Abstract

School inspection as a ‘management tool’ is accompanied by making transparent the expectations of what is a ‘good school.’ Inspection teams that have to implement the inspection procedure are confronted with diverse requirements. They are not only obliged to follow procedural rules that require interpretation, but they must also rely on different information sources as well as evaluate and synthesise that information. Furthermore, the final assessments and evaluations are to be made by consensus. In this session I will illustrate what different solutions the evaluation teams have pursued in making their judgements and in building consensus. The empirical data has been obtained from three external evaluations in Thuringia and Lower Saxony in three inspections, two federal states in Germany with distinct evaluation regimes.