ABSTRACT
Over recent years, the terms ‘effectiveness’ and ‘standards’ have entered the lexicon of education terms. Within England and Wales, external inspection has become one of the tools for ensuring that national standards of effectiveness are achieved. However, the users’ education dictionary also includes ‘success criteria’, ‘school review’, ‘self-evaluation’ and ‘the creation of a learning organisation’, terms which draw on very different assumptions and strategies. The new education language (which has international currency) now embraces two traditions, each with different antecedents and modes of operation, yet each aiming to achieve school improvement. The context for this chapter is the uneasy tension between those two traditions: one based on inspection (and the use of external criteria to judge the effectiveness of a school); and the other rooted within the school itself (and focused on its capacity to engage in a process of selfreflection and review).
