European School Inspection and Evaluation: History and Principles

By Adrian Gray

Written by Adrian Gray, a former Executive Committee member. It shows that school inspection has been a key factor in the European educational landscape for 200 years. The book also explains how inspection and evaluation approaches have changed and developed, especially over the last fifty years, reflecting changing ideas about sc

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookworm of Retford
• Release date: May 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781999833497

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The inspection of schools has been part of European life for over two centuries. In the early years of the Nineteenth Century, educationalists and politicians criss-crossed Europe studying the school systems in each country and, almost universally, came to the conclusion that schools were best where inspection was effective.

Despite this, in the second decade of the Twenty First Century, it is still necessary to explain in what ways inspection is an essential contributor to the quality of education. School inspection does two things that are of central importance – it protects the interests of the child and it ensures that public money is spent properly – yet it remains necessary to remind commentators of such simple reasoning. The history of inspection shows that this is best done by a field-force of trained, professional educators working to a consistent framework and making evaluative judgements. There is less consistent agreement over what inspection should include (or should not include) and what sanctions or rewards should follow on from it.

Some aspects of the work of inspectors have attracted much academic debate – for example around the ‘impact’ on individual schools. This is certainly extremely difficult to quantify as it cannot be shown how schools would behave if there were no inspection at all, so what would happen without it? Nevertheless, inspectorates throughout Europe are building tools to measure the impact of their work and to follow up the implementation of their recommendations. This is a very positive improvement which SICI is strongly encouraging.

It is also clear from the history that school inspection was intended to have other forms of impact as well – keeping government informed on school quality, providing evidence to inform political policymaking, and organising conferences to promote more general improvement in the teacher workforce. There has been little attempt so far to measure impact in these areas.

Why is school inspection often unpopular? One of the reasons perhaps is that it is still seen by some as a mechanism designed not to help education systems improve but merely to assert central control over local activity. The answer to this argument is that local activity is often centrally-funded whilst a government’s duty is to ensure all citizens have fair opportunities.

Another is perhaps that inspectorates have clashed repeatedly with vested interests, starting first with the Churches, then with teaching unions and sometimes with the forces of liberalism – though on other occasions the inspectorate has been a force for liberalism against conservatism.

It is nevertheless important to note that many inspectorates have undergone profound reforms in the last twenty in order to focus on helping schools improve and not only judge and grade them. These changes have done a lot to make them much more popular than they used to be.

I want to thank Adrian Gray for taking the initiative to write this book: it fills a very obvious gap in our knowledge of school inspection. Its history is very much a European phenomenon, and yet this is the first attempt to tell the story of European inspection. This means that hundreds of people now becoming school inspectors every year will be able to have access to their own history and culture and have some knowledge of the past that shaped it; this will help them avoid repeating some of the mistakes of the past, and not to ignore the successes. As President of the Standing International Conference of Inspectorates I am delighted that our organisation can now contribute to the international debate about inspection by widening awareness of our professional heritage.

Chantal Manes-Bonnisseau, President, Standing International Conference of Inspectorates

CHAPTER ONE:

THE FOUNDATIONS OF STATE INSPECTION IN EUROPE TO 1850

‘It is no hardship to a competent teacher to be examined…and an incompetent one has no just reason to complain.’ (The Athenæum, 12 September 1846)

THE NARRATIVE: THE GROWTH OF INSPECTION TO 1850

Inspection has been a part of European life for centuries. Its origins probably lie in the Roman Catholic Church’s practice of diocesan ‘visitations’ which developed from an early date. Medieval bishops effectively ran occasional ‘inspections’ of the parishes and monasteries within their diocese and this approach was continued even in some countries that became Protestant. In England Henry VIII used this to ‘inspect’ monasteries as he moved to close them down from 1535 and for the Catholic countries the Council of Trent (1545-1563) revived the practice, so that ‘the principal object of all the visitations shall be to lead to sound and orthodox doctrine, by banishing heresies; to maintain good morals, and to correct such as are evil; to animate the people, by exhortations and admonitions, to religion, peacefulness, and innocence….’¹ Whereas Henry’s servants used the process as a means of government control, the Council of Trent intended it to raise standards and thereby to strengthen their own cause, and many bishops used the visitation system to identify poor clergy.

As we shall see, this idea evolved, so that by 1850 almost all countries agreed that school inspection was essential when education was publicly funded and often still vital when not. Despite this, school inspection developed in radically differing ways across Europe, reflecting prevailing cultural and political factors. An American educationalist reported in 1839:

‘Differences in political and social organisation, in habits and manners, require corresponding changes to adapt a system of education to the nation; and, without such modifications, success in the institutions of one country is no guarantee for the same result in those of another.’²

A key difference emerged between countries in whether inspectors had some direct responsibility for the schools they inspected, whilst in most countries what emerged first was hardly school inspection at all – the inspection of teachers being the main activity.

Given the close connection at the time between Church and Education, it is not surprising that the idea of ‘visitation’ was used for schools. In Brandenburg, Joachim II from 1540 appointed ‘visitors’ to inspect the town schools, reporting on improvements required and in 1545 a permanent council or board was appointed on school and church matters; this pattern appears to have survived for nearly 300 years. Inspection and regulation – the passing of school laws – developed in tandem. Duke Ernest of Saxe-Gotha introduced wide-ranging school laws of 1642, which included inspection³. According to Barnard, a series of decrees in German states such as Württemberg, Saxony, Hesse and Brandenburg were issued from 1559 to about 1580 providing for public schools and their ‘inspection’ – though we must always approach this term with caution. An inspector general of schools, Christophe Schrader, was appointed in Brunswick in 1648 and began work in 1649.⁴

School reform accelerated in Prussia under Frederick William I from 1717, and in 1738 clergy were made ‘inspectors’ of schools. The decree of 1738 also set out that prospective teachers had to be examined by inspectors and set a number of regulations, for example the hours of the school day. It appears that it was generally the clergy – unsalaried – who provided the inspectors and ensured that regulations on teaching hours, subjects of instruction etc., were being met. In 1787 the Ober-Schule Collegium or Upper School Board was created whose powers included regulating textbooks and sending out inspectors ‘to examine any part of public instruction’.⁵ This was embedded in the General Code of 1794, but inspection was transferred to the Ministry of the Interior in 1808, and by 1830 all state schools were subject to inspection, reform having accelerated after 1809. The system stayed largely the same until 1817-19, and elements persisted far beyond this date.

Charities copied the model. In England a religious society with 1,300 schools had its own ‘inspector’ from 1701, but the role quickly became one of an operational manager. The influence of charities should not be discounted, for in the Netherlands the ideas of the Society for Public Good spread to the city authorities in Amsterdam and eventually into a national inspection system, with a similar pattern in Ireland in the early 1800s.

The concept of school inspection was embedded in Haarlem by a decree of 1746 that regulated the city’s private schools, notably about what books could be used. Teachers could be fined for using the wrong books. In 1757 a college for the inspectors of schools for the poor was set up composed of twelve persons, only three of whom were clergymen, and replaced every three years. The college had to make a report to the council twice a year; in one of their first acts, they recommended a fourth school for the poor be set up and this was duly done.⁶

In the next few years they took action so that a drunken teacher who had struck his pupils was sacked, and investigated a teacher accused of being too close to his female pupils.

They soon expanded into trying to influence delivery and policy, arguing that another school was needed as classes were too large, and disputing how long the poor should be educated for.

In 1784 they decided that finance was a major problem and organised a house-to-house collection. Although the local council took action to control the activities of the inspectors, their actions resulted in a large increase of pupils attending school.

Dutch education began to improve under the influence of the Society for Public Good, which began to provide schools in the 1780s. The Society was very successful, and their ideas were copied in creating school regulations in Utrecht in 1796, and in Amsterdam by the city magistrates in 1797, whilst in revolutionary France some simple regulation was being introduced. The Dutch Batavian Republic developed an inspection system to support its school laws of 1801. These laws were first drafted by an academic, Professor van der Palme, to cover the local government schools; then they were modified in 1806 by van der Ende, including regulations for primary instruction, which also brought endowed schools within state supervision. Van der Palme wished to curtail religious influence whether through ‘ignorant priest-craft’ or the associated ‘opinionated and fanatical idiots in the position of teachers’, who he thought corrupted rural youth because local government allowed them to.⁷ Over the next thirty years the Dutch system attracted international interest for its impact on quality.

The idea of the supervision of education also developed in France in the 1790s, but inspection did not properly arrive until after the laws of 1802, which led to a system centralised on the University and including teaching appointments. Inspectors-General were sent out to visit secondaries in 1809 but with a remit also to check on primaries – they found ‘a state of languor, degradation and death.’ ⁸ The Russian system, developing at about the same time, was influenced by French practice with the universities initially in charge until 1834. After 1815 Church influence began to undermine aspects of the system and led to a renewed call for specialist inspectors from 1831; until 1833 there was little effective inspection of primary schools and teachers were usually certificated in the most rudimentary fashion by the parish priest. In France in 1833 Guizot passed wide-ranging reforms of the primary sector as a team of 500 primary inspectors were reporting back on the horrors of French primary education, perhaps only eclipsed by the failures in Russia.

Less well known is that school inspection also developed in Ireland in the very early 1800s. Several societies distributed Government subsidies to their schools and from around 1804 the Hibernian Society organised inspections as the central body was being misled about the state of its schools by local committees. One of these inspectors covered 230 schools in six months: unsurprisingly the system failed to prevent a series of scandals. In 1820 the first Government inspector was appointed, and there were eight by 1825. In 1831 a National Board was set up which appointed its own inspectors, reducing the operations of the charities, but here again Church opposition was a persistent problem.

In Belgium, initial schemes based on the Dutch model soon collapsed and were gradually replaced by a Church-dominated landscape. Belgium’s schools were widely criticised and a move back to the Dutch model had started by 1850, including the idea of inspectors having an annual conference with the Minister. Church domination was not limited to Catholic countries: from 1825 Swedish school inspection was managed by the national Church and in Scotland the Presbyterians ran most aspects of education. A key factor in the delayed appointment of the first national inspector in Scotland in 1840 was ‘the confidence of the Church of Scotland’⁹ and inspection did not actually start until five years after the first grants.

The pattern that developed in Prussia was very hierarchical and part of a movement for ‘national renewal’, but always dominated by the Churches. A new Ministry of Public Instruction was created in Prussia in 1817, with Karl von Altenstein as its first minister; he was advised by a council which included an ‘extraordinary inspector’, who could investigate issues of importance. Supervision was the responsibility of ten provincial school boards with several layers down to parish level. The level below the province was supervised by a school councillor, who had a duty to visit schools but who was generally a layman. Beneath that, ‘circle’ inspectors – generally clergy – supervised groups of parish schools, and at parish level it was normally the parish clergyman who was delegated to be the ‘inspector’; in towns it would often be the curate.¹⁰ Dallas Bache, an American who published his report in 1839, considered that the system gave the government ‘almost unlimited control’ over the schools, but also preserved Church influence. Yet the Prussian law of 1826, renewed in 1846, also linked the inspection of teacher quality to the ‘normal’ teacher training schools. The director of each normal school was required to make an annual inspection tour. A key debate in Prussia was therefore how far Church control of education should be maintained, and the result was that clergy formed the bulk of inspectors for decades to come.

Other German states developed similar ‘layered’ systems from the 1830s onwards, often with the inspectors having substantially managerial roles but operating within a network of regulations. The same happened in the Austrian Empire, where the schools were dominated by the Catholic Church. The French inspection of primary schools from 1833 was also layered, but crucially each department also had a permanent inspector responsible centrally from 1835. Also, by 1846 some Swiss cantons had annual inspections. Thus, there were various gradations of an education system which was delivered by localities, with what we might now call quality management known as ‘inspection’, but also often regulated and inspected – or evaluated – by central government.

In both Prussia and England, further school inspection developed in connection with factory laws about the schooling of mill children. In England a factory inspector, Leonard Horner, became a significant influence on school inspection reform even before there was a national school inspectorate, whilst Church-based school bodies also had their own inspectors before the State did. Inspection of factory and poor law schools in England began several years before inspection of primary schools¹¹, and indeed a system was first introduced in the West Indies colonies from 1837. It took only a few years before the first crisis in England, when HMI Tremenheere resigned after political interference in his reports. There was further inspection development in Ireland with a new national system from 1831, separate from the organisations which actually ran the schools.

Inspection was slow to develop in England, but from 1839 school inspectors were introduced as the state began to increase its subsidy to a Church-run system. The prime factor here was accountability for state money given to non-state organisations, and inspectors were slower to develop any role in managing the quality of teachers – a clear distinction from most other countries.

Therefore by 1850 most European states had some form of school inspection, although in Spain it was not authorised until 1849 and not really in place, albeit ineffectively, until 1857. Furthest south, Malta had appointed Monsignor Panavecchia as Inspector of Primary Schools in 1840, though this role was typically as much about developing the system as about inspection.

Specialisation in inspection work developed, notably between what we might broadly consider as primary and secondary age phases. In France from about 1830 a trend for women to inspect nursery schools emerged, although it became difficult for women to break out of this area. In part this was because some women inspectors themselves perpetuated gender-based views, such as when Eugenie Chevreau-Mercier said, ‘The inspection of nursery schools can be done usefully and correctly only by women… inspectresses will intimidate less and will persuade more readily than men can’.¹²

WHAT IS INSPECTION?

Key issues:

• Inspection should be seen as one element of an education system which also includes policy setting, regulation, delivery (including quality management)

• Inspection at its simplest might best be described as the direct observation and evaluation of teachers and/or schools at work, without any personal line responsibility for the staff being inspected

• Evaluation with responsibility is better seen as ‘quality management’ or supervision, though historically this has very often been termed ’inspection’

• Inspection developed in close parallel with ‘regulation’ – the passing of laws to define minimum teacher or school quality

• National Inspection systems had sharply different roles in relation to the management of teacher quality

It might be argued that school inspection in its ‘purest’ form cannot conducted by people who have any responsibility for running the schools: in other words, there is a separation between independent inspection and quality management processes.

It took some time – perhaps even centuries – to develop the understanding that inspection was better conducted by individuals with no direct interest in the outcomes. The first ‘inspections’ in the Electorate, from 1540, appear to have been closely aligned with the development of school councils or boards. One of the issues that soon emerged was the lack of appropriate management terminology to define management functions and roles that helped to differentiate between local non-executive ‘supervision’, educationalists with management responsibility, and inspectors from a central agency. This was confused from the earliest days, as the term ‘inspectors’ was used for those who often had roles that included strategic planning and day-to- day management, including the hiring of teachers. The debate about inspectors making judgements on the result of their own decision-making had barely begun.

These blurred boundaries can be found in some of the charitable groups who first introduced ‘inspection’ of schools in Ireland and England. In England, the National Society, under Andrew Bell’s leadership, from 1812 introduced regular visits to give a ‘scrutinising eye’ and an ‘unbiased judgement’ to inform central managers. But these ‘inspectors’ were clearly also managers, having the power to dismiss teachers. The ‘agents’ employed by the rival British Society were also involved in raising funds, building schools and giving advice. Professor Bache thought that inspection in Ireland originated similarly with the charitable Kildare Place Society, which had ‘an admirable system of regular school inspections’.¹³

The centralised French government system that emerged after 1802 was based around the Institute of France, later the University, which controlled secondary education and the teachers nationally through three inspectors-general, but did not cover the local provision of schooling. Primary schools were at first supervised and ‘inspected’ locally as the central powers lacked the funds, but when the inspectors-general looked at the primary sector ‘they reported a state of languor, degradation and death’¹⁴ and centralised inspection began. After this parish and district committees had ‘immediate inspection and superintendence’ duties, but the State inspectors appointed the teachers.

Inspection began to work best where it was a separate activity. George Nicholls, visiting the Netherlands in the 1830s, noted that central government did not run schools or ‘deliver’ education but ‘direct interference of government is confined to regulating the mode of instruction by means of an organised system of inspection’.¹⁵ Yet it took some time for a language of inspection to emerge that clearly structured an understanding of functions, with Henry Barnard¹⁶ in 1850 still talking about the Dutch inspectors as providing ‘vigilant superintendence’ with ‘direction’ and ‘real responsibility’.

They retained some management functions in teacher quality and in ensuring there were enough school places in their districts.

In contrast the revised Irish system after 1831 clearly separated management from inspection; government inspectors checked the schools, which were run by local interests (but centrally subsidised) and did not have the authority to ‘decide upon any question’ in a school.

The Prussian system involved layers of control where, at local level, the difference between inspection and supervision was not clear. When Professor Bache visited Halle in Prussia in 1836-8, he found that the ‘inspector’ of the Franke charity schools was also the ‘headmaster’ and reported to the ‘director’ of the foundation, with reports sent to the Magdeburg school board; clearly at the lower level this was a managerial relationship. There were echoes of the Prussian system in that adopted by Saxony from 1838; here, the district inspector superintended a typically localised structure of clergy who visited all schools and checked teachers – a process as much akin to monitoring as inspection.

In the Austrian Empire parish clergy were expected to visit their schools twice a week, and to teach religion; they were trained in school management and pedagogy and approved pupil transfers to upper schools. The district inspector or Aufseher, also a clergyman, had duties including managing school buildings, ensuring that teachers had houses, and that the parish clergy visited their schools; he also sent an annual report to the county magistrates who sent a summary to Vienna; so, this was as much about corporate management as it was about inspection: everyone was part of one system.

The Belgian system of 1836 had limited central control and made education and its inspection the responsibility of local government with, after 1842, very extensive control by the Catholic clergy. Such imbalances reflected the political processes of the State: Belgium and Austria had very different approaches because – in both cases – of the influence of the Catholic Church.

Thus ‘inspectors’ were often so-called yet had largely supervisory management functions which commonly included a role in school strategic planning. In England one of the religious charities active in the early 1700s employed ‘inspectors’ and ‘agents’ whose overlapping duties included promoting new schools, soliciting charitable donations but also checking conformity with policy. We have seen that the Haarlem inspectors in 1784 decided there was too little money so organised a house-to-house collection. Joseph Kay, in England in 1846, thought that inspectors should play a role in planning for new schools.

The confusion over the use of the term ‘inspector’ comes because there was no separate terminology for non-executive quality management; thus, in the simplest and most common way, the parish clergyman who sat on the school’s committee was spoken of as an ‘inspector’ when today his visits would be seen as ‘monitoring’. In almost all cases as well, ‘inspection’ involved the formal reporting on the findings from a visit to a school. Therefore, a key debate that emerged over many years was about the boundary between inspection and management supervision. Leonard Horner, in the 1830s, headed a section of his introduction to Cousin’s¹⁷ work ‘General inspection and local superintendence’, indicating how he thought the system should work, reflecting the Dutch model.

Writing in 1846, Joseph Kay concluded from his study tour that there should be two levels of ‘inspection’. He thought there ought always to be local ‘inspection’ which could provide a ‘continual check upon the schoolmaster’ and would also know better than any national inspector the needs of the area and the character of the teacher; he was really talking about an ‘area manager’ concept.

He also thought that national expert inspection was vital, as there were limits to what local amateurs could do.

What all countries agreed upon was that inspection involved the actual visiting of schools by those who did not normally work there. Often this was to check and enforce regulations set by policy-makers who were central politicians; without inspection, regulation would have no force and inconsistency would develop. Who did this, and how it was done, developed over time but it always involved a degree of external challenge. At the same time, local managers needed to regularly visit their schools to supervise them.

In conclusion, we might say that ‘inspection’ in its purest sense is the evaluation of schools by those with no direct responsibility for the school itself. However, the term has plainly been used for many years to include direct quality supervision – by the local council of its schools, or by headteachers of their teachers; in these situations, ‘inspectors’ have some responsibility for the quality which they are checking. The following ‘model’ sums up some of these issues:

WHY INSPECT?

• To control and Improve: inspection was needed to ensure that schools were meeting the quality regulations but the tension between control and advice was recognised from early days

• To protect: inspection in many forms exists to protect the vulnerable and the interests of other stakeholders; there was a need to protect children in general from poor education and especially those in vulnerable settings who needed extra safeguards, such as factory schools and boarding schools

• To manage political priorities: the ‘risks’ that needed regulating varied according to the priorities of the state, and in some states the greatest fear was of political or religious ‘corruption’

• To ensure accountability: as soon as the state started providing funding for schools, it established that schools should be inspected to check the proper use of public money and check quality

• To provide information to Government

• Additionally, in many early systems a prime function of inspection was to quality manage the teaching workforce by both hiring and firing teachers or contributing to training

TO CONTROL AND IMPROVE: TO REGULATE, WITH REGULATIONS INTENDED TO DEFINE MINIMUM STANDARDS

At the simplest level inspection is needed, as otherwise the law has no force. Governments passed laws to control many aspects of schooling, including the curriculum, the books that could be used, the teachers and the school buildings. Central governments as in the Netherlands were content to pass laws to regulate education which was then to be delivered by others, so in the Dutch case laws covered the curriculum and textbooks. Books were also regulated in Prussia and new books were ‘assessed’ by inspectors and local use sanctioned by the Schulcollegium. Some commentators thought that state regulation could go too far; in the Austrian Empire Professor Bache noted ‘a spirit of system, which exactly regulates the method and amount of what is to be taught, and when it is to be taught, throughout this vast empire’.¹⁸

As soon as states began passing education laws, they realised they needed a means of checking or enforcing them. Inspection’s function as regulatory work then began. Frederick William I’s reforms included inspectors checking on teaching hours and the curriculum from 1738. By 1787 Prussia had created its Upper School Board whose powers included regulating textbooks. In the Netherlands, books were also regulated by a decree in Haarlem in 1746, and teachers could be fined for using the wrong ones. In England, the employment of factory inspectors, which was because mill owners were flouting laws on child education, led in 1836 to a large increase in prosecutions.

Guizot’s reforms of 1833 were intended to reconstruct French primary education, supported by evidence from around 500 inspectors. They found all manner of abuses, including one teacher leading an aggressive parade around the priest’s house shouting, ‘Down with the Jesuits’. Evidence from inspectors was gathered and quantified by Paul Lorrain, which led Guizot to embed his primary reforms further.

The Poor Law officials in England, who inspected workhouse schools after 1834, were intended to be regulatory and to ensure national consistency, but also produced one of the outstanding officials of English education history in James Kay Shuttleworth. Thus, in England inspection emerged that covered schools for child workers and the poor before it emerged for the general population.

We can also see the pattern emerging that the designated regulations reflected the priorities of governments at the time. For example, in Prussia primary schools had to have a playground used for exercise and in Bavaria schools had to have an orchard where children could learn about trees.

However, in education very little ‘inspection’ has ever remained purely regulatory. Whereas regulation implies a yes/no answer and therefore risks making a minimum standard the ‘acceptable’ norm, school inspectors have always drifted into being more evaluative and into offering advice; only judgements of quality support improvement. Instructions issued to inspectors in England in 1840 tried to hold back this tendency by reminding them that ‘inspection is not intended as a means of exercising control, but of affording assistance’, although inspectors had ‘no power to interfere, and not being instructed to offer any advice or information except where it is invited’.¹⁹

Despite the intention to improve, inspectors were not always popular. In the early 1830s one French primary inspector reported that ‘we counted on meeting with gratitude, instead of that we have met, almost everywhere, with resistance’.²⁰

TO PROTECT: ‘VULNERABLE’ CHILDREN – INCLUDING PRIVATE SCHOOLS AND FACTORIES

Strong elements of the protection of children can be found in school inspection, but there is less clarity about what (or who) they need protecting from. One of the most common disputes has effectively been over how far the State should intervene in private matters to protect the interests of the vulnerable – a dispute which has been at the heart of much discussion about the regulation of private schools²¹. Thus George Nicholls, who published a study on the condition of the labouring poor in Holland and Belgium in 1838, had some doubts about regulation ‘interfering with the liberty of the subject’ but he thought this might be worthwhile as the certification of teachers by the inspectorate formed ‘some sort of guarantee that the persons to whom (the poor) send their children is not an ignorant charlatan’.²² He complained that in England at that time anyone could ‘become a schoolmaster, as easily as he can a coal merchant, by simply putting a brass plate on the door’. But this was not true in France or Prussia, which subjected private elementary schools to inspection by the ‘kreis’ (circle) inspector, although their popularity declined due to state school competition.

Private schools tended often to reflect individual religious commitments and so were a centre of struggle against Government involvement in France, Belgium, Prussia and elsewhere. The resurgence of the Catholic Church in Belgium after 1836 resulted in a curtailing of private school inspection to just once a year and only ‘for the purpose of satisfying themselves that these schools continue in the conditions desired…’.²³

In Baden by 1850 privately educated children needed a certificate from the inspectors at the end of their education, whilst the private schools and seminaries were regulated by the upper school authorities. In Prussia at this time private schools had to be open for inspection ‘so that none of the children are subject to immoral or corrupting influences’.²⁴

An early pattern was set when the law began to regulate children working in factories. In England four inspectors and eight assistants were appointed from 1833 with the right to enter factories and inspect provision of schooling for children. The Prussian factory laws of 1839 set out that children under sixteen had to have five hours of schooling per day, and from 1855 inspectors were deployed to check on the education of factory children under fourteen.

Poor treatment was another issue, as satirised by Charles Dickens in his account of ‘Dotheboys Hall’. Cruelty in the Irish schools was a major debate in the 1820s and fuelled calls for reform: the school at Sligo was run as ‘slave labour’ by its master and there was some suggestion that inspectors turned a ‘blind eye’ to corruption. This scandal contributed to the abolition of the funded charitable system and the creation of a Board of National Education with its own inspectors.

Some factions thought that children needed protecting from unfettered religious groups. Professor van der Palme, one of the architects of the Dutch system, wanted to curtail the influence of the ‘ignorant priest-craft’ and their associates, the ‘opinionated and fanatical idiots in the position of teachers’ who he thought were allowed to ‘corrupt’ rural youth as local councils permitted it²⁵. The same was true in France where ‘little by little’ the independent schools were ‘harried out of existence… subjected to severe inspection’. Even after 1815 a third of private boarding schools for girls failed inspections for competency and ‘moral character’; private schools had to register with both the University and the local police. A law of 1820 gave the inspection of private girls’ schools to the prefect, and in 1829 to a cantonal committee; however, the Church gradually pushed back the boundary of the State as governments changed, so that from 1830 they were inspected by the bishops, and eventually these schools were no longer really inspected at all. Nonetheless, in 1837 France became one of the first states to inspect pupils’ health in schools; but the inspection of private schools was limited to ‘health, morality or the law of the land’, for which in girls’ schools female inspectors were allocated²⁶. Guizot’s 1833 reforms in France included provision to control religious teaching and to protect minority groups; Rectors and inspectors had to ensure regulations were met. If they were not, they were to arrange new minority schools.

ACCOUNTABILITY: MONEY AND ‘EFFICIENCY’

As soon as the State began giving money to private or charitable organisations to run schools there began to be a debate as to how to ensure the money was being spent effectively. In 1787 in Prussia the inspection of secondary schools was placed under a new secondary school board within the Ministry of Finance, because the government wanted to produce ‘more efficient officials’.²⁷ In Prussia, the law of 1794 provided for state contribution to education and declared that all public schools were under the state’s ‘supervision’, being available for inspection and examination at any time. Only in 1808 was this work transferred to the Interior Ministry.

Where efficient inspection was slow to develop, there were problems: the Irish Charter schools began to receive funding from Parliament