ABSTRACT
In the wake of global developments schools and educational systems across the world increasingly are expected to attend to issues of accountability, in many cases shifting the focus of school evaluation towards measurement and control of educational outputs, and implicitly towards efforts to define ‘best practices’ that might ensure favourable results. However, there are intrinsic tensions in current policies, for example between accountability and responsibility (Englund and Solbrekke, 2011), between answerability and responsibility (Hatch, 2013) or between different forms of professionalism (Evetts, 2009). How such tensions are dealt with, both at policy levels and in the practices of schools, differs, which leads to a distinction between ‘high-stakes’ and ‘low-stakes’ testing and evaluation regimes, shaping differing opportunities for school-based evaluation. Norway is commonly described as a low-stakes context. Although the systems for measuring quality have proliferated in the 2000s, unlike other countries there are no follow-up systems of incentives and rewards (Hatch, 2013; Møller and Skedsmo, 2013); however, the expectations are high for schools to improve their quality. This chapter is the story about a lower secondary school which has developed school-based evaluation practices that both accommodate external expectations and allow them to maintain their broader goals for education.
