Learning from and Reacting to School Inspection – Two Swedish Case Narratives

ABSTRACT

Throughout Europe, school inspection has become a visible means of governing education. This education and inspection policy is mediated, brokered, interpreted, and learned through networked activities where the global/European meet the national/local, giving national and local “uptake” a variety of characteristics. We explore the local features of this “uptake” as processes of learning in the interaction between schools and inspectors in Sweden. Drawing theoretically on Jacobsson’s notion of governing as increasingly done through meditative activities and on Leontiev’s activity theory, we suggest that school actors learn compliance through diverse emotions provoked by inspection processes in different local settings. Based on observations of inspections, interviews with teachers, head teachers and inspectors, documents, reports, and decisions, we portray how governing education is done through inspection processes in two Swedish schools. The case narratives underscore the importance of local context in these governing and learning processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Case narratives
• compliance
• learning policy
• school inspection

Acknowledgements

We kindly acknowledge helpful comments from the reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This paper draws on data from three projects: Governing by Inspection: School Inspection in Sweden, England and Scotland (Segerholm, Forsberg, Lindgren, Nilsson and Rönnberg); Swedish National School Inspections: Introducing Centralized Instruments for Governing in a Decentralized Context, (Rönnberg); Inspecting the “Market”: Education at the Intersection of Marketization and Central State Control (Rönnberg and Lindgren).

2 The 11 schools in 4 municipalities were selected to mirror variety in geographical location, size, public and independent schools, schools not required and required to give marks, and different inspection histories. Data used to analyse the inspection process in the two schools were: inspection reports and decisions from the previous round of inspections and of the inspection described here; material sent in to the SSI by the two schools (descriptions of their work filled out in a template developed by the SSI, a self-evaluation type of material); examples of individual student plans; individual plans for action for students with special needs; statistics from the last five years of national tests and marks where adequate (at the time marks were given in grades 8–9, now marks should be given in grades 6–9); attainment rates for all students in all school subjects; quality assurance reports; action plans for harassment, bullying, maltreatment, and unequal treatment; other school documents showing examples of the schools’ work; SSI templates and interview guides for the inspectors and process descriptions of the inspection; interviews with the inspectors before and after the site visits and follow-ups approximately 6 months later; observations of the site visits; interviews with four or five teachers and staff who took part in the inspection interviews at each school, both after the site visits and in follow-ups by email approximately 6 months later; interviews with head teachers after the site visits and in follow-ups by phone 6–18 months later depending on when the SSI was satisfied with the measures taken by the schools.

3 This political process is thoroughly described and analysed by Rönnberg (2012, 2014).

4 This is a description we use with some variations in several texts within the project.

5 This description is a summary based on internal SSI material and interviews with inspectors and persons at the SSI responsible for developing inspection processes. See also Lindgren (2014) for an elaborated study of how the inspectors handle these processes.

6 We use pseudonyms for the names of the schools and municipalities.

7 There were also other schools in the municipality that received rather heavy criticism in the SSI reports.

8 Individual development plans were obligatory in all grades at this time. Now they are obligatory in grades 1–5. There should be one for each pupil and for all school subjects, tracking the students in relation to the goals set in the national curriculum and course plans and specifying what the school provides for the pupil in order to reach the goals.

9 Written assessments have to be delivered to pupils and parents/legal custodians for each pupil and all school subjects each term.

10 Decisions for two village schools were reported in the same publication.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Swedish Research Council [grant number 2009-5770]; [grant number 2007-3579]; Umeå University [grant number 223-514-09]; MidSweden University, Faculty of Humanities; and Umeå University, Faculty of Social Sciences.