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Educational Research for Policy and Practice
Published in: Educational Research for Policy and Practice 1/2019

19-03-2018 | Original Article

An investigation into school inspection policies in Western Australian state education performed by the Expert Review Group

Author: Christine Cunningham

Published in: Educational Research for Policy and Practice | Issue 1/2019

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Abstract

The aim of this work is to learn more about the Expert Review Group (ERG), a small but powerful team of bureaucrats in Western Australia’s Department of Education whose role is to inspect the quality and standards of pre-K to year 12 government schools. Critical education policy analysis is utilised. Iterative understandings were developed through historical and contemporary document analysis of legislature, policy documents, department reports, academic journal articles, media reports and social media information. This study makes transparent why the ERG was created and how it functions today. ERG school inspections are of proportional, risk-based type, targeting only those schools operating extraordinarily below or above the official measurements of adequate school performance. Very limited public analysis of the ERG had been undertaken prior to this study; thus, the data explored here are original and new to the public record. The ERG’s work and influence have expanded over its first decade of operation. However, there is no publicly available evidence that draws a link between ERG inspections and subsequent improvement in school performance for any ERG-inspected school.
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Footnotes
1
In order to comply with the university’s standards of ethical research, it must be noted that, when research data are presented in the following pages, in order to ensure that ERG staff and WA public school stakeholders are protected as well as possible from identification, school names are omitted from the text and APA referencing is not conformed to regarding the authorial acknowledgement protocols usually found within in-text and end-text referencing.
 
2
In the Australian literature, rather than the more commonly used term ‘inspection’, which is often used in the international literature, ‘reviewing’ schools is the jargon used to confer the same meaning. This is noted because, when searching for similar literature, ‘review’ is not a keyword that finds many links, whereas ‘inspection’ proves quite successful. Whichever terminology is used, inspection or review, in WA they are synonyms for processes involving inspecting, evaluating and judging whole school communities’ performance and reporting it back to the Department of Education, which ultimately reports to the education minister in the state government.
 
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Metadata
Title
An investigation into school inspection policies in Western Australian state education performed by the Expert Review Group
Author
Christine Cunningham
Publication date
19-03-2018
Publisher
Springer Singapore
Published in
Educational Research for Policy and Practice / Issue 1/2019
Print ISSN: 1570-2081
Electronic ISSN: 1573-1723
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10671-018-9227-5

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