Assuming that, despite the feeling that "it appears that centralized control of curriculum will remain the dominant motif in curriculum policy-making" (Kennedy, 2010, p. 15), research on centralisation versus decentralisation of the curriculum in a wide range of countries suggests that, overall, "some progress has been made" in the consolidation of school-based curriculum development (Kennedy, 2010, p. 16). According to Marsh (2010), "there are promising examples [of school-based curriculum development] emerging in many countries despite the tightening central control exerted by central authorities" (p. 295). This growing tendency to accept the idea of schools as curriculum agencies has been accompanied by an increase in the adoption of teacher evaluation and school evaluation measures in many countries, which has been interpreted by some authors as a means of strengthening control while praising schools' and teachers' curricular autonomy. Krejsler (2005) views this relationship between autonomy and evaluation in education as part of a wider phenomenon whereby a large portion of the public sector has been increasingly subject to changes "characterised by a decentralisation of decision-making as well as centralisation in the form of broad descriptions of aims and goals for public service that are controlled at the output level through quality assessment by a major expansion of detailed auditing and (self-)evaluation measures" (pp. 350-351). In order to deepen our understanding of the relationship between school-based curriculum development and school evaluation, it is important to conduct empirical research on the extent to which school evaluators focus their attention on curricular issues. This is especially important in the specific case of schools' self-evaluation, considering that the extent to which self-evaluation teams in schools emphasise curricular issues can be a good indicator of their level of ownership of the curriculum. Accordingly, some studies on that issue have recently been conducted in the Azores, Portugal (Sousa & Roldão, 2009; Sousa, 2010). The researchers found that reflection on curricular issues has been "little visible" in the self-evaluation reports produced by the schools of that region (Sousa & Roldão, 2009, p. 79). Through this paper, we intend not only to discuss the results of the analysis of more recent self-evaluation reports produced in the Azores, but also to compare those results with results of the analysis of self-evaluation reports produced by the schools of Nord-Trøndelag County, Norway. This comparison will be facilitated by the fact that the model of school self-evaluation being used in both regions is an adaptation of the Common Assessment Framework (CAF), which has been used as a self-evaluation tool by a wide range of public institutions across Europe, including schools. This tool was created in 2002 by the EU ministers responsible for public administration, in the context of the Innovative Public Services Group (IPSG). In 2010, an overall European CAF version specific to the education sector was approved by the IPSG and published. These developments of CAF clearly illustrate the above-mentioned subordination of educational policy to changes in the public sector al large (Krejsler, 2005).

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