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New South Wales has a highly centralised State Education Department which has its headquarters in the state capital. The “ears and eyes” of the Department are the inspectors, who are selected from within the system on the basis of ability in scholarship, teaching and leadership. During a period of induction the inspector learns to appreciate the departmental viewpoint on efficiency as applied to teaching and administration and the significance of departmental policies. The “district” inspectors, responsible for a particular geographical area, are the most numerous. The functions of these inspectors include administration as the local representative of the central office and supervision, advice and appraisal of schools and teachers. Appraisal is the major task, as the general improvement of schools and the promotion of teachers are dependent upon the reports written by inspectors.

Despite general agreement amongst educators, both in Australia and other countries, that an authoritarian inspection system, whatever its virtues, has outlived some of its original purpose, reformist demands in this aspect of school administration have been slow to be met. In N.S.W. inspectors of schools have advanced proposals for change and the Department of Education has implemented some of these, together with other recommendations from its own committee of inquiry into the inspectorial system. The result has been a further liberalization of school inspection, although some traditional aspects remain. Arising out of the reforms are questions about whether inspections are necessary, how accountability and promotion are to be managed if they are not, and whether inspectors are justified in feeling insecure. The view is held that the growing professionalism of teachers will assist them to become more accountable directly to those they serve, but that regional education officers will still perform indispensable functions aimed at improving the educational quality of schools.

There are strong affinities and similarities between Her Majesty's Inspectors and the inspectors of schools employed by the Australian States, but there is one important difference between them. The Australian inspector spends much of his time assessing teachers and making recommendations for their promotion and appointment, while the H.M.I. is more of a professional consultant to central and local authorities and to schools, and he has little influence on the progression of individual teachers. Australian inspectors appear to have had longer teaching experience than H.M.I.‘s and they certainly carry out a wider range of duties. They seem to be more concerned with in‐service training, curriculum construction and research than are their British colleagues. H.M.I.'s, however, appear to be more scholarly and they are more resolute in pressing professional criticisms than are the Australians. Nearly one‐third of H.M.I.'s are women. In Australian school systems there is a marked and unfortunate paucity of women inspectors.

With the advent of State systems of education in Australia during the latter part of the nineteenth century, inspectors became key figures in the organization of educational policies, to maintain standards of instruction, and to assess the efficiency of teachers and schools. A teacher's promotion was dependent mainly on his seniority in the service and inspectorial assessments of his efficiency. Inspectors were also required to act as educational advisers to teachers, but this role was overshadowed by, and it conflicted with, the inspector's role of assessor. In recent years, there has been a marked change in the inspector's functions, with increased emphasis on professional advice and leadership. Assessment procedures have also been liberalized generally by reducing the frequency of teacher assessments and by broadening and modifying the criteria used to evaluate efficiency. However, it has not been possible to eliminate elements of incompatibility in the inspector's dual role of assessor and adviser, nor has it been possible to devise any reasonably infallible method of grading the complicated task of teaching. The advisory role of inspectors in relation to individual teachers is also being questioned. Such considerations are leading to the further development of alternative ways of stimulating the professional growth of teachers and they also indicate the need for promotion criteria which are largely independent of the inspector.

School inspection or supervision is one of the core institutional mechanisms for ensuring the quality of education. While analyzing the practices of this quality assurance tool at the basic education level in six developing and emerging economies, this paper found that there has been a major shift in exercising supervision system pushed by the policy dynamics of both international actors and state institutions. The school supervision system has been shaped by decentralization, school-based management, monitoring, data gathering, and output-focused governance. These are also known as the elements of New Public Management (NPM). The growing practice of NPM in all these countries has made the external supervision a less prioritized issue, which is evident in its stagnated and sometimes deteriorated state. On the other hand, the pro-NPM management system advocating for greater autonomy, decentralization and results has not evidently yielded any major positive outcomes, especially in lower-income countries. Thus, the absence of an effective supervision system, both support and control, has created a vacuum in the educational quality assurance instruments. By oversimplifying local contexts in situating NPM, this foreign-emerged management system also has shown reluctance toward fundamental crises of weak institutions in lower-income countries, including resource constraints, skills shortage, and service recipients’ lack of trust, among others. In short, developmental level and institutional capacity matter for the successful implementation of NPM.

Timor Leste was established as a country in 1999 when the Indonesians relinquished sovereignty and their departing military units and associated militias left most of the educational infrastructure in ruins. Civil disorder flared again in 2006 and the Government invited international military and reconstruction aid agencies in to restore order and reinvigorate development. The Inspectorate was established by law in 2008 to improve the quality and accountability of the school education system. The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between a national language policy that favours Portuguese and Tetun, and the establishment and administration of the Inspectorate of the Ministry of Education in Timor Leste.

The author was embedded in the Inspectorate between January and June 2009. During this period he conducted ethnographic analysis of the administration of two of the largest regions prior to helping develop the School Inspector's Manual and a strategic plan for the Inspectorate. This report was derived from those experiences.

The Inspectorate in the Ministry of Education, led by an Inspector General, has a symbiotic relationship with what is termed in this paper as the “Schools Directorate” led by a director general. Although the Inspectorate is required to improve the quality and accountability of all services provided by the Schools Directorate, a close symbiosis is encouraged between the sister bureaucracies by the Minister of Education, resulting in serious goal displacement in both organisations, degrees of confusion and paralysis in implementation. Four major reasons are identified. The Minister co‐manages the Schools Directorate and the Inspectorate has a chief executive officer. Formal communications in the Ministry are conducted in Portuguese, although very few are competent in this language. Regional directorates and regional inspectorates are required to collaborate closely in review and development planning, while the activities of the latter are funded and administered by the former. The cultural norms of conflict‐avoidance in a post‐conflict context are all pervasive in a setting of scarce resources, to the point where no one is ever fired, even for corruption.

This paper reports baseline research into the development of the Inspectorate and the Ministry of Education.

An attempt is made to compare the “effectiveness” of secondary school inspectors in the six Australian states. This is done by the use of two “intermediate” criteria—the number of teachers for which each inspector is responsible and the way in which time is allocated amongst the tasks involved in the role of inspector.

Written official and formal accounts such as Inspectors’ Reports provide a summary of the teachers’ work, conduct, interactions with pupils, as well as a glimpse of the skills, knowledge and dispositions brought to their work. What can be concluded from these reports is that teachers had little occupational control of their work. What was taught and how they taught were prescribed by the curriculum and mediated against the standards pupils attained. In addition, teachers’ and pupils’ successes and failures were made public in Inspectors’ Reports, although it was the teacher who was more readily identifiable if not explicitly named. This is not to suggest that teachers did not act as agents of change. Increasingly, teachers sought to professionalize their work through qualifications, training and exposure to new ideas and practices. Against this backdrop of the professionalization of the workforce were the increasing bureaucratization of schools and teaching and the institutionalization of teacher preparation and training.

The article investigates the language and rhetoric used by school inspectors as leverage in determining the direction for professional practice among teachers in colonial Trinidad and Tobago. The approach is ethnohistorical, and the database comprises major evaluation reports of the inspectors in question in respect of one school over a 20‐year period. The research reveals that the rhetoric employed in reporting was a major vehicle in transmitting important messages about professional practice which local teachers could not afford to ignore. The practice adopted imparted distinctiveness to the schooling system at the time, and a significant observation in the process is that the rhetoric used was laced with the language of “performativity” spawned and justified within a technical rationalism constructed and put to work in the colonial period”. Technical rhetoric, the paper argues however, is not the type of medium required to do justice to education, generally recognized as a social practice enterprise.

The office of Inspector of Schools, so long an important part of the Australian State Education systems, has become the target for a barrage of criticism. There is no doubt that the function and image of the Inspector must move in new directions, particularly in view of an increasing professionalism in teachers. In this paper the history of the position is briefly reviewed and alternative new directions are explored. It is maintained that with a decreasing emphasis on assessment in school systems, the Inspector is still the most appropriate assessor of teachers, in conjunction with Heads. However, it is suggested that his major function must become that of the system's supervisor ‐ co‐ordinator, with both professional and public relations involved.