ABSTRACT
The Handbook for the Inspection of Schools is an important text in that it interacts with the practices of inspection and the practices of schooling in complex and, as yet, inadequately understood ways. It is the chief means by which Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools (HMCI) exercises his statutory duty under the Education (Schools) Act 1992 of giving guidance to those inspectors registered by him as fit and proper persons to conduct an inspection of schools. The Handbook is both comprehensive and extremely detailed about both how inspection is to be organised and what is to be inspected. There is a degree of ambivalence in the Handbook as to whether the intention is to provide a model of 'good practice'. The role of inspection, as set out in the Education (Schools) Act 1992, is to monitor the standards, quality, efficiency and ethos of the schools and to inform both the government and the general public on these matters.
