Shallow ground for judgement? Dilemmas in the “inspection swamp”

Abstract

This article seeks to analyse school inspectors’ work in the Swedish school inspectorate’s regular supervision. The research problem revolves around tensions between, on the one hand, juridical and standardised scripts for action and tacit and embodied professional knowledge on the other. The inspectorate’s prevalent search for ‘equivalent judgements’ and the high stakes nature of inspectors’ judgement making give rise to complicated professional dilemmas and what Peter Dahler-Larsen labels constitutive effects. Inspectors struggle with their judgements and seek to merge programmatic and technical elements within the current model of regular supervision with their accumulated professional experience. The article draws particular attention to the inspectorate’s urge to make the implicit explicit. Inspectors’ oblige inspectees to provide detailed descriptions of their work; i e to be inspectable. Their stress on transparency and accountability is supposed to produce democratic accountability and improvement. The constitutive effects might, however, be counterproductive and enforce less responsible and knowledgeable school actors.