School accountability with autonomy (SAWA) reforms have developed in diverse forms in Northern Europe. Indeed, Denmark and England have both legislated SAWA reforms in various configurations and at different stages over the past thirty years. Following processes of educational decentralization to the municipalities, and the implementation of free school choice and per capita funding, municipal quality assurance reports became key to the test-based accountability agendas of education policymakers in Denmark (Dovemark et al., 2018; Moos 2006). By contrast, in England, as a result of decentralization to the school level (Gewirtz et al., 1992; Rayner et al., 2018), and a significantly reduced role for local authorities, school accountability for educational standards has been increasingly tied to two regulatory instruments: performance league tables and inspection (Ydesen et al., 2022). While changes to the development and enactment of these accountability systems over time mean that SAWA reforms in these two contexts could be described as a moving target, research suggests that social systems often exhibit active resistance to radical transformation (Milner et al., 2021). Assemblage theorists tend to explain this phenomenon through the conceptual lenses of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. However, certain scholars argue that the postmodernist emphasis on fluidity neglects sufficient treatment of the stability of structures and have therefore attempted to combine assemblage theory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972/1983, 1980/1987) with critical realism (Bhaskar, 1975; Archer, 1995; Collier 1999; Sayer, 2000). Inspired by this theoretical development, we employ a hybrid framework created by Martyn and Galvin (2022) to analyze the ‘production stories’ of quality assurance reports and inspection in Denmark and England. Drawing on data from an international comparative research project, and more recent policy analyses, we examine the arrangement of social entities that led to the development of these specific forms of accountability within these particular educational assemblages. With concern for the stability of structures, we explore the underlying logics to these assemblages and the latitude of teachers and school leaders to challenge them. We argue that pauses to the development enactment of accountability mechanisms are the result of distinct arrangements of social entities at distinct times within the social system. Additionally, the possibility for ‘rupture’ is limited by the resilience of underlying market and managerial logics supported by discourses of quality in education which appeal to key actors – government policymakers and parents.

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