In most countries, publicly funded schools are held accountable to one inspectorate and are judged against agreed national standards. Many inspectorates of education have recently moved towards more proportional risk-based inspection models, targeting high-risk schools for visits, while schools with satisfactory student attainment levels are…

With decentralisation becoming increasingly widespread across Europe, evaluation and accountability are becoming key issues in ensuring quality provision for all (Altrichter & Maag Merki, 2010; Eurydice, 2004). In Europe, the dominant arrangement for educational accountability is school inspections. The purpose of this research is to identify…

The focus of this article is the Revised Programme of Instruction (1900), which was devised in the final years of the nineteenth century and implemented in Irish national schools between 1900 and 1922. It begins by analysing the societal and educational context for the Revised Programme. Second, the work of the Commission on Manual and Practical…

This article examines the professional learning accruing from school-based initial teacher education (ITE) within the wider policy debate on school performance. It contrasts the very positive perceptions reported by teachers on the contribution of involvement in ITE to their professional learning with the less than fulsome attitude of school…

This article uses a policy scientific approach to reconstruct assumptions underlying the Dutch Educational Supervision Act. We show an example of how to reconstruct and evaluate a program theory that is based on legislation of inspection. The assumptions explain how inspection leads to school improvement. Evaluation of these assumptions is used to…

This summary outlines the key findings from a national evaluation of the first-year trials of the New Relationship with Schools (NRwS) carried out by a team at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER). The trials took place in the period September 2004 to July 2005 and involved 93 schools in eight local educational authorities…