Examining school inspectors and education directors within the organisation of school inspection policy: perceptions and views

ABSTRACT

State school inspection creates expectations in the interface between transnational ideas and national policy contexts. This article investigates how inspectors and education directors understand and reformulate their regulatory roles in relation to the new framework for school inspection policy in Norway. Using data from the LEX-EL project, interviews with 3 educational directors and 6 school inspectors in 3 County Governors' Offices were analyzed. The article draws on organizational theory, within the concept of institutionalization. Findings suggest inspectors function as change agents, channeled through inter- and intra-institutional cooperation. Additionally directors are more tightly coupled to their counterparts in other counties. Moreover, the role of school inspectors is moving from a compliancy-based focus to increased emphasis on self-evaluation and quality assessment.

KEYWORDS:

• School inspection
• policy
• expectations
• institutionalization

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge the Research Council of Norway for financing the project “Legal Standards and Professional Judgment in Educational Leadership” (LEX-EL), based at the University of Oslo, Norway. Finally, the author wishes to thank colleagues at the Faculty of Educational Sciences for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Felles nasjonalt tilsyn (FNT) may be translated as Regular State Inspections, and concerns annual inspections initiated by The Directorate.

2 The Education Act of Norway (Government Act, 1998 Sec. 14-1) states: “The County Governor supervises the municipal and county educational authorities’ fulfillment of the duties bestowed upon them.” These duties refer to the role schools possess through respecting individual students’ rights to, for example, satisfactory education and a healthy and sufficient psycho-social learning environment (Government Act, 1998), and secondly the role County Governors’ Offices play by seeing that regulations are followed.

3 The three County Governors’ Offices (CGOs) are treated as individual cases; however the data is analyzed across cases in order to unveil commonalities and possible differences. I here refer to section under heading The study and its methodology in this paper for an overview of methods chosen, especially concerning case studies.

4 Legal Standards and Professional Judgment in Education Leadership is a four-year research project supported by the Research Council of Norway (http://www.uv.uio.no/ils/english/research/projects/legalstandardsedu/).

5 The interview with Patricia (CGOEE) and Eva (CGOEL) at CGO “East” was conducted as a group interview.

6 There are in total 18 CGOs in Norway, as the counties of Oslo and Akershus have one common County Governor.

7 These do not refer to classroom observations, which are not a part of the inspection process in Norway. The informant here (Jens, CGONL) referred to observations during interviews with school leaders, teachers, and so on.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in full by the Research Council of Norway [grant number 212328].