This study explores the impact of educational governance through the lens of school inspections in three dissimilar places: England, Bahrain and Chile. While the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) is the largest inspectorate of schools in Europe and have systematically assessed school effectiveness over the last three decades in England, since 2008 and 2011 respectively Bahrain’s Quality Agency and the Chilean Quality Agency have inspected public schools through similar school inspection models. Following Perryman, et al. (2023) first we compare these accountability regimes focusing on six key criteria: (1) when do inspections take place, (2) who conduct inspections, (3) what is inspected, (4) what information is gathered, (5) how results are reported, and (6) what happens after inspections finish. Then, drawing on our previous work (Munoz-Chereau, González & Meyers, 2022; Ehren, Hutchinson & Munoz-Chereau, 2023; Munoz-Chereau et al. 2024; Al Khalifa, 2024) we focus the analysis on primary and secondary schools that have failed inspections over the last decade through multiple case studies in more than 20 primary and secondary ‘failing’ schools and their comparison groups (16 in England, 10 in Chile and 4 in Bahrain). 

We analyse thematically the evidence coming from document analysis, interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders by distinguishing between those aspects that help to explain failing schools’ trajectories that are arguably under schools’ control (such as leadership), from those that are not (such as the percentage of students living in poverty or coming from ethnic minorities). Hence, through cross-case analysis of multiple case studies we bring to the surface the unequal territorializations of educational governance that, following unrecognised imperial logics in education (Allweiss and Al-Adeimi, 2024) and neoliberal turns, use apparently neutral school effectiveness discourses that perpetuate deficit models of schools working in very challenging circumstances, without properly considering contextual differences that cause these inequalities.

We conclude pointing to policy and practice recommendations oriented to build local, fairer accountability regimes that could better support school improvement and educational social justice in these countries in specific, and in other countries in the Middle East, Europe and Latin-America that have implemented similar school governance regimes in general.

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