The Regime of Self-Evaluation: Self-Conception for Teachers and Schools

ABSTRACT

Self-evaluation in inspection policy has become a global phenomenon. The idea is that it increases levels of teacher and school autonomy, wherein both schools and teachers have more ownership and responsibility over their work. In turn, such a process has allowed for greater accountability, which is then said to provide high quality education and, therefore, greater competitive advantage amongst knowledge-based economies. In both England and Ireland, self-evaluation has become a demanding procedure that is meant to complement external inspections of schools and teachers. In this article, I will argue that self-evaluation, whilst having the potential to become a worthwhile endeavour, does not live up to its name. In the first instance, the criteria used for self-evaluation are not internally generated but externally imposed. Thus, I would like to discuss the extent to which visions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ education developed by inspecting bodies influence the way in which teachers and schools assess themselves. Furthermore, I will raise questions as to what appropriate criteria for teaching might look like. In doing so, I shall try to show that what is now current is a debased form of self-evaluation that is not only detrimental to the self-perception of teachers, but inadequate to what any coherent notion of the ‘self’ might be. In light of work by the philosopher Charles Taylor in particular, I will argue that the self is not something that can be examined in the way that is imagined in these inspection systems but is rather something dynamic and unfixed, constituted within a wider community of practice and, therefore, not amenable to evaluation in quite the way that is supposed.

Keywords:

• self-evaluation policy
• inspection
• the self
• accountability
• autonomy

8. Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Due to the economic boom of the 1990s, as well as seemingly feeling pressured by the apparent implementation of an array of evaluation approaches internationally, further exacerbated by accusations from such influential bodies as the OECD (1991), the Irish government became increasingly concerned with securing the country in the realm of global, knowledge-based economies. The Irish education system was considered to be a key factor in ensuring such socio-economic progress.

² This is a stark contrast from the previous, individualistic nature of schools, maintained for a number of reasons, including resistance to inspection on behalf of the Teacher Unions (McNamara and O’Hara, 2009), as well as the influence of the Catholic Church in purporting an image of the school as a kind of sanctuary, appropriately void of governmental involvement (Mooney-Simmie, 2012).

³ The Department of Education and Science in Ireland officially changed its name to the Department of Education and Skills in 2010, and will herein be referred to as DES (Ireland).

⁴ This message is somewhat disingenuous, however, when one considers the fact that, after the evaluation has been completed, such results are published on the Department’s website, available to the wider public, and thus naturally informing parental choice and school image in a similar manner to the contested league-tables in such countries as England (DES (Ireland), 2003 and 2004; DES (Ireland), 2011).

⁵ For Hislop (2012), the main reason why self-evaluation is avoided in schools is precisely because of a lack of detailed criteria provided to teachers in LAOS with which they can evaluate themselves, thus making teachers directionless and ill-advised of their own weaknesses and strengths.

⁶ The Self Evaluation Form has more recently been referred to as to Self Evaluation Document in policy literature (see, e.g., Ofsted (2015a)).

⁷ In a survey conducted by the National College of Leadership (MacBeath, 2006) which directly probed schools as to which self-evaluation framework they were adopting, the Ofsted SEF template proved to be the most popular. Their main rationale was that it was the most standardised and thus easily applied, and doing so would adequately prepare schools for any impending external inspections. More original or creative approaches became marginalised, despite aforementioned disclaimers from HMCI that Ofsted’s form was not self-evaluation per se. According to the most recent policy literature (2015d), however, Ofsted has made clear that self-evaluation does not have to be of a specified format, length or level of detail. Conversely, when one considers the documentation on self-evaluation as provided on the Department for Education’s website. On it, Ofsted offers examples of good practice in terms of self-evaluation from schools that have successfully attained the ‘outstanding’ status, presumably in order to give guidance to those schools failing to achieve the same. In one such example (2015b), the school’s own criteria for how they self-evaluate effectively are curiously in line with Ofsted’s own standards of good teaching – having high expectations of pupils, making staff feel accountable for the work they are involved in, utilising specific and targeted data collection which informs practice, monitoring and evaluating school processes on a regular basis. It may be that such generic aims are unarguably central to education, yet it is interesting to consider to what extent such targets arise from self-evaluation (e.g. see also DfES 2006 surveys; MacBeath, 2006).

⁸ The Ofsted inspection framework of 2013 has since been replaced with the ‘Common Inspections Framework’ in September 2015 (Ofsted, 2015c). Whilst this new framework does not, at length, discuss self-evaluation, the new school inspections handbook and the self-evaluation document guidance (Ofsted, 2012, 2015d) still requires that Inspectors, upon their arrival to the school, should be able to look at evidence that such processes are being undertaken at the school in the form of a school self-evaluation document, unspecified in terms of format or length.

⁹ What Sartre refers to as ‘the gaze’ in ‘Being and Nothingness’ (1943) is particularly relevant here, as is Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon prison design in ‘Discipline and Punish’ (1979). The overall claim here is that the self, through technologies of surveillance, become fixed, either as an object in the perception of the Other, or as that which internalises certain mechanisms of discipline which are (initially) externally imposed. In self-evaluation, neo-liberal ideals of teaching in general is quite palpable, and such ideals ‘fix’ the teaching self in a similar way to what is discussed in both Sartre’s and Foucault’s work. Other thinkers such as Levinas and Derrida would also be useful in this discussion.