Both internationally and in Germany, schools are integrated into a network of legal frameworks and administrative structures that, among other aspects, control school development processes. In an international comparison, however, schools in Germany can make relatively few decisions of their own (OECD, 2018), with the school supervision, as the formal supervisor, having just as much decision-making power (ibid.).
Contrary to the assumption that school supervision, in its factual and legally enforced relevance (Rürup, 2020), is a well-known actor in the discourse and highly professionalized in practice, it has only received increasing attention in German education policy and academic discourse in recent years (Klein & Bremm, 2020; Zaruba, Porsch & Rabisch, 2024; Dedering & Kallenbach, 2024; Dabisch, 2023; Nationales Bildungsforum [NBF], 2024).
The latter focuses in particular on the role of school supervision, which has changed fundamentally in the course of the new governance (Dedering, 2020; Dedering, 2021) and is still largely considered “unclear” (NBF, 2024).
Among other things, it can be seen that the executive school supervision (the superintendents) operates in a “mix of functions” (Diedrich, 2020, p. 52). In doing so, they are confronted with various contradictory requirements for action. These contradictory functions of the school supervision are expressed, for example, in the often-examined area of tension between counselling and control (Klein & Bremm, 2020). Therefore, there are several antinomic requirements for the super intendents in charge, including contradictions between their normative state mandate and the school reality, which are strengthened by the unclear steering responsibility with regard to school autonomy (Diedrich, 2020). These tensions point to uncertainties in the knowledge of specific tasks and responsibilities of the school supervision. However, to enable a constructive approach to these challenges in the sense of a goal-oriented work of the school supervision, transparency and clarity regarding a systematic task profile are required (Diedrich, 2020; NBF, 2024).
In the growing discourse on school supervision, little attention has so far been paid to the legal requirements that regulate the respective tasks and responsibilities (Hugo, 2025, in press). The totality of these school-related regulations comprises a complex structure that proves to be challenging for the creation of transparency in two dimensions: On the one hand, these regulations are distributed across the various levels of the hierarchy of norms, from the constitutional level to laws and legal ordinances and statutes (Kelsen, 1960/2020). On the other hand, Germany's federal structure with the cultural sovereignty of the federal states leads to each state enacting its own school legislation (Avenarius & Füssel, 2008). This complexity makes it difficult to achieve a clear structure and thus the desired transparency for those actors involved in the education system.
The paper is dedicated to this desideratum and focuses on the question of which formal task and responsibility profiles of the school supervision is defined in the legal requirements of contrasting federal states.

In order to answer the question, a systematic legal review (Hugo, 2025, in press) was carried out in two federal states (Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (HH) and North Rhine-Westphalia (NW)) (legal status: January 2024). The selection of the federal states is based on the one hand on the representation of a territorial state and a city state, and on the other hand on the different form of state school supervision (Hamburg: unrestricted school supervision and North Rhine-Westphalia: limited school supervision). This legal review was carried out as part of the TransLex - Transformation & Law in the Education System project conducted at the (name withheld) university. The systematic legal review underwent a four-stage PRISMA-compliant selection process (Moher et al., 2015). First, in the (1) identification phase, a keyword search was carried out in the relevant legal websites of the federal states. This involved searching for the relevant actor groups with formal power in the multi-level school system (ministry, school administration, school inspectorate, school authority, school board, school supervision, school council, school management, principal). The overall corpus is made up of all legal bases at constitutional, statutory and ordinance level (ntot=348; nHH=29; nNW=319). In the subsequent (2) screening phase, the text corpus first underwent a pre-coding, in which two researchers selected the data independently of each other (pre-coding: 96.9% agreement, Krippendorff's alpha: 0.929 threshold values according to Krippendorff, 2019). This was done using a previously defined coding manual with inclusion criteria (regulations of the public education system) and exclusion criteria (regulations of special education, early childhood, higher education, non-governmental, non-public, vocational education and schools without an education mandate, such as driving schools). The resulting corpus (ntot=102; nHH=8; nNW=94) was deductively coded in the subsequent (3) eligibility phase based on its full texts. To define which text passages are relevant for the selected actor groups (see above), the basic coding was carried out along these actor groups (rough coding: 97.7% agreement, Krippendorff's alpha: 0.979; threshold values according to Krippendorff, 2019). In this step, further irrelevant texts were excluded using the exclusion criteria. The resulting corpus (ntot=34; nHH=7; nNW=27) was evaluated in the final (4) inclusion phase. In this finite coding the named tasks were analyzed using inductive structuring and content analysis (Mayring, 2022).

In the basic coding, 1276 actor-specific passages were identified across the federal states (nHH=494; nNW=782). Of these, many passages relate to school supervision (ntot=237) In addition to the actor groups originally searched for, the group of collectively unknown actors were identified, whose exact assignment was initially unclear. These include the responsible authority (ntot=123), which can be assumed to refer to the school supervision. The fine coding led to a total of 1914 passages in which the tasks and responsibilities of the relevant actor groups were defined. These task text passages were then grouped into eleven transformational areas of responsibility: organization & administration (n=254); leadership (n=235); examinations, certificates & degrees (n=229); education (n=189), finance & facilities (n=105); data (n=98); development (n=96); protection (n=96); inclusion (n=64); counselling & support (n=53); cooperation (n=49). The tasks of the school supervision are primarily assigned to the areas of leadership (n=116) and examinations, certificates & degrees (n=72). It can also be seen that they bear responsibility in the areas of education (n=51) and finance & facilities (n=50). In contrast, the majority of the responsible authority's tasks are in the field of examinations, certificates & degrees (n=58), organization & administration (n=33) and data (n=31). Based on these results, a structured task and responsibility profile of the school supervision can be defined, which describes its various dimensions in terms of their relevance. Furthermore, the results indicate, among other things, the central importance of management, supervisory and/or control functions of the school supervision, particularly against the background of its comprehensive responsibility in the area of leadership. By contrast, the relevance of the field of action of advice & support (n=18) appears surprising, as although it refers to an advisory function of the school supervision, this is significantly less important than the area of leadership.

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