and Clarke (2014, 117) describe as affective governing, which “not only relate to the rise of feelings of anxiety or stress that school inspections are associated with” but also consider the interactive or relational aspect of inspection “where inspectors and inspectees have to meet face to face and negotiate differences of position, authority and interest”. 

To understand how school actors make sense of the performance feedback from the inspection visits through the incorporation of the affective dimension, this paper examines this phenomenon from a policy enactment perspective. Policy enactment offers a critical perspective of how policies are recreated and produced (Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012), by considering local contingencies and the agency of actors (Parcerisa 2021). Thus, this paper explores to what extent both the emotions of and relationship between Agency inspectors and school leaders in the context of inspection visits encourage school actors to make sense of the performance feedback resulting from the inspection visit, as a way of doing policy work.

This paper draws from a three-year exploratory multiple case study that investigates the influence of different instruments of SAC on the improvement of public primary schools, located in disadvantaged areas, and that were classified as Insufficient in 2016 by the Quality Agency. Since then, these schools have had different improvement trajectories according to the Agency’s yearly performance evaluation, until 2019: sustained improvement, irregular improvement, and no improvement. Three schools, each representing one of these trajectories, were chosen for this paper. School A represents the No Improvement trajectory, as its insufficient category has not changed since 2016. It is located in a densely populated urban area and serves students from low-income families in the surrounding neighbourhoods. The school was inspected in 2017 and a follow up visit was carried out in 2019 by the same panel of inspectors. School B represents the Irregular Improvement trajectory since it has advanced and regressed in its performance category between 2016 and 2019 and is currently classified as Medium-Low. The school is in an urban area where most of their students live, but also serves students from nearby rural areas, all of them with low income or minimal levels of education. The school was inspected in 2017 by a panel of three inspectors, and two of them returned for a follow up visit in 2019. School C represents the Sustained Improvement trajectory as it has systematically progressed until reaching the classification Medium. The school is in a middle-class urban area, but a significant number of students come from low-income families living in rural areas, so the school offers free transportation. The school was inspected in 2017 by a panel of three inspectors, with no follow up. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with the principal and curriculum coordinator from each school (n=6), as well as the inspectors that visited them (n=9). Interviews were conducted between 2020 and 2021 through video call, had an average length of 60 minutes and the audio was transcribed for analysis. Data were analysed through a qualitative content analysis strategy (Schreier 2014), for the identification of emergent themes based on a coding framework developed according to the study purpose of understanding how school actors make sense of the performance feedback of the inspection through the incorporation of the affective dimension.

Inspection visits are viewed by inspectors and school leaders as a critical instrument for school improvement. Inspectors generally observe schools from an outsider position, they carefully collect and systematise evidence about instructional and management standards and employ it to provide feedback to school actors about their performance, whilst also attempting to translate quality assurance criteria for schools. School leaders initially try to perform what they believe is expected from them by inspectors, as inspection visits follow a strong normative pattern, framed by the affective forces on which the quality assurance system is built upon (Matus 2017; Falabella 2021). However, the cases also show that some leaders assumed a more dialogical position to better understand the feedback offered to them, which seems to be shaped mainly by the unique and agential affective forces from bodies in place at the moment of the visit. This resembles a form of affective governing that arises from the direct encounter of inspectors and school leaders which enriches an understanding of sensemaking in the inspection process (Grek, Lindgren, and Clarke 2014). Although all three schools were weary of the inspection visit on the back of their emotional response to the performance category, those reporting mutual understanding and kindness seem to have taken active advantage of the performance feedback, which in turn regulates the possibilities for making sense of recommendations for school change. The issue of kindness becomes a surprising and even counterintuitive finding, as low performing schools become scrutinised by the labelling of the quality assurance system, which is represented by these strangers -the inspectors- that show up at the school to offer recommendations. Thus, by turning to the affective dimension of inspections, we shed light on the unplanned but everyday events of this PBA policy instrument, which is key for understanding policy enactment and implementation.

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