Impact of school inspections on improvement of schools—describing assumptions on causal mechanisms in six European countries

School inspection is used by most European education systems as a major instrument for controlling and promoting the quality of schools. Surprisingly, there is little research knowledge about how school inspections drive the improvement of schools and which types of approaches are most effective and cause the least unintended consequences. The study presented in this paper uses interviews with inspection officials and a document analysis to reconstruct the “program theories” (i.e. the assumptions on causal mechanisms, linking school inspections to their intended outcomes of improved teaching and learning) of Inspectorates of Education in six European countries. The results section of the paper starts with a summary of the commonalities and differences of these six national inspection models with respect to standards and thresholds used, to types of feedback and reporting, and to the sanctions, rewards and interventions applied to motivate schools to improve. Next, the intermediate processes through which these inspection models are expected to promote good education (e.g. through actions of stakeholders) are explained. In the concluding section, these assumptions are critically discussed in the light of research knowledge

Comparing effects and side effects of different school inspection systems across Europe

In this article, different inspection models are compared in terms of their impact on school improvement and the mechanisms each of these models generates to have such an impact. Our theoretical framework was drawn from the programme theories of six countries’ school inspection systems (i.e. the Netherlands, England, Sweden, Ireland, the province of Styria in Austria and the Czech Republic). We describe how inspection models differ in the scheduling and frequency of visits (using a differentiated or cyclical approach), the evaluation of process and/or output standards, and the consequences of visits, and how these models lead to school improvement through the setting of expectations, the use of performance feedback and actions of the school’s stakeholders. These assumptions were tested by means of a survey of principals in primary and secondary schools in these countries (n = 2239). The data analysis followed a three-step approach: (1) confirmatory factor analyses, (2) path modelling and (3) fitting of multiple-indicator multiple-cause models. The results indicate that Inspectorates of Education that use a differentiated model (in addition to regular visits), in which they evaluate both educational practices and outcomes of schools and publicly report inspection findings of individual schools, are the most effective. These changes seem to be mediated by improvements in the schools’ self-evaluations and the schools’ stakeholders’ awareness of the findings in the public inspection reports. However, differentiated inspections also lead to unintended consequences as principals report on narrowing the curriculum and on discouraging teachers from experimenting with new teaching methods