In a comparative study of school leaders in Denmark, Ireland, England and Norway published in 2004 (Møller), British head teachers were asked about their views in regards to Ofsted inspections. Møller concludes; “As a head teacher in England it’s impossible to ignore Ofsted”. Since then, Ofsted as an external interventional body has undergone major transformation. Through the recent Ofsted reforms, schools in the U.K. are now subject to "no-notice spot checks", a change which has been widely discussed. These reforms are interesting to look further into.

As a result of Ofsted inspections, British schools which successively receive sub-standard evaluations, are in many cases forced to shut down. In fear of closure, schools undergo an intense period of preparation for inspections such as Ofsted (Perryman, 2011).

The paper is based on an empirical case study of a senior leadership group in a large lower secondary school in Greater Manchester, U.K.  The core purpose of the study is threefold; first to discuss how leadership may be understood through the scope of combining theoretical concepts of Weberian bureacracy, organizational management and networks (Olsen, 2005), secondly, to unravel which forms of accountability that existed within the case school, and finally how organizational or professional relationships between senior leaders might evolve in the event of intervention by external bodies such as Ofsted. The paper's conceptual framework is based on combining bureaucratic, market-oriented and network-driven aspects of organizations (Weber, 1971/Olsen, 2005/Kjær, 2004), and secondly links these aspects to internal/external and professional/political accountability mechanisms (Sinclair, 1995/Langfeldt et. al., 2008).

The goal of this paper is to look deeper into exactly how leadership relationships in the case school might evolve in times of external scrutiny such as Ofsted. In this paper, it is argued that external intervention, in this case through Ofsted inspections, plays an important role in the shaping of professional and organizational relationships within the case school. 

The research question is;

• How do organizational relationships evolve within the senior leadership group in the case school during external intervention, such as Ofsted inspections?

Based on the research question above, the main problem which is explored is;  In times of new inspection and accountability systems, how do organizational relationships within the senior leadership group at “Middletown College” evolve?

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