Session Information
23 SES 02 C, Inspecting Schools: Policy and Practice
Paper Session
Contribution
The paper focuses on inspection in two very different countries: Scotland, which develops a new model of inspection disseminated in the entire world (through organisations like SICI for example) and France which is often regarded -rightly or wrongly- as a country with a classical inspectorate (De Grauwe, 2006) not really open to international issues and recent governing changes (Pons, 2010). It offers a perspective on the study of the inspectorate that relates inspection to governance. It draws on a range of literature from political science and from the sociology of knowledge to propose that inspection may be understood as a governing form and as a site of tension between hard and soft governance (Lawn, 2006), and that this approach helps to combat ‘methodological nationalism’ in the study of the inspectorate. We look at it as a way of shaping and steering education, and consider the behaviours, knowledge resources and assumptions of the inspectors themselves, drawing on recent research in France (Pons) and Scotland (Ozga). In developing this approach, we question recent changes in inspection regimes in some contexts that are intended to reduce ‘hard’ governance forms of central control and bureaucracy and 'free up' initiative and energy at local and school levels in order to support competitiveness and entrepreneurship for knowledge economy purposes. If in Scotland inspection is being reshaped to promote self-evaluation and encouragement of improvement, in line with developments that promote ‘responsibilisation’ in other areas of education/learning, in France it is still rather used as a traditional vertical channel of information for decision makers, either to have empirical feed-backs or to legitimate new policies. In the light of these ideas, we compare inspection regimes in the two systems, with attention to the kinds of knowledge that inspectors are being encouraged to reference and mobilise, and to whether ‘policy learning’ or ‘policy transfer’ may be evidenced in this area.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Clarke, J. (2005a) ‘Producing Transparency? Evaluation and the Governance of Public Services.’ In G. Drewry, C. Greve and T. Tanquerel (eds) Contracts, Performance Measurement and Accountability in the Public Sector. Amsterdam: IOS Press. Cowie, M. and Croxford, L. (2006) Measuring and Monitoring School Performance in Scotland, Education in the North. 13, 23-36. De Grauwe, A. (2006) L'État et l’inspection scolaire : analyse des relations et modèles d’action, Doctoral Study, Paris: Institute of Political Studies Freeman, R (2006) 'Learning in public policy', in Rein, M, Moran, M and Goodin, R E (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy, Oxford: Oxford UP Lawn, M. (2006) Soft Governance and the Learning Spaces of Europe, Comparative European Politics, 2006, 4, 272–288 Maes, B Vereeke E and Zaman M (eds) (1999) Inspectorates of Education in Europe: A descriptive Study Standing International Conference of Inspectorates,(SICI) Brussels Pons, X (2010) Evaluer l'action éducative, Paris: PUF, Forthcoming. Steiner-Khamsi, G. (ed.) (2004) The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending, New York: Teachers College Press
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