Situating the Study of School Inspection in the Context of the Evaluation Society

This chapter situates the study of school inspection teams’ scoring practices within the broader context of the rise of evaluation and new public management approaches in education. School inspection is positioned as a key policy tool for monitoring and improving school quality, introduced in Germany following ‘disappointing’ PISA results in 2001. The chapter argues that while inspection methodologies aim for standardisation, significant discretion remains in how inspection teams implement evaluations and make scoring decisions in practice. The importance of studying these naturalistic scoring practices to open up the ‘black box’ of how inspection judgements are produced through team interactions is highlighted. The research questions focus on illuminating the process and conditions shaping score production, especially how disagreements are resolved. Key contributions of this study for a more sophisticated understanding of inspection dynamics are outlined. The chapter concludes with an overview of the book structure.