Excellence, equity and efficiency are key drivers for improvement in Scotland's education sector, including educational psychology. This paper discusses and evaluates the decisions taken by one Scottish Educational Psychology Service towards achieving the key outcomes of excellence, equity and efficiency through a redesign of their service…

Purpose: In recent decades, higher education institutions have been encouraged to develop their own internal management systems as a response to perceived quality challenges in the sector. These quality management (QM) systems have often been found to mainly reflect external accountability requirements, with less focus on coherent study programme…

Just as surveillance in general has become more sophisticated, penetrative and ubiquitous, so has the surveillance of teachers. Enacted through an assemblage of strategies such as learning walks, parental networks, student voice and management information systems, the surveillance of teachers has proliferated as a means of managing the risks of…

This paper explores the impact of external accountability on four mechanisms of network-internal quality control and the properties of (mandated) inter-organizational networks. An explorative case study approach examines the external accountability of a newly established educational network (MAT) and how schools and the Trust are held accountable…

Many efforts to implement and improve school inspections have been modelled on examples from high-income countries, and many studies on the effectiveness of such systems have also only been carried out in these countries. However, local contexts in low- and middle-income countries are very different from those in developed countries, and findings…

The focus in this article is on Brazilian education policy, specifically quality assurance and evaluation. The starting point is that quality, measured by means of large-scale assessments, is one of the key discursive justifications for educational change. The article addresses the questions of how quality evaluation became a significant feature…

The goal of this work is to better understand the institutional changes in the educational systems of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. We demonstrate that the educational reforms implemented during the transformation introduced very different institutional arrangements in the four countries, despite the fact that their systems…

At a time when more students than ever are attending higher education, its provision is becoming more fluid, global and competitive. For example, developments in new technologies mean that higher education institutions (HEIs) can make their courses available all over the world. These developments bring into question the traditional delivery model…

Although students are considered major actors in the quality assessment of universities, the way they perceive this process and the meanings they ascribe to it are still neglected as a research subject. This article aims to reduce this gap by focusing on the social representations of students on quality assessment. Specifically, it tries to…

Higher education in Australia is currently in a state of flux, with the Federal Government's Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency commencing operations in January 2012. The "After Standards Project" has been working with Australian university history departments and the Australian Historical Association, educating and…

The purpose of this study is to identify how the meaning of autonomy and accountability changes between domestic and overseas campuses of the universities in New York State. The article confines to and examines the shift of the quality assurance mechanism between two contexts. The article argues that home campuses of the University of the State of…

"New" school inspections are essential parts of "evidence-based governance" concepts and have been implemented by many European countries as a major strategy to assure and improve the effectiveness and quality of their education systems. However, national inspection systems vary in their composition and in their contextual…

The accountability versus improvement debate is an old one. Although being traditionally considered dichotomous purposes of higher education quality assessment, some authors defend the need of balancing both in quality assessment systems. This article goes a step further and contends that not only they should be balanced but also that other…

Globalization in the 21st century has brought innumerable challenges and opportunities to universities and countries. Universities are primarily concerned with how to ensure the quality of their education and how to boost their local and global competitiveness. The pressure from both international competition and public accountability on…

The aim of this study is to identify achieved successes, existing gaps and possible prospects of implementing the principle of transparency by Russian universities. It was focused upon the information transparency of educational activities from the perspective of legal requirements and interests of applicants and university students. The analysis…