ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the governing of schooling, and the role of inspection in governing schools. The idea of the local school seems ubiquitous in the construction and management of education systems. While the idea of schooling is free floating, built on or around national myths and discourses, the practice of schooling has been focused historically on physical buildings, surrounding communities and urban and regional practices of administration. In the past, the school to be inspected was particular and situated in a place, it was in a street or a suburb, within a community and with a local workforce. A collective memory of that school was available in the family or through the professionals who worked in it. In Scotland, a relation between inspectors and schools built over the last decade focuses on school self-evaluation, and this has been developed further by a move to change the inspection role, with the opportunity to move into development.