2009/ED/EFA/MRT/PI/32
Background paper prepared for the
Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2009
Overcoming Inequality: why governance matters
School Monitoring Systems and their Impact on
Disparities
Anton De Grauwe
2008
This paper was commissioned by the Education for All Global Monitoring Report as
background information to assist in drafting the 2009 report. It has not been edited by the
team. The views and opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and should
not be attributed to the EFA Global Monitoring Report or to UNESCO. The papers can be
cited with the following reference: “Paper commissioned for the EFA Global Monitoring
Report 2009, Overcoming Inequality: why governance matters” For further information,
please contact [email protected]
International Institute
for Educational Planning
School Monitoring
Systems and their
Impact on Disparities
Anton De Grauwe
This paper was commissioned as a background contribution for UNESCO’s
Global Monitoring Report 2009.
School monitoring systems and their impact on disparities
Introduction
Among the many steps taken by Napoleon Bonaparte in his efforts to create a unified French
nation, is the setting up of a school supervision system1. Indeed, the first French school
inspectors, who were also among the first official inspectors anywhere in the world, started
working at the end of the 18th century at the creation of the French public education system
(Demailly et al., 1998, p.15). This is not a coincidence: most other countries have been
preoccupied, from as soon as the first public schools were created, with the control of what
went on in these schools and classrooms through supervision visits. Therefore, the origins of
the supervision service can in general be dated back to the creation of the public education
system. This is true also for countries who gained their independence during the last half
century and who continued working with the same supervision service set up by the
colonizing authority.
A number of elements which characterized the monitoring of education systems from the end
of the 18th century onwards did not undergo much change until today. Firstly, monitoring
remains a key concern; the fact that in almost every country there is a supervision service is
proof of this concern. In recent years, the interest in this question has probably grown, as can
be seen from the popularity of international achievement tests such as TIMSS and PISA and
from reforms in areas such as supervision, on which we will comment. Secondly, the
monitoring of the effectiveness of public education systems mainly consists of examining
what takes place in schools and in classrooms. There is less interest in how the educational
administration itself functions, e.g. through audits or institutional analyses of ministries or
regional offices. Thirdly, the main tool in a majority of countries to monitor education
continues to be the supervision system. And these services continue to operate in a fairly
traditional manner, through school visits and reporting. However, notwithstanding these
similarities, several fundamental changes have occurred in recent years, inspired mainly by
the conviction that the classical school supervision services have increasingly shown their
limits in fulfilling their mandate.
This mandate consists, on the one hand, of exercising effective control over schools and, on
the other hand, of improving through a mixture of control and support the quality of schools.
As a result, in many countries a range of reforms have been tried out, which aim at
strengthening the present supervision services and/or at developing alternative monitoring
tools. This has led to a variety of monitoring systems, which can be organised in different
“models” in function of the responses they offer to key strategic questions, which relate to
their interpretations of the concepts of accountability and teacher professionalism but also to
the attention they give to the issue of disparities.
An overall appreciation of the impact of these different monitoring systems on the
achievement of EFA objectives would not only be a very heavy task, but it would be an
1
We use in this text the term « supervision » to refer to the service which has as a mandate to control
and/or support teachers and schools through regular visits, and which generally forms part of the
Ministry of Education. The term « inspection » which is still used in many countries and in particular
in French-speaking ones, has acquired a connotation of a service focussing on control, and will be
used as such in this paper.
1S
extremely intricate one, because the relationship between a specific monitoring approach and
these global objectives is very indirect and is mediated by many contextual factors and the
presence or absence of specific accompanying strategies. In this article, we will therefore
examine the relationship between monitoring systems and EFA objectives with two
restrictions. Firstly, our attention will go mainly to the role played by the school supervision
or inspection system, which is one of the key monitoring tools used by most governments.
Other monitoring devices – such as examination and test systems, school “league tables” or
school self-evaluation reports – will only be considered in function of their relationship to
school supervision. When examining supervision, we will focus mainly on the overall system
and not on the individual supervision visits, although evidently the two are not unrelated.
Secondly, our guiding question throughout the analysis of the different school supervision
systems will be: what attention do they give to disparities between schools, how do they
attempt to overcome these disparities and (though this is a question to which no precise and
measurable answer can be given) what impact do they have on these disparities.
This article will therefore consist of three sections. We will first analyse the reforms in the
area of school supervision which countries have undertaken in the last two decades, in
response to the ineffectiveness of this monitoring tool. Some of these have simply tried to
improve this particular tool, while others have gone further and have developed alternative
monitoring systems, in which supervision may or may not play a key role. In a second section,
we will propose various supervision models, which are the result partly of the different
“ideological” convictions which inspire these reforms but also of the confrontation of the
reform principles with the constraints of different national realities. In a third section, we will
examine the impact of these models on disparities between schools.
Section 1
School supervision: an ineffective service, a service under reconstruction
While there has been rather little systematic research on the functioning and the effectiveness
of supervision systems, the anecdotes in this regard are plentiful. Teachers who are left
unsupervised for many years; supervision visits which teachers consider disrespectful, if not
demeaning, rather than helpful; supervision reports which are shelved without any action
being taken. The research undertaken in various countries (e.g. Carron et al, 1999; De
Grauwe, 2001; Hopes, 1992) confirms this anecdotal evidence. What may be most striking is
that the nature of the challenges to an effective school supervision system does not differ
much in developed and in developing countries, though in the latter they are of much greater
magnitude. It is important to go beyond an inventory of difficulties faced by supervision and
to organize in a systematic manner the causes of its ineffectiveness. We will briefly do so
without entering into many details, as this only forms the background to the reforms which we
will examine in more depth.
The most preoccupying characteristic of the supervision service in many countries is its
almost complete lack of impact on the teachers, the schools and the system. Ideally, the
supervision visit should form part of an improvement cycle. Such a cycle starts with the
selection of the schools and teachers in function of their needs, a profound examination of the
school’s or teachers’ profile and a helpful visit. This leads to a pertinent report which is
distributed to several actors who can take action including the school itself, the supervision
service, the central administration and teacher training colleges. Their action leads to
improvement within the school and in the education system as a whole. This ideal scenario
however is the exception in both developed and developing countries. In many schools in
France for instance, principals and teachers go through a supervision visit as if it is an ancient
2
initiation rate which has lost all sense and is forgotten as soon as the supervisor leaves (Pair,
2001; Chassard and Jeanbrau, 2002). Research on school supervision in Africa (for instance,
De Grauwe, 2001, Diarra et al, 1997, Garforth, 2004, Gumbi and Dlamini, 1997, Lugaz et al,
2006 or Solaux, 1997) shows the lack of satisfaction among teachers and supervisors with the
impact of supervision on the classroom. Similar criticism can be found in reports on several
Asian countries (Carron et al, 1999). In Québec, teachers’ lack of satisfaction with the impact
of supervision was a key factor in the abolition of the service in the 1960s (Pelletier, 2005).
Systematically, where teachers are asked to compare the impact of supervision on their
performance with that of their colleagues or the principal, supervisors score less well. The
impact on the education system is, if possible, still weaker: the findings of the supervision
visits very seldom feed decision-making at regional or central level, which is particularly
deplorable when we consider that supervisors are among the rare, if not the only ministry
representatives regularly to visit schools.
This lack of impact is the result of a complex series of factors, which can be organised around
three key issues. Firstly, there is a profound conflict between the mandate of the service and
its resources. The mandate is very demanding: to exercise control over and offer support to all
schools and teachers, while informing schools of ministry policies and bringing school
realities to the attention of decision-makers. The expansion in the numbers of schools and
teachers has not been accompanied by an equal expansion in the numbers of supervisors, the
evident result being that each supervisor has so many schools under his or her charge that they
simply cannot visit all schools more than once or twice a year, if at all. Research at the end of
the 1990s in five Asian and five Southern African systems showed that a supervisor was on
average responsible for over 150 teachers (see Table 1). The situation in West-Africa a few
years later was similar (Lugaz et al, 2006). Table 1 presents data for a few countries which
research has made available over the last decade. Surprisingly maybe, the situation is not
much better in OECD countries for which such information is available. In France, there are
on average 240 teachers per supervisor (Barroux, 2000, p.27); in Ireland, in 2000 only 604
teachers out of a total of about 21000 underwent a supervision visit. At the same time, in
many developing countries, the weak professional profile of volunteer and contract teachers
makes their need for regular supervision more urgent.
3
Table 1 :
Supervisor/school and supervisor/teacher ratios
Supervisory officer
Number of schools
Number of teachers
per supervisor
per supervisor
Botswana
Primary supervisors
21
365
Secondary supervisors
8
222
External advisors
14
281
Namibie
Inspectors
29
335
Advisory teachers
10
113
Tanzanie
Primary inspectors
26
247
Zanzibar
Primary inspectors
14
161
Secondary inspectors
5
64
Zimbabwe
Primary supervisors
15
207
Secondary supervisors
10
186
Bangladesh
Sub-district supervisors
19
80
Korea
Supervisors
3
63
Népal
Supervisors
33
173
Resource persons
16
85
Sri Lanka
Supervisors
11
193
Master teachers
44
796
Uttar Pradesh Supervisors
68
231
Sources : Carron et al. (1998, p.38) for Asian countries ; De Grauwe (2001, p.54) for African
countries.
To make matters worse, supervisors can seldom spend much time on school visits, because of
their administrative tasks. In addition, because supervisors are also in many cases the local
representatives of the Ministry of Education, they are given many other duties, few of which
have anything to do with their mandate, as Table 2 shows. A significant part of the resources
of the supervision service are moreover taken up by its rather bureaucratic structure, copied
from the educational administration as a whole. As a result of its deconcentration, a rather
limited number of supervisors are spread over many regional and district officers, each of
which needs some support staff and an operational budget.
Table 2 :
Tasks
School visits
Report writing
Office work
Meetings
Teacher
development
Others2
Time-distribution between different tasks (in % of weekly total)
Korea
8
5
61
7
5
14
India
Sri Lanka
Botswana
Namibia
Zimbabwe
37
12
-
65
9
6
7
7
20
8
42
10
8
34
11
25
12
9
23
18
28
11
15
34
6
10
34
16
10
6
12
9
5
-
41
Chile
Sources : Carron et al., 1998 ; De Grauwe, 2001.
2
This category includes, in Korea: research on supervision methods; in India: distribution of
scholarships; management of school feeding program; population census operations; in Botswana :
handling disciplinary cases; in Namibia: management of non-teaching personnel, participation in PTA
meetings; in Zimbabwe : investigations, participation in school fairs.
4
Secondly, precisely because supervisors have many tasks and many schools but are expected
to cover all schools (the number of schools supervised may play a part in their performance
evaluation), they tend to spend little time in each school. Their visits lead almost unavoidably
to superficial reports, which have little credibility in the eyes of teachers. Principals and
teachers do not only criticize visits for their superficial and artificial character (can one judge
the performance of a school or teacher on the basis of a single visit a year?), but object in
particular to the attitude of supervisors, which many feel is disrespectful of their
professionalism. Behind the “attitude” issue lie three deeper conflicts:
A conflict between support and control, both of which are tasks of supervisors but
which are very difficult to combine into one approach. Monitoring in general should
be a combination of these two tasks, but regularly the pendulum swings towards
strengthening control. A Kenyan researcher concludes that school inspection is
foremost a control process to ensure respect of rules and regulations and loyalty to
authorities (Wanzare, 2003, p.3).
A conflict between the recognition of teachers as autonomous professionals or an
emphasis on teachers as ministry officials who have to respect rules and regulations.
The most fundamental conflict relates to how to evaluate an exercise as individual and
personal as “teaching”. Is a standardized process acceptable? Can judgment be made
on the basis of the students’ results? It is surely not our intention to offer any response
to these complex and nearly eternal questions here. The main point is that the lack of
agreement within the education community makes it very difficult to enforce action
upon the findings of a contested evaluation.
It is pertinent here to point out that the resistance to supervision is an expression of a more
general resistance to external evaluation on the part of teachers. This can be interpreted as a
reflection of their professional autonomy or as a corporatist protection of their privileges.
What is clear is that this is a phenomenon that transcends national boundaries.
Thirdly, the lack of impact is directly related to the lack of attention given to the follow-up to
supervision. Evidently, when reports are short and superficial or simply shelved without being
distributed, it is hardly surprising that they lead to little follow-up. In addition, in many
countries, solutions to the problems which supervisors may identify going from leaky roofs to
absent teachers, are not under their control but demand action by local government or by
ministry departments. A deeper challenge lies in the complexity of the link between
evaluation and action. It is a fallacy to believe that evaluation results (be they in the form of
supervision reports, exam results or audit conclusions) will quickly and easily lead to a
change in realities or practices. The causes of the evaluation result are interpreted in many
different ways and each interpretation (if not, the result itself) is contested. One complexity
especially in the area of education is that there is seldom a single factor at stake. To give on
example, poor quality of teaching can be linked to lack of teacher training, poor leadership by
principals, ineffective supervision, politicized recruitment practices, lack of pedagogical
resources, inappropriate or insufficient incentives and so on. Even if there is agreement on the
causes and on the recommendation to overcome these, their implementation may take time.
Evaluation recommendations almost always have an impact on the position and power of
different actors and those who feel that their authority is under threat will unavoidably oppose
reforms. Moreover, very regularly implementation of recommendations demands coordination
between different agencies and offices, which goes counter the sense of independence of
many such officers and especially of supervisors.
5
Against this complex background, a growing number of countries have since some 15 to 20
years implemented reforms in their school monitoring systems, including the supervision
service. These reforms have taken place within a political and ideological context
characterised, on the one hand, by doubts about the effectiveness of the state as a major
development actor and especially as an evaluator of its own action and, on the other hand, by
a conviction that a more effective State demands a new public management, characterized by
a greater level of decentralisation and local autonomy, but also by more stringent external
evaluation and an emphasis on public accountability. In certain countries, this has led to a
complete rethinking of the monitoring system; in others some marginal tinkering has taken
place. We can organize these reforms in four groups.
A first set of reforms is based on the conviction that school supervision can be an effective
tool of external evaluation, but in order to do so, its mandate and organization needs to be
reviewed. The following paragraphs look first at changes in the mandate, then the structure of
supervision and finally at attempts to make the follow-up to supervision more consistent.
The reformulation of the mandate aims at simplifying the role of the supervisor. This can take
in principle three forms: either by focussing on the control task, or on the support task, or by
creating two separate corps for these two separate tasks. Examples of the first approach can be
found in New Zealand and in England & Wales, where governments created specific school
inspection bodies, whose main task is to exercise control over schools and teachers: the
Education Review Office (ERO) in New Zealand in 1989 and the Office for Standards in
Education (OFSTED) in England and Wales in 1992. The province of Gauteng, SouthAfrica’s richest province, has also set up in 2001 an Office for Standards in Education with a
similar control-oriented mandate. In the developing world, there are more examples of
countries who have opted for the second approach, namely a shift towards giving supervisors
a greater role in supporting and advising teachers. Already in the mid-1970s in Peru, special
technico-pedagogic adviser posts were created at the levels of regions, zones and nuclei,
whose focus was on giving support and support alone. About the same time, similar changes
occurred in Venezuela and Costa Rica (Oliveira …). A more recent example comes from
Mali, where in 2002 the inspection units were transformed into pedagogical advice centres.
Among the countries which have separated control from support and have in the 1990s
created a specific corps of pedagogical advisors, we can quote Botswana, Kenya, Lesotho,
Namibia, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
Changes in the organization of supervision have generally consisted of creating an additional
level of supervisors, closer to the schools and thus able to more regularly and consistently
interact with teachers. This is an evident response to the expansion of the education system
and accompanies in many cases a further deconcentration of the ministerial administration.
Belize for instance has set up in the 1990s administrative structures around existing district
education centres, which includes the transfer of education officers away from the central
Ministry offices and the establishment of District Councils. A second example comes from
Guinea which created in the late 1990s under the district office a group of délégués scolaires
de l’enseignement élémentaire based closer to the schools, with less schools to supervise and
therefore, in principle, able to offer consistent support. Already in the late 1970s, Pakistan
created the corps of learning coordinators and Bangladesh the sub-district education officers
(Lockheed and Verspoor, 1991, p.131).
Attempts to strengthen the follow-up to supervision also belong in this category of reforms.
This can take different forms, such as a systematic follow-up visit some months after a first
6
visit or the obligation on the school to prepare a report indicating how it intends to take action
upon the supervisors’ recommendations. Rather few countries have addressed this issue headon. Even in developed countries, where the issue of resources to ensure follow-up action
should be less of a constraint, in only a minority of cases. A study on 28 European education
systems identified six where a systematic follow-up visit is supposed to be undertaken, twelve
where there is no provision for such a visit and ten others where only in certain cases
(especially when the school’s performance is not satisfactory) there is a follow-up visit
(Eurydice, 2004, p.89-90). Probably the most systematic approach is followed by OFSTED:
the inspection report identifies areas for improvement and schools have to produce action
plans within 40 working days of an inspection, indicating how they will act upon
recommendations. Copies of the plan or a summary of it must be distributed to all parents.
Such a systematic approach is quite exceptional and I do not know of any developing country
which has successfully implemented it. A few projects aimed at transforming supervision
which focus on a groups of schools and not on the overall system, have made attempts to
reinforce follow-up. One interesting example comes from a project on plantation schools in
Sri Lanka during the 1990s (Perera, 1997). Resource persons were specifically contracted for
the project; each worked with a fairly small number of schools, which they visited every few
weeks. Each visit took the form of a discussion workshop with teachers to identify areas for
improvement and in between visits all teachers in a personal activity book wrote down what
they had done to improve on an area under their responsibility. The project did succeed for
some time in improving the internal school culture and their performances, but a longer-term
evaluation of its impact was not undertaken. It did not have a direct impact though on the
ministry’s supervision system.
None of these steps are easy to implement and none guarantees automatically a more effective
supervision process. Their impact in any case is difficult to assess, for at least two reasons. On
the one hand, few impact studies have been undertaken, and those studies tend to examine
mainly easy to collect data such as the number of visits rather than the nature of these visits or
their influence on teachers. On the other hand, judgments depend on the point of view of the
evaluator: for instance the creation of OFSTED has certainly strengthened central control over
schools, which was one of the reform’s objectives but this in itself has been decried by
teachers as detrimental to their professionalism. Some positive elements can be identified.
The move in Mali from inspection to pedagogical advice has been welcomed by teachers and
has allowed these services to function more effectively, though this is partly because this
reform was accompanied by a strengthening of advisory offices in staff and financial
resources (Lugaz and De Grauwe, 2006).
The implementation of this first set of reforms has encountered several challenges. In
developing countries, the first challenge is in many cases the lack of resources, for instance to
set up a series of well functioning offices close to schools (UNESCO/PROAP, 1991; Carron
et al, 1998, De Grauwe, 2001). However, the fact that much richer countries have also
struggled with these reforms indicate more profound constraints. They concern for instance
the fact that a new post description is by far not sufficient to change the culture of a service:
supervisors, who always have exercised control and have seen such control as a form of
power, are not easily transformed into actors offering collegial support to teachers. As other
management reforms have proven, it is a lot easier to change structures and terminology than
to transform ingrained cultures and traditions. There is also the risk of conflicts between these
groups and confusion among teachers who get contrasting advice e.g. from inspectors and
pedagogical advisors, who have different opinions on the correct teaching methods. This
factor was identified for instance in Lesotho as a core constraint to quality improvement
7
(Newth and Whalley, 2002). Research on the follow-up to OFSTED inspection visits in
England (Gray and Wilcox, 1995; Chapman, 2005), which demand that schools prepare action
plans, indicate that only the straightforward recommendations related for instance to report
completion or administrative procedures are easily implemented but that anything which
demands a change in teaching or leadership practices takes much time or does not get
implemented at all. One of the reasons lies in the lack of support to schools in this regard.
Once again, the lack of balance between support and control is at stake, even in a context
where teachers are well qualified professionals. Evidently, in contexts where teachers have
low qualifications and little training, such support is even more necessary.
A second series of reform trends aims at strengthening internal school evaluation processes.
In many schools, such an evaluation has always existed informally, with teachers discussing
during staff meetings their problems and possible solutions. These take now a more formal
character, through the preparation of a school improvement plan or a genuine evaluation
report. By recognizing the role of the internal processes, these reforms recognize the
professionalism of teachers and their right to a form of self-evaluation, as has been the case at
university level since a much longer time. They also put into question the role of external
evaluation, which will have to look for new arrangements with the school. The key rationale
for this emphasis on internal evaluation is the conviction that sustainable change in the school
demands participation and commitment by the teachers. These internal evaluations can
involve a cluster of neighbouring schools or the individual school.
School clusters have been throughout the years a popular strategy, which has many objectives
including strengthening supervision within this cluster (Bray, 1987; Carron and De Grauwe,
1997; Giardano, 2008). The most successful ones are those which have originated from the
school level upwards, in response precisely to the weakness of external supervision and
support. This was the case for instance, in the 1970s already, of the Zonas de influéncia
pedagogica in Mozambique (Hoppers, 1997) or, since the beginning of this decade, the
Collectives des directeurs in Senegal. These principal groups were the initiative of a few
school principals who, because of the lack of visits by supervisors, decided to organize such
visits themselves, with a few directors visiting in a group their respective schools. This not
only allowed schools to learn from such a visit; it also strengthened the linkages between
schools and broke possible isolation. Moreover, it made school staff feel responsible for its
own improvement and proud of their success. However, with the nation-wide generalization
of this initiative, some problems have cropped up: the lack of financial support by the national
authorities makes some principals reluctant to participate. And because these collectives have
no sanctioning power, not all teachers pay attention to their advice. Several principals and
supervisors are therefore asking for a recognition of these groups as a full supervisory actor.
Experiences in other places, for instance Nepal or even France, show however that once these
structures become integrated into the administrative set-up, they tend to loose their originality
and to focus on administrative control to the detriment of pedagogical support (Khaniya,
1997; Knamiller, 1999; Dutercq, 2000).
School self-evaluation is an increasingly popular strategy in OECD countries (Eurydice,
2004; MacBeath, 1999; Solomon, 1997) and many developing countries have also adopted
similar schemes, taking for instance the form of the preparation of school improvement plans,
based on an identification of strengths and weaknesses by the school community. However, in
many countries this process has been limited to a simple demand by ministries for schools to
prepare a plan, without any assistance or guidance, with mixed success (De Grauwe, 2005). A
more structured program exists in Botswana: staff development committees in secondary
8
schools evaluate the professional development needs of the staff and prepare professional
development sessions, relying on internal or external resource persons. Primary schools,
through clusters, get jointly involved in evaluating and supporting their staff (De Grauwe,
2001, p.46). In many OECD countries, still more comprehensive programs exist. In the
Netherlands for instance, every school has the legal obligation since 1998 to prepare a yearly
school plan or project and a school prospectus, which is a public document containing key
objectives and indicators. The school must also set up a complaint mechanism for parents
(Hendriks et al, 2001, p. 597).
This emphasis on school self-evaluation accompanies the higher level of school autonomy
which characterizes education policies in many countries. It is also a response to the increased
diversity between schools and therefore their need for a less standardized approach. There are
many differences in the policies developed by countries and in their actual implementation in
schools as the term “self-evaluation” allows for many interpretations. What is of particular
interest is the way in which the inevitable differences and disparities between schools will be
responded to by the supervision system, an issue to which we will return later. While the
theoretical advantages of an internal evaluation process are beyond doubt, its actual potential
has been less evident. Three factors play a role. Firstly, many schools simply do not see such
a process as a priority and teachers are given little incentive to participate in it, especially
when they are aware that the resources may be missing to implement whatever
recommendations may come out of the evaluation. Secondly, school principals rarely have the
necessary authority and profile to lead such a process. They may not be eager to do so in any
case, because it does put them on the spot as it makes them more directly responsible for the
school’s performance (Thrupp, 1998; Petzko et al, 2002; Chapman, 2005). Finally, selfevaluation is a delicate political exercise which creates conflicts among the school staff and
demands a collaborative approach which is absent in many schools.
The existence of internal evaluation and the difficulties which schools face in this process
oblige the supervision service to rethink its own role. Without such rethinking, they risk to
become irrelevant or in conflict with these internal processes. These responses form a third
group of reforms.
A first response consists of focussing supervision on the school as a whole and not on the
individual teacher. This is again the case in OECD countries (Solomon, 1997; Eurydice,
2004) as well as in developing countries. In Botswana, Namibia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe in
Southern Africa (De Grauwe, 2001) and in Nigeria (Ajayi et al., 2002), supervisors’ tasks
now include the organisation of conferences with all school staff, including at times parents,
or assisting the school with the preparation of an improvement plan. In South-Africa, the
government at federal level and in many provinces attempts to undertake whole school
evaluations, but this encounters severe resistance from teacher unions, who feel that such
evaluation should be preceded by comprehensive teacher professional development
programmes (De Grauwe, 2006). A second response is to give supervisors a greater role in the
evaluation of the education system as a whole. Such changes demand new competencies from
supervisors and also new practices, for instance the need to work as a team, which is not
among their habits. These two responses change the supervision object.
A different response to the existence of internal supervision is to transform more
comprehensively the relationship between supervision and school, by asking external
supervision to steer, influence or support the internal evaluation process. This again can take
two different forms. One option is to standardize the internal process, for instance by
9
developing guidelines and manuals which reflect the priorities of the authorities or by
demanding that the internal report be validated by external supervisors. This is the case for
instance in Austria (Posch, 2004) or several Australian states (Gurr, 1999). Such approaches
evidently limit the autonomy of the school’s action. As such, they are illustrative of the
inherent conflict of many recent governance reforms, which on the one hand emphasize in
their discourse the autonomy of the local actors and on the other hand control this autonomy
through stricter steering instruments.
A second option is quite different as it consists of demanding that external supervisors support
the internal process through advice and guidance to this internal process, but without
imposing a specific set of rules. (This is similar to the first set of reforms, which changed the
supervision mandate through for instance an emphasis on support, but it is different
nonetheless because the support here is to an internal evaluation process and not to the
teachers). This is the case for instance in Morocco, which has set up pedagogical support
groups (groupements d’appui pédagogique) whose role is to help schools use their increased
autonomy in an effective manner by giving them advice through global school visits (Yekhlef
and Tazi, 2005). The project in Sri Lanka on which we commented earlier fits also to some
extent in this trend (Perera, 1998). Similar approaches are followed in developed countries
(see Mintrop et al, 2001, on the State of Kentucky; Demailly et al., 1998, on the department of
Lille in France). This demands a difficult balancing act from these supervisors who have to
set up a collegial relationship with the teachers and respect the internal process, while making
sure that genuine school improvement occurs. The Morocco groups have not yet proven their
value precisely because they continue to play a control-oriented role, including in financial
matters. This option also demands from the service as a whole to adapt its interventions to the
needs of the school, by focussing more on the schools who need such support and by
changing their advice in function of those needs. The difference with the standardization
agenda is quite evident as is the possible impact on disparities between schools, an issue to
which we will return. A more radical example comes from the Bahamas (Miller, …). Since
1995 the Ministry of Education has introduced a new system of accountability which
dispenses with school inspection but relies on schools assessing themselves in terms of targets
they set within the framework of overall goals set for the school system by the Ministry of
Education. Each school develops goals and objectives annually in relationship to the overall
targets for the school system. The teachers’ evaluation instrument, namely the Annual
Confidential Report is being modified to include goals and objectives set by each teacher
annually with respect to the goals and objectives of the school.
All the reforms so far concern education professionals, i.e. teachers, principals or supervisors.
A fourth set of reforms is significantly different, because it brings into the picture a new group
of actors, namely the parents and the public. It reflects an important reform within the public
service as a whole, which consists of allowing the customers of a service a certain form of
control over its quality and effectiveness. The task of school evaluation is no longer in the
hands of the education “establishment” but is partly taken over by non-professionals. The
ideological background to this reform is offered by the principal – agent theory. This theory
argues that the Ministry officials (i.e. the agents) who work on behalf of the Ministry (i.e. the
principal) tend after some time to start working for their own interests rather than those of the
Ministry if they are not supervised by an external actor, who represents the interests of the
Ministry but is not part of the administration.
The reform can nonetheless take two very different forms. A first one interprets the “public”
as the parents who are close to a particular school. This reform attempts to strengthen the
10
relationship between parents and teachers, so that together they strive to improve the school.
The many community participation programmes developed in the 1970s and 1980s and more
recently the creation of school management committees, in which parents form a majority, are
examples of this first interpretation (see for instance Holland and Blackburn, 1998; Shaeffer,
1994; Uemura, 1999). This can also be interpreted as an expression of greater
democratization. The 1991 Education Reform Strategy of the Organization of Eastern
Caribbean States for instance argues: “to achieve democratization, a management board
should be established for each primary school. The board, which would be linked to the
National Education Advisory Council, would be mandated to foster closer links between the
school, the homes and the community it serves." In many schools, these boards, committees
or parent-teacher associations have some form of control over teacher management, because
some teachers are paid through their funds. Their existence however does not automatically
lead to stronger community power. In South-Africa, for instance, it seems to have led mainly
to strengthening the position of the school principal, who generally is secretary of these
committees (Naidoo, 2006). Neither does community power automatically translate in better
decisions: the fact that at times unqualified family members are recruited or that funds are
managed without any transparency is proof thereof (Lugaz et al, 2006).
A second interpretation of the concept of public accountability considers that all potential
parents of a school are its public and that they all have the right to be informed about the
performances, the characteristics and the quality of all schools, so as to be able to choose the
school most fitting for their kids. The scenario here is the one of a marketplace for schooling,
which, to function well, needs to provide the public with relevant information. As such,
several countries have started publishing examination results by schools while some have
done so for school supervision reports. The latter is the case in England, Scotland and New
Zealand, but also in Iceland or the Czech Republic. The public’s reaction to bad school results
in these two scenarios is very different: in the first case, parents are expected to support the
improvement of “their” school. In the second, parents, or more correctly those who can afford
to do so, will “vote with their feet” and move to what they consider a better school. It is useful
to point out that the emphasis on public accountability characterizes education policy in both
developed and developing countries, but that two different motivations are at their origins. In
many OECD countries (especially in those of an Anglo-Saxon culture), governments have
transferred certain management and monitoring tasks to the public, as part of an overall policy
to increase transparency and in response to a feeling that the State was taking too many
responsibilities and is not effective in controlling its own agents. In developing countries, it is
precisely a feeling that the State is absent or that it is not performing its basic task of
providing public services, which has led communities to fill the gap, a move which afterwards
the national authorities have promoted because it lightened their workload.
Section 2
Four models of school supervision
These sets of reforms have been implemented in a great number of countries, but they have
not led to the development of a single model that all countries try to adopt. Admittedly, the
New Public Management theorems have strongly influenced thinking and practice almost at a
global level, with some authors talking of a policy epidemic (Levin, 1998). This could lead to
the belief in a strong convergence of education policies and the absence of any alternative
policy paths. However, a deeper study shows that profound differences in school monitoring
systems and in school supervision services continue to exist. This leads to phenomena of
superposition, métissage and hybridation (Popkewitz, 2000; Barroso et al., 2002). This is
linked to two major factors. Firstly, the NPM policy precepts carry different interpretations, as
11
we highlighted already above: somewhat sloganistic concepts such as “accountability”,
“school based-management” or “competition through choice” can be used as arguments
behind a great diversity of reforms. The same is true for the very general statement that there
is a need to reformulate the role of the State. Secondly, the actual implementation of these
principles depends as much if not more on the specific context within which they will be
implemented than on their theoretical potency. A particularly important factor in the context
is the position of power of different actors, some of whom may benefit from these reforms
while others oppose them. The overall result is that even in countries which have adopted
similar reforms, quite distinct systems exist. We can nevertheless behind this wide range of
systems discover different models, which reflect significantly different policy options. These
options concern the following questions:
• What role should be assigned to school supervision?
• How can the service best be organized?
• What is the role of two other monitoring tools (examinations and tests; internal school
supervision) and what is the relationship between internal and external supervision?
• What type of accountability inspires the model?
• What interpretation is made of the concept of teacher professionalism?
We will in the following paragraphs present and analyse each of four such models by
systematically examining their responses to these questions. Later on, we will analyse their
impact on disparities. Let us first though look at some of these questions more closely.
A first strategic choice concerns the role of supervision. As we saw, this role is quite complex
and can be summarized in a graph such as Graph 1. Supervision has to combine three roles:
control, support and liaison between schools and with the Ministry. Each role has two
dimensions: pedagogical and administrative. In principle, in addition to individual teachers,
supervisors can also take an interest in schools as institutions and in the education system as a
whole. Each supervision system can be analyzed as to the relative emphasis placed on
different aspects and in particular on the choice between support and control.
Graph 1: Key functions of supervisors
Dimension
Pedagogical
Administrative
Tasks
Level
Teacher
School
System
Teacher
School
System
Control
Support
Liaison /link
This role-definition has a direct impact on the organization adopted by the supervision
service, which can be more or less centralized, more or less top-heavy. This offers a second
distinction between models.
To monitor the functioning and efficiency of a school, three principal tools are available: the
external supervision service; the school’s internal evaluation; and examinations and
assessment tests. The relative importance of these tools, their degree of use, and their
objectives and characteristics differ profoundly from one model to another and offer a third
12
way of distinguishing between different models. Specific attention has to be given to the
relationship between external and internal evaluation (who sets the agenda for the internal
evaluation: the school itself or central authorities) and to the main objective of internal
evaluation (for accountability or for quality improvement). Saunders (1999) for instance
makes a sharp distinction between, on the one hand, an “instrumentalist, action-oriented,
rationalistic and managerial” model of school self-evaluation, and, on the other hand, a school
self-evaluation process, which integrates “the ethical, affective, non-rational and democratic
modes of thinking”. Behind these two models lie different visions of the school: on the one
extreme, a rational organization, characterized by clear goal-setting, a bureaucratic
distribution of formal authority and easily changeable through the right incentives and, on the
other extreme, a living organization with a plurality of visions and agendas, where incentives
can have perverse unintended effects.
A fourth option to take, when developing a supervision system, is to offer an answer to the
question: to whom are teachers held accountable? This is a crucial issue which is easily
forgotten in the present hype around the accountability concept. This concept allows for
different interpretations and each interpretation distributes power differently to various actors.
The following paragraphs present, in a somewhat schematic manner, these different forms of
accountability, based on a distinction originally made by Kogan (1988).
Contractual accountability: teachers are held responsible to the person or the unit with which
they entered into a contractual relationship (their employer), and this is in general the Ministry
of Education represented at local level by a school director or inspector. Teachers are seen as
civil servants; as such, they form part of a bureaucracy and are in a hierarchical relationship.
The term ‘bureaucratic accountability’ is used from time to time as a substitute.
Professional accountability: teachers are viewed as professionals. They belong to a
professional community, characterized by a unique body of knowledge and skills. There are
two options: one is that each teacher can only be held accountable to him or herself. This
option allows for no external supervision and is nearly non-existent, except perhaps in
selected higher education institutions. A second option is that each teacher, as a member of a
professional community, is accountable to this community and its code of ethics. In other
words, the teacher is responsible to the body to which he or she belongs, and thus control is
exerted by his or her colleagues.
Public accountability: teachers are seen as members of a ‘public service’ and are therefore
accountable to the public or, in other words, to the clients of the education system. As we
already highlighted above, there are two different interpretations of the term ‘client’. On the
one hand, the students and parents of a specific school could be viewed as the immediate
clients of that school. The teacher is accountable to the local community. Accountability is
then enforced through parent meetings or reports prepared for limited distribution. On the
other hand, the term ‘clients’ could be interpreted as the public of the education system in
general. In this instance, teachers and schools are held accountable to the general public
through the publication, for example, of exam results or supervision reports.
Each of the four models that we will present below offers its own response to the issue of
accountability and relies on a different mixture of the three accountability types. This is
strongly related to a country’s context. This involves, among other things, opinions about the
professionalism of teachers, the effectiveness of the government’s bureaucracy or the civil
service and the interests of parents and the community in education.
13
A fifth distinction between models relates to the interpretation of the concept of “teacher
professionalism”. This helps us to understand the relationship between the teaching corps and
the supervision service, which represents the State. Teachers precisely base their refusal of an
external supervision process on the argument that they belong to a professional corps,
characterized, according to Larsson (1977) by a corpus of specialized knowledge, a specific
training, service orientation, a distinctive professional ethics and the right to participate in
their own evaluation. Several authors (Sachs, 1999 and 2003; Hanlon, 1998; Niemi, 1999)
emphasize that in recent years opposing interpretations of the concept have been developed:
on the one hand, an ‘activist’ interpretation, stressing teacher empowerment and professional
development; on the other hand, an ‘entrepreneurial’ one referring to public accountability
and performance obligation. While the former interpretation leads to stronger teacher
collaboration, the latter results in competition between teachers.
The following section analyzes in greater detail each of the four models, beginning with a
presentation of the role assigned to the supervision service and its ensuing structure. We shall
then examine the importance of the different monitoring tools as well as the interpretations of
accountability and professionalism that underlie each model. We will end with a brief
discussion of some strong aspects and some challenges.
The classical supervision model
The first model is the ‘classical’ model to which we referred in the first section of this article.
It came about as a result of the adaptation of the supervision service to the expansion of the
education system and to the deconcentration of the administration that accompanied it.
Supervision retains the role it was first assigned: that is, to control and provide support in
pedagogical and administrative areas. In addition, coverage is supposed to be global: each
school and teacher has a right – or could be submitted – to supervision.
In order to undertake this ambitious mission, supervisors find themselves in all the echelons
of administration: at district level, where, in general, they exercise control over primary
schools and provide support to teachers; at regional level, where they have the same tasks but
in secondary schools; and at central level, where their role might include an evaluation of the
evolution of the education system, as the General Inspectors in France do or a used to be the
role of the Standards Control Unit in Zimbabwe.
Table 3: The structure of the classical supervision model
Central level
Central supervision
Responsible for the elaboration of supervision
service
policies, global planning, training and system control
Regional
Regional supervision Responsible for supervision in secondary schools,
level
office
control of the development of education in the region
District level
District supervisors
Responsible for supervision in primary schools,
control of education development at district level
Advisors and
Advise primary and secondary school teachers
resource centres
School level
Principal or
Informal supervision of teachers
headteacher
This model can be called ‘classical’ as the essence of the supervision exercise has little
changed since its creation. Even though there have been some reforms in response to some
demands of teachers – for example the creation of pedagogical advisors, in addition to
14
inspectors or greater transparency by announcing visits and systematic debriefing sessions –
these innovative elements have not profoundly modified the service.
This model was implanted in most developing countries, particularly in the previous British
and French colonies. Tanzania is a good example, among many others (De Grauwe, 2001). A
supervision service in the Ministry is responsible for the definition of policies and training.
Seven zonal offices organize supervision in their zone, supervise secondary schools and
supervise the operation of the district office. The district offices, which are expected to have
nine primary school inspectors, undertake the genuine school inspections. Alongside these
inspectors, there are resource centres that organize training sessions in schools and in the
centres. At a level closest to the school are Ward Education Officers. They were originally in
charge of supervising adult literacy classes, but are now helping inspectors in particular with
the control of school finances.
In its pure form, this model places a strong emphasis on the external supervision service,
which is the most important monitoring tool. The internal evaluation of the school is weak
and exam results can be used to inform the supervision process, but play no further role in
controlling schools. This reflects a strong trust in the capacity of the State to control schools
effectively. Countries such as Cuba and Viet Nam have kept this model without much change,
partly because of the easy integration of its key principle – careful control by the State over
the implementation of central rules – into the existing structures. The concept of
accountability that underlies this model is clearly contractual accountability: the teacher is
accountable to his or her employer, the Ministry of Education, and is controlled by this body –
through the intermediary of ministerial agents, the body of inspectors.
As we discussed before, this model has two assets: firstly, its global coverage: in principle, all
schools have an equal chance of being supervised and none is forgotten; and, secondly, its
comprehensive role: the inspectors accompany their control and evaluation with support and
advice.But the model has a number of weaknesses: its cost, its complex structure and the
heavy mandate, characterized by role conflicts and task overload. In fact this model was
originally developed in countries where the services of the state were effective and well
financed and was then in some cases implanted into an almost totally different environment: a
weak state without resources. The model works best in countries that have a competent public
service, with civil servants that are rather well paid, such as Botswana, Malaysia or Viet Nam.
However, it is important to emphasize that even though this model remains the main
inspiration in many countries, almost everywhere reforms are put in place that aim at
integrating other tools than the inspection service in the monitoring process. The publication
of exam results and the preparation of school improvement plans are the best-known
examples. And these tools reflect an accountability that is not purely contractual. Precisely for
this reason, their integration will not always go smoothly. At times, there will be conflict
between the internal and external evaluation processes. This is the case mainly in countries
where the preparation of school development plans is being officially encouraged but not
taken very seriously by the supervisors who stick to business as usual. This situation is
possibly harmful because it only widens the gap between supervisors and teaching staff. Both
parties might well end up by using totally different frameworks and criteria for making
judgments about school practices. It could be argued that the promotion by ministries of
education of school self-evaluation serves objectives which have very little to do with school
improvement, but are a reaction to the Ministry’s weak capacity to regulate the whole system.
In those developing countries, where school improvement programs have gained in
15
popularity, they represent more the agenda of international agencies or NGO’s than a change
in culture within the education system.
The central control model
Weaknesses of the ‘classical’ model were a source of inspiration for reforms, which have led
to the development of what we will call the ‘central control’ model. This model is based on
the following convictions:
• supervision should concentrate on one task – control. It is harmful to ask supervisors to
combine support and control as the conflicting roles that this entails renders ineffective their
interventions in the two domains;
• the heavy bureaucracy that characterizes the classical model is not only expensive, it also
prevents it from functioning effectively: there are too many small offices and the different
levels lengthen the time between the supervision visit and follow-up to its recommendations;
• external supervision cannot on its own lead to school improvement. This is the
responsibility of the actors at school level (the principal, the teachers, the board, the parent
association). But school inspection can be an incentive to start internal school reform, by
informing the school and the public of the school’s progress and weaknesses.
The role of the supervision service is therefore fairly simple: to inspect each school from time
to time and to publish a public report. Such an inspection and its report examine all the
aspects of the school’s functioning and could be considered an ‘audit’. The structure of this
model, which is presented in table 4, reflects its role: strong central control and few, if any
supervisory actors at lower levels, while support is made available through private providers.
Table 4: The structure of the central control model
Central level
Central inspection body
In charge of full inspection of all schools every 3,
(autonomous)
4 or 5 years and informing the public
Regional level
No specific officers
District level
No specific officers
School
School board
Supervision of school management
School
Headteacher
Regular supervision of teachers; decides on the
need to purchase advice from private providers
Private
service
Private providers
Offer advice to schools and teachers upon their
request
This model exists in its most pure form in several Anglo-Saxon countries and in particular in
England & Wales and in New Zealand. In both countries, the construction of a new system
was intrinsically linked to a more global reform of the public service and the management of
the education system. The context of this reform was an economic crisis and strong criticism
of the public service – the public education system in particular. The system of inspection was
also criticized: it was accused of being characterized by a heavy inefficient bureaucracy, a
derisory impact on school improvement and a body of conservative and individualist
inspectors. These criticisms were also fed by more ideological arguments: the ineffectiveness
of the supervision system was seen as proof of the ineffectiveness of the State, in particular
when it comes to evaluation of its own agents. Evaluation can best be done by an actor
outside of the educational administration, which is why autonomous bodies were created. In
the same vein, the inclusion of the public in the evaluation process will break internal
complacency. These criticisms brought about a profound restructuring of inspection. In New
16
Zealand, a very classical structure was replaced with an independent unit, the ‘Education
Review Office’, while local and regional offices were abolished. This Office has a mandate to
inform the Ministry and the public of the effectiveness of the system and all its schools. Each
school is inspected every three years. During these visits, the review officers do not offer
formal support. Schools are expected to use their own budgets to buy support (for example
training courses) offered by universities and other training institutions. The report is a public
document and contains a summary that is specifically addressed to the local community.
OFSTED in England and Wales follows to a large extent the same approach.
This model relies on inspection visits and reports as its main monitoring tool. However,
because such supervision takes place only every few years, intermediate information is
needed to monitor the schools’ performances. This is why in the same countries the exam and
assessment test system has generally been strengthened, and the schools’ results on these
exams and tests are used as information for the schools and the public. The publication of
results in league tables has become probably the best-known and most controversial form of
intervention in the monitoring system in a country such as the UK. The use of exam and test
results to measure – at central level – the performance of schools and to hold them (and the
local authorities who manage them) accountable, is also a key characteristic of recent
monitoring reforms in the USA, where the No child left behind Act of 2001 has strengthened
in this manner central control over what used to be very autonomous local school boards
(Carnoy and Loeb, 2001; Stecher and Kerby, 2004).
Internal evaluation also develops, partly because of the conviction that such an internal
process is intrinsic to an effective school. But in countries where this central control model
has been implanted, school autonomy in teacher management has also increased and school
boards and teachers are obliged to reinforce their control over teachers. In addition, an
internal review process forms an integral part of the external supervision cycle. It takes place
before an inspection visit and has two objectives: first, to facilitate the inspection process by
gathering documents and preparing an initial analysis of the status of the school; second, to
get the school ready for this external audit so that it comes out better. Indeed, quite a few
schools use this self-evaluation process as a rehearsal for the audit. The OFSTED handbook
makes it clear that school self-evaluation, in order for it to be effective and of use to the
external review, needs to use the criteria, indicators, methods and techniques developed by the
external review body. The situation in Hong Kong is similar. Richards (2004), among other
authors, concludes that in such a scenario the internal evaluation process cannot be a
recognition of teachers’ priorities and professionalism, but becomes an additional control tool.
OFSTED on the other hand emphasizes that the obligation to prepare an internal evaluation
report before the visit has helped the school in developing a culture of self-review, which is
helping their improvement.
In this model, two forms of accountability mingle: contractual and public accountability. The
schools and teachers are accountable to their employer, the Ministry, which does not intervene
directly but exercises control through an independent agency. The schools and teachers are
also held accountable to the public. This forms part of a wider trend to strengthen customer
choice and control in the public sector (Burns, 2000). The paradoxical result is one whereby
the school, in the official discourse, receives more autonomy and does so in reality in
managerial and financial matters but where such autonomy is severely restricted by stronger
control, in which non-professionals play a significant role. According to several critical
authors (e.g. Laval, 2003; Fiske and Ladd, 2001; Simola et al., 2002), this leads to a deprofessionalisation of the teaching body. The publication of inspection reports and exam
17
results are intended precisely to make the school feel directly responsible towards its ‘clients’
and to allow these clients to choose a school and to put pressure on schools. Their conclusions
are at the same time used as advertisements by schools: praising quotes decorate their
websites and information brochures.
Several countries have adapted certain elements of this model, particularly the institutional
audit carried out by a specific corps of inspectors (such audits were introduced a few years
ago in several countries, including Guyana, Malaysia or Zambia [check]). These countries
have nevertheless kept a classical supervision process, which in principle concentrates more
on support than control. The objective of the audit is to reinforce the evaluation of schools and
give it a formal structure and character. This allows for a more intensive use of the reports of
these audits which remain, however, confidential, in contrast to the situation in for example
England.
This model has certain evident assets:
• The role of the supervision service is simple – to control the school in a comprehensive
manner. This control covers all pedagogical aspects, administration and management. The
inspector or review officers are not confronted with conflicting roles because they are not
supposed to offer advice.
• The organization of the inspection service is also simple. Due to the fact that its sole task is
to inspect schools every three years or more, it is better for this body to be centralized than
dispersed in many small offices. The distribution of functions is clear: the inspection controls;
private service providers offer advice, at the request of the school. This avoids role overlaps
and the co-ordination between actors and services causes few problems.
• Inspection visits are meant to provoke schools to assume responsibility for their own
improvement through the preparation of an action plan. This model therefore assigns
responsibility for improvement to those actors who can make the difference.
However these assets rapidly reach limits, particularly with schools facing difficult
circumstances. The following are the most significant weaknesses:
• Schools receive too little support. As we will see in the last section of this article, this is
particularly detrimental for weaker schools, who feel demoralized rather than strengthened by
this process.
• The process puts too much pressure on the schools and above all on their principals.
Principals complain about excess responsibility due to the fact that they are the last in line,
and of excess work, in particular regarding administrative tasks, to the detriment of their
pedagogical role (Cusack, 1992; Ferguson, 1998).
• The inspection visit conditions the future of the school. A critical report, especially if it is
published, can create a vicious cycle that brings about the downfall of the school. Before the
visit, the preparation period is one of great anxiety, which causes conflict among teachers and
in some cases kicks off a process that deteriorates more than it improves. Various researchers
(Wilcox, 2000; Burns, 2000; Osler, 2001; Watson, 2001) as well as school staff have
expressed doubts about the validity of supervision reports, which makes their high-stakes
character even more of a concern.
Interestingly, Scotland, which has adopted several key characteristics of this model, such as
the central inspection unit (HMI - Her Majesty’s Inspectorate), the comprehensive school
“audits” and the publications of these “audit” reports, has to a large extent been able to avoid
the sharp criticisms leveled at OFSTED in England (De Grauwe, 2006, p. 246-259). The main
reason is that there is a better balance between support and control, because of two factors in
particular. Firstly, the elected Local authorities, who generally have an important education
18
section, offer support to schools and in many cases show strong interest in the least successful
schools. Secondly, the fairly intimate relationships between the staff of HMI and the school
principals and teachers (partly a result of Scotland’s relatively small size), make for a less
menacing and less distant supervision exercise, with more space for dialogue and therefore a
report which is more nuanced and arguably more helpful.
The close-to-school support model
The third model also starts off, as did the second model, from a criticism on the classical
model, but draws very different conclusions. It is based on the following reasoning: the main
weakness of the classical model (and of the central control model) is to consider all schools as
rather similar units. The supervision system can therefore treat all schools as equals and use
the same strategies towards all. But schools have very different characteristics: their
environment, pupils, teachers, parents, resources and so on are all specific to each school.
And, because they have different characteristics, they also have different needs. While the
best performing schools can function without any external support or supervision because of
their internal strengths, this is not at all the case for the weaker schools. The supervision
system should take those diverse needs into account. What those ‘weaker’ schools need is not
control alone but consistent pedagogical support and therefore regular visits by supportoriented supervisors.
In this model, the core role of the supervision service is to assist the weakest schools by
offering them advice and guidance on how to improve. With such a purpose in mind, each
school will need to be treated differently and supervision will have to adapt itself to the needs
of each school. The drawback of the ‘classical’ model is precisely that by trying to cover all
schools without distinction, it fails to give due attention to those schools most in need of its
intervention.
These points have implications for the supervisory structure. To enable supervisors to make
regular visits, most are based as close to the schools as possible, while central and provincial
officers no longer visit schools, but are in charge of policy-formulation and training
respectively. To avoid supervisors spending too much time on administration, a specific cadre
of administrative controllers may be created. And to ensure that they focus on the schools
most in need of their support, a database identifies a fairly limited number of schools with
which each supervisor has to work. The following structure is thus developed.
Table 5: The structure of the close-to-school support model
Central level
Central supervision service Small team in charge of development of
supervision policies
Regional
Regional supervision office Small team in charge of training supervisory
level
officers
District Supervision officers In charge of offering intensive and
development-oriented supervision to those
District level
schools most in need
Administrative controllers
In charge of controlling in particular the
finances of all schools
School
Headteacher
Informal supervision of teachers
The purest example of this model was developed in Chile, after the end of the Pinochet
regime, when a new democratic government came in power. While under Pinochet the overall
19
performance of the education system had improved, this had been accompanied by an
increase in disparities. By giving attention to equity, the democratic government tried to
strengthen its legitimacy. Its equity-focussed policies were not limited to supervision, but
guided social policies as a whole, though some remnants of Pinochet’s ideology could not be
abolished, for instance parental free choice of school, which worked to the detriment of equity
(Baeza and Fuentes, 2003; Avalos, 2004).
Supervision visits, in this model, are an important monitoring tool. However, the character of
these visits is very different from the previous models: the supervisor visits a few carefully
selected schools and tries to develop a close relationship with them. The visit includes
classroom observation, workshops with the school staff, discussions with all teachers and with
the school community. The aim is to develop together projects and plans to improve teaching
and school functioning. While few countries have adopted a system such as Chile’s, several
projects have integrated the key principles of this model, namely a flexible developmentoriented support to the most disadvantaged schools. This is the case for instance of programs
in Sri Lanka (Perera, 1998), Bangladesh (Govinda and Tapan, 1999) or Kenya (Anderson and
Nedritu, 1999). In all these examples, there is a close linkage between the external supervision
and the school’s self-evaluation. The supervisor, when in school, works with the school’s staff
on identifying its strengths and weaknesses and on developing a school improvement plan.
Supervision becomes thus a stage in the process of school self-evaluation and improvement,
while in the preceding model the school’s self-evaluation is a phase in the external inspection
process. In other words, in this model external supervision helps the school undertake its own
evaluation, while in the central control model self-evaluation helps the external inspectors to
carry out their inspection. Exams play an important role, namely to allow the Ministry and the
supervision service to know which schools to focus on and to monitor the reduction of
disparities. Their role in monitoring schools is thus very different from in the previous model,
where exam results are public information and parents use them to choose a school.
The close-to-school support model incorporates two concepts of accountability. On the one
hand, contractual accountability: school staff are accountable towards the supervisors, who
are representatives of their employer, the Ministry. There is, on the other hand, a strong aspect
of professional accountability: the involvement of the teaching staff in a self-evaluation and
school improvement process implies a sense of responsibility towards their colleagues. In the
same way, the change of the supervisor from a control-agent to a collegial advisor expresses a
desire to instil a sense of professional accountability. This emphasis on professional
accountability expresses a belief in the capacity of teachers, even in the most disadvantaged
schools, to engage in a process of self-improvement. This strengthens their professionalism.
The fact that the public does not play much of a role in this process is also an indication of the
trust in the professionals to regulate their own action.
This model has the following strong points:
• the structure is top-light: by far most personnel is in offices closest to schools, which
makes it easy to undertake regular visits;
• supervision is freed from its administrative work overload, and can therefore concentrate
on its essential work – offering support; and
• supervision becomes a flexible service by adapting itself to the characteristics of schools –
effective schools are to a large extent left to get along on their own, while supervisors
concentrate on the neediest schools.
20
Evaluation of school results between 1990 and 1996 show a significant improvement of the
most disadvantaged schools and thus a lessening of disparities. It is difficult though to relate
this simply to the new supervision model because this model formed part of a more global
reform, which also for instance gave additional resources to these schools. Research on the
work by Chilean supervisors under this model (Carlson, 2000; Navarro et al, 2002) shows the
profound change which has taken place and the positive interpretation of this change by
teachers and supervisors alike. But the studies also identify a number of challenges, which
have been preoccupations in the case of Chile:
• supervision does not cover all schools. This will not be a concern for the best performing
schools, but there might be a large group that is not sufficiently weak to benefit from
supervision and not sufficiently strong to function without any support. This becomes an
even more serious issue in countries or regions where a majority of schools can be
categorized as ineffective or disadvantaged, as is the case for many rural regions in many
developing countries.
• setting up such a needs-based model demands a strong database on the characteristics and
needs of schools, which goes beyond a simple league table. Chile has such data, but few
other countries do.
• The most intricate challenge resides in the need to change the culture of the supervision
service, from one of control over a large number of schools towards one of supporting a
few selected schools, in other words from an authoritarian to a democratic and collegial
relationship.
In Chile, such a cultural change was achieved but not through what could have been the
easiest way, namely a radical replacement of existing staff. The same staff was used, but
several steps were taken to change its outlook and practice, including training, new job
descriptions, taking away all control functions and new working tools. Notwithstanding these
various strategies, supervisors have had it difficult to abandon their tradition of control and
adopt a support-oriented approach. In all case where this model has been tried out, the
supervisors have searched for the right balance between allowing the school and teachers
sufficient autonomy and intervening to correct their actions.
The school-site supervision model
The fourth model was not developed in reaction to the inefficiencies of the ‘classical’ model.
It is to some extent typical of countries with the following characteristics: great homogeneity,
a society with few disparities, well-motivated teachers, public trust in their professionalism
and strong parental interest in education. In such an environment, the teachers and the local
community might appear the best monitors of the quality and the functioning of the school, as
they are either in or close to the classroom and therefore can have a direct impact on the
teaching process. The conviction exists, moreover, that the teaching staff have the skills and
professional conscience to participate in self- and in peer-evaluation without being supervised
from outside, and that the local community is willing and competent to exercise some control
over the school. Moreover, because of the low level of disparities and because of the cultural
and social homogeneity, there is little need for strong central intervention, either to address
those disparities or to ensure the respect of national norms, including the curriculum. In other
words, there is no need for a formal supervision service organized by the Ministry of
Education.
21
Countries where this model exists are also characterized by a fairly high level of school
autonomy. The Scandinavian countries but also some States in the USA and Canada and some
cantons in Switzerland are among these (see for instance Lacey, 1999, on Ontario; DuruBellat and Meuret, 2001, p.183 on Rhode Island and Favre, 2001 and Strittmatter, 2001, on
Switzerland). At the local level, different scenarios can exist. The self-evaluation can be very
informal, without much structure or organization, relying on the individual initiative of the
teachers; or it can be the responsibility of a specific structure such as a school governing
board, which can be in charge of one or a few schools. While there is no external supervision,
there are central-level tools to monitor the schools, such as examination and test results and
indicator systems.
The following table shows the structure of this model, where all supervisory actors are based
at the school-site, at local level or in the school.
Table 6: The structure of the school-site supervision model
Central level
Regional level
District level
Local level
School
No specific
supervision officers
No specific
supervision officers
No specific
supervision officers
School board or
council
Headteacher and
senior staff
All staff
No external school inspection as such, reliance on
indicator systems, examination and test results
In charge of supervision of the management of the
school: the role of the headteacher
Regular supervision of teachers; decide on the need to
ask advice from teacher training officers
Involved in school self-evaluation and development of
school improvement plans
Finland is a clear example of this model (see for instance Webb and Vulliamy, 1998;
Kivirauma et al, 2003; Webb et al, 2004) . The external inspection service was abolished in
1991. Decision-makers felt that the benefits from external inspection and advice services were
minimal and that, in view of the high level of training and professionalism of teachers, quality
control could be entirely entrusted to them. In the same vein, the strict national curriculum
was replaced in 1994 by a much lighter framework. Schools were encouraged to undertake
their own evaluation, although no national strategy or guidelines were developed on how to
do so. The schools took that initiative, many of them pushed into doing so by the
municipality. But allowing schools so much autonomy in their evaluation does not mean that
the central government is not preoccupied with the quality and functioning of schools. Their
preoccupation is expressed in at least two ways:
• the Ministry organizes optional achievement tests, develops national performance
indicators and proposes evaluation procedures that the municipal level can employ. A
‘National Board of Education’ has been set up that, among other things, evaluates the
education system through for example examining the operations of educational
institutions; and
• the abolition of the inspection service and of the national curriculum was counterbalanced
by the development of a framework, with norms and indicators that allow the Ministry to
compare between schools.
In the other Scandinavian countries, we see a similar evolution, with an earlier movement
away from central control towards local-level regulation being tempered more recently by the
reintroduction of some form of central regulation (Eurydice, 2004, p.31-32). It is not
22
surprising that such a model is not present in most developing countries precisely because of
the absence of the characteristics which explain its success in places such as Finland, namely
a strong teaching corps, closely involved and well educated parents and few disparities.
It will have become clear that, in the absence of external supervision, the role of the other two
monitoring tools, exams and assessment and self-evaluation, have grown in importance. The
absence of external supervision is not so much a result of doubts about the effectiveness of
State control as a reflection of the relative strength of the other actors who can exercise
control, i.e. the teaching profession and the local community. Neither does absence of external
supervision imply a naive belief in the intrinsic value of teacher autonomy. It could be argued
that, where these other tools and actors work properly, teachers might have less autonomy in
their classroom than in a system which relies mainly on an external supervision system that is
not functioning efficiently.
The school-site supervision model relies on a combination of professional and public
accountability. Teachers are held accountable towards their colleagues, with all participating
in a self-evaluation process. Relying on teachers’ professional accountability makes sense
when there is trust in their professionalism and when efforts are made to develop teaching into
an attractive career. There is also an element of public accountability: parents and even pupils
play a role in the school evaluation process and exercise some control. Their involvement is
very different from what the public is expected to do in the central inspection model. They are
meant to put pressure on and collaborate with ‘their’ school, to motivate the whole school
community to improve rather than to go and look for the best possible school to send their
kids to. We can refer here to the distinction made earlier between the ‘free-market’ and the
‘partnership’ model. Parents are considered in this model as partners of the school rather than
as clients. This model however contains an internal contradiction: it emphasizes on the one
hand the value of teacher professionalism, but it relies on the other hand strongly on a group
of non-professionals, the parents. This has in some cases led to teachers opposing parental
control or to parents being reticent to intervene in schools.
This model has two important assets. Firstly, it puts a strong emphasis on the role of the
school, the teachers and the local community in improving teaching and learning. As such, it
respect what most research has taught, namely that for a school to change for the better in a
sustainable way, the commitment of the school-site actors is a requirement. Quality cannot be
imposed from the outside. A second asset is that the supervision service, which under the
classical model in some countries has developed into a fairly heavy bureaucracy, a burden for
the government and a constraint on school initiatives, is replaced by a lighter structure
allowing for more school autonomy.
There are several challenges. The absence of governmental control and a support structure
could become a problem for ‘weak’ schools that do not have the internal resources to start off
an improvement process. Even in the most developed countries (Strittmatter, 2001, p.122,
refers to schools in Switzerland), the lack of internal school capacity was identified as a
serious constraint in some schools who failed to develop an evaluation, in which all local
level actors genuinely play a part. In some countries, the group of ‘weak’ schools could form
a majority. In such a situation, breaking down all external supervision could be interpreted as
an abandonment of responsibility. Secondly, this model functions well if the absence of a
supervisory structure is balanced by other evaluation mechanisms, such as exams and tests
and a comprehensive and regularly updated indicator system, and by a good normative
framework. Arguably, this is as complex to develop as a well functioning supervision system.
23
Thirdly, there is a risk that national policy objectives will be threatened if there is little
external control on what goes on in schools and in the classrooms. A country such as Finland,
characterized by great homogeneity and few disparities, nevertheless had that preoccupation
and after some years started to tighten the regulatory framework. In multicultural countries
with many disparities, this issue might be much more serious.
Maybe the most significant risk of this model is that its strong reliance on teachers’
willingness to participate in self-evaluation may lead to teacher isolation and self-satisfaction.
The absence of an external eye and of a system of exchange between schools can lead to
methodological weaknesses in the evaluation and to complacency. This raises again the
question of finding the right balance between internal and external evaluation even in
countries with a highly professional teaching corps.
Section III Models and disparities
The interaction of these different models with the level of disparities between schools is
complex. Three questions can help us clarify this relationship: firstly, what attention do these
models give to the issue of disparities: do they recognize its existence or do they consider it a
problem of little importance? Secondly, what do these models consider as the causes for such
disparities? Thirdly, what impact do their interventions have on the level of disparities? The
first and fourth model do not pay much attention to this issue, while the second and third do
but offer almost contrasting responses.
The first model – the classical supervision – gives very little attention to the issue of
disparities. This finds its explanation to some extent in the origins of this model: it was
developed in the context of an elitist system and its original aim was to ensure the
development of a homogeneous system, as part of a nation-building exercise. Supervision was
very much a tool of standardization, preoccupied with enforcing respect of national rules and
regulations. This was linked to the conviction that the respect of these rules, in the form of a
national curriculum and nation-wide norms on e.g. teacher qualifications or pedagogical
methods, was the best strategy to help each school achieve good results. Any movement away
from these norms, even if intended to make school more locally relevant, was considered an
abnormality.
This reasoning can still be valid under two conditions. Firstly, when a country is relatively
homogeneous and with little disparities, supervision as a standardization tool can have a
positive impact and may not worsen disparities. In such a scenario, applying the same
framework and norms throughout the country may indeed make sense. A second condition
relates to the State having sufficient resources to ensure that its supervision reaches out to all
schools on a fairly regular basis, as this is needed to guarantee the respect of these standard
rules and regulations. While these two conditions may to some extent still be present in a few
countries, they are absent in most places which work with this classical model, even in some
of the most developed countries where disparities have increased and resources are
insufficient for regular coverage of all schools. Several responses are then possible. In France
for instance, the classical supervision services have changed little, but special programmes
have been created to give additional resources and support to the most disadvantaged schools,
the Zones d’éducation prioritaire. These compensatory programmes, which think along the
same lines as the third model described above, tend to lead to a stigmatization of the schools
which belong to these priority zones and their record is patchy.
24
In developing countries, the key constraint is that the mandate of supervisors, namely to
supervise and support all schools, outweighs by far the resources. A rather unpromising
response, which many supervision services nevertheless adopt, is to ask continuously for
more resources, which however never arrive. Another option is to accept the limited level of
resources and to restrict the mandate, i.e. to cover a limited number of schools. If disparities
between schools would be of great concern (and in many developing countries they are of
such a high level that they should be), then supervisors probably should focus their attention
on the schools which need their intervention most. Unfortunately many supervision services
in developing countries have made a different choice, namely to focus on the schools which
are within easy reach, such as those close to their office or to the main road. The result is that
more remote schools tend to get less supervision. In Zimbabwe for instance at the end of the
1990s, while a teacher was on average visited every two and a half years, those in rural areas
had to wait four years (De Grauwe, 2001, p.103).
There are at least four reasons to explain this scenario. Firstly, because these schools are
easier to reach, they are less expensive to cover. Secondly, because supervisors are to some
extent evaluated on the number of schools and teachers supervised and the number of reports,
it makes more sense to visit many schools close by even if they do not need such a visit,
rather than a smaller number of isolated schools, even if they are more in need. In other
words, institutional incentives are absent for these officers to change their traditional
practices. Thirdly, the administrative structure is such that all districts or regions within the
country are assigned a similar number of administrative or supervisory staff, without taking
into account the needs and characteristics of schools for which they are responsible. Finally,
few supervisory offices have developed within their own district the necessary data and
indicators allowing them to carefully select schools most in need. Because of this complex set
of reasons, in many developing countries the standardized supervision service is probably
reinforcing disparities, because it is reaching out more to better-off schools than to schools
facing difficulties. To summarize, the classical supervision model is in most developing
countries no longer suitable to the existing education system. Not only does it fail to fulfil its
mandate – comprehensive administrative control – but its mandate itself has become outdated:
while some form of control is undoubtedly needed, the focus must shift to pedagogical
improvement.
It could be hoped then that more support-oriented strategies, introduced precisely to make up
for the over-emphasis on administrative control, would be more successful in addressing
disparities by concentrating their efforts on the more disadvantaged schools. However,
services which specialize in pedagogical support suffer from a somewhat comparable
weakness. In many case, their advice is also benefiting mainly the schools closest to where
these support services are located. Research undertaken on the role of resource centres for
instance in India, Kenya, Nepal and Zambia (Khaniya, 1997; Knamiller, 1999) shows that
they are generally not able to reach out to a large number of schools, and even where they
succeed in doing so, they offer advice which is of little relevance to the situation of schools
whose resources and context are too far away from the standard one that these services know
and cater for. The interventions by these school monitoring services are reflective of the
State’s intervention as a whole: because the State is incapable to fulfil its mandate, authorities
tend to focus on those groups whose support is important to their survival. The politically less
vociferous groups are to some extent abandoned and will at times, with their own scarce
resources and with the help of non-governmental organizations, set up their own services.
25
The fourth model – the peer supervision model – pays little attention to disparities, mainly
because, as we saw above, this model was developed in countries where such social and
educational disparities are weak. The absence of these disparities is not a simple coincidence;
it is the result of socio-economic policies aimed at reducing disparities. These sociodemocratic traditions are strongly anchored in the psyche of these countries. This in itself
offers an important insight: reducing disparities is probably not the key role of education,
which cannot be asked to repair what socio-economic policies have failed to solve or may
even have contributed to. Educational policies evidently can have an impact on disparities, but
as long as they are not an integral part of an overall framework with the common objective to
reduce such disparities, they will never succeed in a sustainable diminution of these
disparities and will always be fighting a rearguard battle.
This also brings up the point how far this “peer-supervision” model can be transplanted from
one national context to another. It relies on a distant evaluation by the centre, a strong trust in
the teaching corps and the involvement of a capable and interested community. Where
disparities are important, such a model may not be able to address them because there is too
little external intervention in schools. Even in Finland, one of the economically most
egalitarian societies, differences in the level of school evaluation are developing as a result of
the actions by municipalities (De Grauwe, 2006, p.260-271). Indeed, some big urban
municipalities have set up their own school evaluation units, believing that these will
contribute to higher quality. In more remote rural regions, school principals and teachers are
not at all supervised by any external actor, mainly because municipalities do not have the
necessary financial or human resources to organize supervision. In the long run, this could
lead to increased disparities for which the actual system is not prepared.
The central control model does pay attention to the issue of disparities. It puts the blame for
differences in results between schools squarely on the school’s internal functioning. It is
based on the conviction that as long as schools follow a certain set of principles, based on a
rather simplified interpretation of school effectiveness research, they will perform with
success. The supervision service imposes these principles upon all schools and therefore uses
the same approach systematically. The school’s socio-economic context is disregarded.
Studies on the UK (Smith, 2000) and New Zealand (Fiske and Ladd, 2001) which
implemented fairly pure examples of this model, emphasize this lack of attention to the
school’s context, while at the same time pointing at the possible linkage. Smith’s study
demonstrates a strong association between the socio-economic context and the evaluation
made by OFSTED: among schools based in the highest socio-economic areas, 91 % received
a “favourable” evaluation and only 3% a “not favourable” one; among schools in the lowest
socio-economic areas, only 2 % received a “favourable” evaluation and 89 % a “not
favourable” one. When OFSTED made efforts to take more into account the school’s context
in its inspection visit, there was resistance from among political authorities who felt that such
a move could be interpreted as a lowering of expectations and a loss of pressure on schools to
perform.
More preoccupying however than this neglect of the context, is the fact that the supervision
strategy followed by the central control model tends to enlarge disparities between schools. A
quantitative analysis undertaken by Shaw et al (2003) indicates that in only three types of
schools (girls only schools, selective schools and grant-maintained schools, all of which are
schools catering for a certain elite public) inspection was associated with a light improvement
of exam results. Elsewhere, there is no impact or results seem to decrease. A similar
conclusion was arrived at by Cullingford and Daniels (1999) on a less representative sample.
26
Chapman (2002) went in some more detail and examined what changes schools in difficult
circumstances undertake following an inspection visit. These changes have little to do with
what takes place in the classroom but mainly concern administrative reporting or management
procedures. Chapman draws the conclusion that a monitoring approach such as OFSTED’s is
better at influencing management practices than classroom interactions. Unfortunately, what
such weak schools need above all is a change in classroom behaviour. Research in New
Zealand (Fiske and Ladd, 2001) has also led to the conclusion that the central control model
tends to lead to increasing rather than reducing disparities.
There are at least two reasons for this. Firstly, schools and teachers receive too little support.
Many teachers make the point that recommendations for improvement are of little help if they
are not accompanied by advice and guidance on how to implement these recommendations.
The best performing schools evidently suffer much less from this lack of support than the
weaker schools. Schools in a situation of crisis feel de-motivated by a process which
highlights their weaknesses (and turns them into public knowledge) without offering any
solutions (Fiske and Ladd, 2001; Case et al, 2000; Shaw et al., 2003; Chapman, 2002;
Cullingford and Daniels, 1999). Moreover, the competition between schools which this model
promotes, has led to a weakening of school networks, to the detriment of the weakest schools,
as Harold (1999, p.11-12) demonstrates for New Zealand. Secondly, this central control
model puts a heavy emphasis on the responsibility of schools and teachers. The school
principals in particular suffer under this stress, when they are made responsible for the
school’s performance, even if certain factors explaining this performance are beyond their
control. Because of the emphasis on accountability, principals also tend to spend much of
their time on administrative and managerial tasks, cutting in their time available for
supporting their teachers. Again, this is more of a concern in weaker schools. It is not
surprising that in South-Africa, where attempts were made to introduce a similar model, the
only schools who have easily accepted to undergo a “whole school review” are those who
recruit from among the richest parents and who have the best results – the previously “white”
schools. The positive evaluation reports they get, are helpful in their public relations
campaigns.
A further negative effect of the central control model is that in a number of cases it has delegitimized the internal school evaluation process. Indeed, teachers who have gone through a
school audit, which internal evaluation helped to feed and which led to a critical public report,
feel to some extent “cheated”. They become somewhat suspicious about any evaluation
process, including those led by internal actors and aimed at school improvement (Webb and
Vullimay, 1998, p.548). It also makes collaboration within the school more intricate. This is
deplorable because all schools, including those with the poorest results, need such an
internally led process in order to improve. While an external encouragement is in many cases
necessary, it should not pervert the objectives of the internal process. It is because of these
various criticisms that OFSTED itself has taken a number of steps which have moved it away
from this pure model: there is more space foreseen during the supervision visits for discussion
with teachers; reports contain some helpful advice; the school’s environment receives some
attention.
Behind this central control model, we discover a model of a State, which has as main
preoccupation concerning the public services, not to guarantee equity, but to ensure that
public services respond effectively to the demand of the individual consumers. This has
different implications. Market mechanisms are promoted as they are believed firmly to serve
both individual and common interests. For this market to function well, the State needs to
27
provide the consumers with the necessary information. The game of choice and competition
will lead to an overall improvement of schools, and to the disappearance of those schools who
fail to improve. This demands that these services are subject to public accountability and that
their functioning becomes more transparent. We can note such a discourse in Anglo-Saxon
countries (Berman, 1999; Walford, 2001, p.23 or McInerney, 2003, p. 60-62) but some
authors also find traces of this reasoning in China (Chan and Mok, 2001, p.26-30) and even in
the Scandinavian countries (Johannesson et al., 2002, p.326-337).
The close to school support model – our third model – is very much interested in the question
of disparities. It offers specific attention to the context of schools and recognizes that schools
function in different socio-economic environments and that these may have an impact on their
performance. Supervision therefore needs to adapt itself to the needs and the characteristics of
each individual school. This supervision model is illustrative of an overall concern with
equity. This concern is based on the conviction that the State has the mandate, if not the
obligation, to intervene in favour of the least advantaged and the weakest actors in society,
including through policies of positive discrimination. This equity-focused policy also offers
the State a source of legitimacy. The model is also popular with non-governmental
organizations, who work precisely within a State which does not pay attention to disparities.
These NGO’s can leave administrative control to the official authorities and dedicate their
time and efforts to the most disadvantaged sections of society (or, in the education system, the
most disadvantaged schools).
The success of this model, when it is the initiative of a government, depends therefore in part
on the characteristics of this government. Setting up a supervision service, which has as an
objective to offer a collegial-type support as part of a compensatory programme, has little
chance of succeeding if it is the initiative of a government which for the remainder shows
scant interest in equity and whose other interventions are focussed on control. The relative
failure of the resource persons in Nepal (Khaniya, 1997) or of the Groupes d’Appui
Pédagogique in Morocco (Yeklef and Tazi, 2004) are testimony to this. However, the State
does not only need to have the right intentions and policies, it also needs to be able to put
these into practice. The South-African government for instance (or, to be more correct the
federal government and those of several provinces) has a series of compensatory policies
(such as giving additional financial resources to the schools in the poorest areas) but has not
been able to transform the supervision service, which is indeed a more complex exercise,
encountering resistance both from practising supervisors and from teachers. Unfortunately,
those schools and teachers who in principle could benefit most from a more support-oriented
supervision service, have, because of the memories of the apartheid regime and its inspection
system, resisted almost any re-introduction of supervision into their schools.
While the close-to-school support model seems the most promising one to address disparities,
its introduction encounters several difficulties, even by governments who have an overall
equity-focussed policy and have the necessary resources. We commented earlier on on some
of these challenges. It is relatively straightforward to adapt the rhythm of supervision to the
results of the schools, with less supervision for well performing schools and more for those
with poorer results. It is much more difficult to change the character of the visits themselves,
and to demand that each visit changes in function of the needs of each particular school.
Several authors have commented that in Chile visits by the same supervisor differ very little
from one school to another. A related difficulty, and probably the most complex one, is linked
to the enduring attitudes of supervisors, who are used to giving directions and find it difficult
to develop a genuine collegial relationship with teachers, especially with those who are not
28
doing a very good job. Few of the supervisors are recruited from among the teachers who
have worked in the most remote or disadvantaged schools and may not easily understand the
specific constraints of such an environment. Behind this model lie finally two internal
contradictions, which may work to the disadvantage of the weakest schools. The first one is
well known: while weaker schools in this model benefit from more support, they are in this
way assigned to a group of less successful schools, and this can work against them, especially
if there is a parental right to choose a school. Secondly, while it is correct that disadvantaged
schools benefit from more support under this model, it is equally true that the stronger
schools, who regularly recruit from among the higher social classes, gain the advantage of
greater pedagogical and managerial autonomy. This is partly the result of the political strength
of their public. To some extent, the fact that the successful schools can operate without much
intervention by governmental representatives, is an admission by the government that it may
not have the capacity to regulate the whole school system. This could become a problem
under a scenario whereby the resources of the better off parents, who support their schools
through school fees and the like, outweigh the resources of government. This is indeed the
case in South-Africa, which helps to explain why disparities between schools have not
decreased swiftly. While this is not an ideal scenario, it is undoubtedly preferable over one
whereby the government distributes its scarce resources to those who have already.
A brief conclusion
The diversity of national contexts makes it hazardous to define principles of successful
supervision reforms. A number of fairly general, but hopefully helpful points can nonetheless
be made. Firstly, there must be a balance between the mandate assigned to supervision
services and the human and financial resources and assets3 at their disposal. If the mandate
outweighs the resources, the response should not simply be to expect that more resources will
become available, but a reflection and a refocusing of the mandate may need to be
undertaken. Secondly, once a clear mandate has been assigned, this mandate should inspire
the organization and structure of the service, the profile of the staff, their recruitment, training
and evaluation and the definition of the actions they are expected to undertake. An example
may clarify this: if the mandate is to offer support to the schools most in need of such support,
then it makes most sense to put supervisory officers as close to the schools as possible and to
have therefore a strongly deconcentrated service. These officers should have a profile which
allows them to work with such schools in a supportive manner and should be evaluated to
some extent on the progress they have enabled these schools to make. Their practices need to
move from school visits to a mixture of visits, workshops, dialogue and networking Thirdly,
what characterizes the more successful supervision systems is that they get the balance
between support and control right and that this balance takes into account the strength and
professionalism of principals and teachers. Where school staff are strong professionals,
supervision may become a more distant exercise. Where teachers are less well trained,
supervisors may need to emphasize more the support function. Fourthly, supervisors are only
one of the actors who work towards a school’s progress. Precisely when supervision services
are lacking in resources, it is crucial to put their interventions in context with those which
others can undertake. Research undertaken in West-Africa (Lugaz and De Grauwe, 2006)
concludes as follows: “Initiatives in Benin and Senegal show the potential of school networks,
where teachers exchange experiences and which develop a tradition of peer support. Many
principals, when they receive appropriate training and support, are competent to monitor the
3
With « assets », I refer to less visible resources such as credibility among teachers, expertise or
strong social networks.
29
performance of their teachers, while parents, community organisations and municipalities can
assume the responsibility of supervising teacher presence and possibly play a role in
recruitment. The local office is best placed to offer intensive support to a few schools that are
seriously under-performing.”
An examination of different monitoring models and reforms needs to pay attention to the
power of different actors and how these models and reforms will impact upon the distribution
of power in society. Where there are little disparities between schools and between parents, a
reform which strengthens the role of these groups may not contribute to widening disparities.
However, where such disparities do exist, such reforms may reinforce them. Another key
actor is the government itself. Recent reforms, influenced by the New Public Management
precepts have in some cases weakened the government’s authority. In itself, this is not a
concern, but it becomes one when the government is the only or the main actor capable of
addressing disparities between schools.
As the preceding discussions have probably shown, there is no ideal monitoring model and
the search for one is an elusive one, precisely because of the diversity of contexts. Neither is
there a monitoring (or for that matter, a management) model that will have only positive
impacts on disparities and will make these disappear. This is not to argue that different
models do not have differential impacts on schools; they do indeed. The point is rather that
national socio-economic policies have more of an impact on these disparities (including in
education) than specific educational management policies. This also implies that when
educational monitoring and management policies form an integral part of a framework which
addresses disparities, they have a much better chance of succeeding.
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