ABSTRACT
Until the late 1980s, when schools and their governing bodies acquired greater independence from the Local Education Authority (LEA)s could be very defensive in their follow-up to a school inspection, feeling responsible for the faults in a school. The local inspectorates will need to monitor and evaluate school performance. They will need to provide LEA and the schools themselves with trusted and informed professional advice, based on first hand observation of what schools are actually doing, of the way in which they are implementing the National Curriculum, and of the standards achieved. The differences between Highbury Quadrant School and William Tyndale School reveal how much had been learned from the sequence of unhappy events in Islington in the mid-1970s. The co-operation between Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI) and the LEAs, which had been especially evident during the Second World War, had continued to exist without any major trouble for a further 35 years.
