ABSTRACT
Accountability and school improvement continue to be major driving forces as we near the end of the first decade in the twenty-first century. Evidence-based organizational change is now a major focus. Schools and systems are now producing objective and reliable evidence of school performance. Increasingly, school self-evaluation is being encouraged or a combination of internal/external modes of evaluation. There are changing roles as the inspectorate is now being given a new role as a ‘critical friend’. In principle, these are interesting developments but there are complexities
still to be resolved relating to levels of mandated changes, time availability and stages of development of schools in their self-evaluation journey (Swaffield and MacBeath, 2005).
