Introduction

Although education in Europe has always ‘travelled’ (Lawn and Grek, 2012), until recently, school inspectors were firmly rooted in particular national contexts, and derived clout from their local and authoritative standing as education ‘connoisseurs’; their embodied expertise in making evaluative judgements on the quality of schooling is perhaps the best example of such knowledge in the field of education. However, this seems to be rapidly changing; inspectors are not alone any more:

Indeed, recent decades have seen a transformation of school inspectorates and inspection regimes in Europe, from professional dominance based on expert connoisseurship, to a much less certain position in a world of competing agencies and new challenges on what inspection is expected to achieve. So, how have inspectorates adapted to this new situation in such a way as effectively to consolidate their position in this new state of affairs? In order to answer this question, I examine why European inspectors are leaving their local ‘knowns’ and are now voluntarily and actively looking into new ‘unknowns’. The chapter focuses on the role of documents, through the close examination of the influential school self-evaluation policy that was first developed in Scotland and then subsequently travelled to a number of European and other countries. The chapter will give particular attention to the role of the ‘How good is our school?’ (HMIE, 2007a) document as the main instrument both for the establishment of quality indicators for the measurement of school performance and as an evaluation toolkit that was to be taken up by other countries almost intact (eg the German version ‘Wie gut ist unsere Schule?’ [Stern and Döbrich, 1999]).