Agneta Hult

Mediating school inspection - Key dimensions and keywords in agency text production 2003-2010

This paper reports on an analysis of how school inspection in Sweden – its aims, directions and procedures – is portrayed in texts produced by the responsible national authorities. The study involves a textual analysis of official annual accounts and plans (texts directed to the government, municipalities, schools and the public) produced by the National Agency for Education and the Swedish Schools Inspectorate. The analysis concentrates on key concepts conveying the dominant ideas of inspection and education. The analysis is structured around four dimensions that are based on an understanding of inspection as education governance and on the characteristics of the Swedish education system. The results suggest that the rhetoric and dominant ideas of schools inspection changed when the responsibility for inspection was transferred to the Swedish School Inspectorate in the autumn of 2008. Key concepts before that time are more supportive of schools and municipalities, recognising local conditions. Later, a language with the intention of detecting shortcomings and supporting an ideology of individual rights and juridification is apparent.

When Performance Is the Product: Problems in the Analysis of Online Distance Education

This article examines two ideologies that have been prominent in recent, if not current, education thinking. The first is that means can be separated from ends (or processes from products); the sec ...

Premises, promises : connection, community, and communion in online education

This paper is an essay on the discursive politics of education. Data from a small study, combined with a review of the related literature, suggest that the overarching concept “community” lacks coherence when used in online education. At least three contrasting forms of connection can be discerned: communion among participants, exchange between participants, and attachment to an ideal. In turn, we believe that this incoherence is not a trivial semantic problem, but rather a central concern in current efforts to remodel, reform and globalize distance education.

Teacher ambivalence towards school evaluation: promoting and ruining teacher professionalism

Todays evaluation society makes teachers participate in a stream of external evaluations. How teachers experience evaluation in school and how this affects their work and professionalism is the focus of this article. Teachers’ views of external and internal evaluations and of the consequences for school practice are described and analysed. The interviewed teachers emphasised the importance of internal evaluations performed close to daily teaching practice and jointly with students and colleagues. These evaluations are generally overlooked in evaluation and school-policy research and seldom attended to or appreciated by school providers. Further, teachers were critical of and reported several negative consequences of accountability and external evaluations, but still generally complied by participating in them. The present results are discussed in relation to professional responsibility and accountability as well as to possible constitutive effects. By emphasising that their daily informal evaluations represent their efforts to improve teaching, teachers are describing parts of their professional responsibility. However, the negative consequences of external evaluations signal constitutive effects on teachers’ work, described as making it less creative, discretionary and autonomous as well as increasing mistrust, meaning that more tests are required in order to legitimate student grades.

Balancing managerial and professional demands: school principals as evaluation brokers

The evaluation trend in the global education field implies new professional challenges for school principals. The purpose of this article is to describe and analyse Swedish school principals’ experiences of prevailing evaluations and the implications for the profession. Specifically, we examine: a) how principals respond to evaluations and their consequences in their schools; and b) the implications of the evaluations for the profession in light of professional responsibility and accountability. The interviewed principals are ascribed huge evaluation responsibilities and are in this respect key actors but to some extent are also ‘victims’ of external pressures. All schools are embedded in a web of evaluation systems. They share the view that evaluations that are useful for improving teaching, student achievement and everyday school life are those conducted close to practice, and involve teachers. Most of them are also aware of the risks for the reduction of the broad goals of schooling and for work overload. The principals express a desire to protect the fundamental values of professional responsibility but the total demands of the local evaluation web have involved a shift in their professional role towards professional accountability.

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.

School evaluation in Sweden in a local perspective: A synthesis

This article synthesises the role of evaluation at the municipal, school, classroom and parental levels of governance, and discusses the results of the articles appearing in this special issue. The discussion concerns the role of evaluation in school governance, the value of evaluation for local school development, the constitutive effects of evaluation, what explains the present results, how knowledge produced by evaluation can be used, and methodological issues. The results indicate that evaluation systems legitimise and support governance by objectives and results, parental school choice, and accountability for fairness and performance. Evaluation systems emphasise measurable aspects of curricula and foster a performance-oriented school culture. The most important evaluations for improving teaching and schools are teachers’ own evaluations. The article suggests two explanations for the actual roles of evaluation in local school governance. First, both the governance structure and applied governance model delimit and partly shape the role of evaluation at local governance levels. Second, how local school actors use their discretion and interpret their role in the education system, including how they respond to accountability pressure, explains how their roles are realised and the fact that actors at the same level of governance can develop partly different roles.

Different Systems, Different Identities: The Work of Inspectors in Sweden and England

School inspection has formed part of both English and Swedish approaches to governing education for some time now. But latterly due to the neo liberal drive for educational excellence, both countries have remodelled their inspector workforce. Using Jacobsson’s theory of governance as a regulative, meditative and inquisitive activity, this chapter investigates the effects that these shifts have had on the operational work of inspectors. Drawing upon interview data with inspectors and head teachers from both systems combined with documentary analysis we examine how the remodelling of the workforce in both countries has impacted on the ways in which inspectors carry out their work. The chapter concludes that inspection operating within a neo liberal framework of regulation must constantly shift and evolve in order to remain credible. It also points out that these shifts in themselves create tensions around the role and operational work of inspectors in both countries.

Making a difference? : The voices of school inspectors and managers in Sweden

A cadre of school inspectors with different backgrounds visit thousands of schools annually in Sweden as is also the case in several other European and other nations. Do these inspectors believe th ...