This paper examines the influence of intense scrutiny from Ofsted on school leadership and policy enactment. Data was collected in a coastal area of deprivation, providing the setting for a detailed case study of school leadership in a state secondary school and a state primary school, both with recent or ongoing experience of intense scrutiny…

The changing education landscape in England, combined with a more rigorous form of governor regulation in the form of the Ofsted 2012 Inspection Framework, are together placing more demands than ever before on the 300,000 volunteer school governors in England. These school governors are, in many cases, directly accountable to the Secretary of…

This paper addresses if, and to what extent, the current working methods of the Dutch Inspectorate of Education affect the governance of school boards in schools for primary education. A key facet of the working method is the inspection meeting with the school board. Drawing upon a large quantitative study (n = 244) we are able to identify some…

The inspectorate's judgements about a school's educational quality in the Netherlands are to a large extent based on sophisticated desk research, risk analyses and analyses of the school's self-evaluation reports. This relatively distant mode of inspecting schools relies on rational ideas about organizational management and control while aspects…

Despite the increased importance of school inspection in recent years, the current knowledge base does not provide a clear view on the effects and side effects of being inspected. More evidence is needed in more diverse educational contexts. This article responds to this need with a quantitative study on the effects and side effects of school…

Leadership in the post-incorporation English further education system has not been distributed in nature, but transactional, driven by the external demands of funding and inspection regimes. However, in the light of the current rhetoric of localism in further education policy there is a view that distributed leadership would be an appropriate…

It is generally accepted that there is a positive association between a school's academic outcomes and the quality of its leadership. This article investigates that proposition in relation to the Catholic sector in England, using data provided by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted). The findings suggest that, for the Catholic sector,…

This study was conducted to determine how instructional supervision was carried out in schools. The study begins with a brief outline of the decentralization of the inspection system in Botswana. It proceeds to present a brief global historical background of instructional supervision before findings on instructional supervision are discussed.…

This is the first article to analyse and evaluate Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) reports on attendance issues within local authorities. A full cohort of Ofsted reports on local education authorities (LEAs) undertaken in 2003 in England were read, evaluated and used in the preparation of this article. The reports show that most LEAs…

Evaluating schools has become a contentious issue in many countries. There seems to be a broad and growing consensus that some form of evaluation can on the one hand play a significant role in school improvement efforts, and on the other is also required to provide a reasonable level of public accountability appropriate in democratic societies.…