School inspections: why and how? A qualitative system comparison of Norway, the Netherlands and England

School inspections are a popular policy tool in Europe with which governments aim to keep control over the quality of education. This policy tool has a long history, which in some countries goes back for centuries. However, the role and design of school inspections have changed tremendously, and the last decades can be characterized as a period in which the international context is added to the mix. School inspections are a special type of policy tool in the sense that they can be described as instruments for policy control. In an instrumentalist approach of policy implementation, instruments for policy control form the crucial link between policy execution and policy development: through monitoring the behavior of actors, regulatory agencies like education inspectorates collect information (or: evidence) to feed the further improvement of policies. However, this ideal of evidence-based governance has clear limitations, which also have been addressed in the many discussions in recent years on the actual impact and possible negative side effects of school inspections. At the core of this discussion lies the question if school inspections could and should be seen as an instrument to hold actors to account. This study aims to contribute to the discussion by presenting a qualitative comparison of the formal arrangements for inspections of compulsory education in three countries: Norway, England, and the Netherlands. These countries have different political-administrative traditions, with England standing out as a country which attaches relatively much weight to accountability, and Norway ending up at the other end as a country with high levels of trust in institutions and a strong appreciation of consensus seeking, while the Netherlands finds itself somewhere in between.