Thispaper will offer a perspective on inspection that links it to current political and structural dilemmas in the governing of schooling, and their attempted solution across Europe. We situate inspection at the point of tension between ‘hard’ regulation through performance management regimes and ‘soft’ governance that promotes self- regulation as the best basis for constant improvement (Lawn 2006). Methodology: The paper draws on interdisciplinary approaches to governance/governing (Rose 1996, Clarke 2009) and Europeanisation (Grek 2008, Ozga et al 2011), as well as conceptualizations of policy actors as mediators, brokers, translators and transactors (Lendvai and Stubbs 2007) in the context of conflicting pressures on education/learning in all of the 3 systems studies here (Segerholm and Lindgren 2011, Lawn 2011, Grek and Ozga 2011). It references preliminary analysis of interviews with key policy informants, along with critical discourse analysis of policy texts. Conclusions: This work is in process and it is too early to draw firm conclusions, but we will reflect on the differences and similarities in inspection practices and in models of inspection that we see across the systems in the study, and connect these emergent findings to our previous work on Europeanisation of education (Ozga et a 2011).