The need of implementing procedures able to promote and ensure educational quality has been recognized as a consequence of an investment in expanding the access to school education, responsible for its massification. In this sense, public policies in several countries and governments have focused in regulating and evaluation educational systems. International organizations within the EU, OECD and UNESCO have produced recommendations concerning the search and assurance of educational quality, given that «external school evaluation is becoming well established but the culture of evaluation and improvement needs to be strengthened; the external school evaluation model embodies a number of features of best practice but there is an insufficient focus on learning and teaching; school self-evaluation requires to be strengthened» (OCDE, 2012).

In Portugal, concerning basic and secondary education, the demand for quality in education has justified policies of schools external evaluation (SEE), among other political measures. Although the statement of these policies has emerged in mid-80s, only at the beginning of the XXI century the SEE was legally defined (Law No. 31/2002). It was based on this Law that between 2006 and 2011, under the responsibility of the General Inspection of Education (GIE), took place the 1^st phase of schools evaluation, in which every Portuguese basic and secondary school was evaluated. The 2^nd phase of schools’ evaluation started in 2012, following the same guidelines that framed the 1^st phase, and taking as reference the recommendation of the National Council for Education (2010), as well as the knowledge produced.

The Portuguese model for SEE, which have a formative orientation (Leite; Pacheco, 2010), follows a data collection procedure focusing: documents produced by the school, interviews in panels constituted by elements of the educational community and observation of school situations. The collected data is, then, analyzed based on a framework that focuses, among other aspects, academic achievement, curricular organization, and leadership and self-evaluation procedures followed by the school. The process ends with the production of a report systematizing the strengths and improvement areas identified. With this information, schools develop an improvement plan, to which they are committed, seeking to respond to accountability demands, as well as to promote school improvement (Alaiz et al, 2003). 

In this context, and considering that the act of evaluation is directly related to the verification of results and outcomes (Davies et al, 2007), this presentation aims to analyze what effects does SEE generate in improving school and curricular organization. To do so, the school evaluation reports from the 1^st and 2^nd phases, concerning all schools, were analyzed. This analysis allowed to conclude that the SEE is generating qualitative changes in school work and some innovation dynamics.

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