The Future of Education

The evolution of the Portuguese Educational System has been accompanied by school inspection since the late 19th century. Traditionally, school inspection, as a State tool to control the effectiveness of the educational process in schools, was mainly related with the decisions, strategies and supervision modes as a form of governance of educational process. In the last few decades, we noticed a paradigm shift strongly related to the variations in the administrative organisation of education. These variations result from the decentralisation processes and the growing autonomy of schools, which have been asked to respond, in a contextualised way, to the educational needs of the populations they attend to and, at the same time, to the demands for quality of learning and performance. However, there also seems to be a certain difficulty to replace traditional administrative structures, which leads to a tendency the expected tendency to recover outdated bureaucratic patterns (Carvalho, 2011). By approaching the concept of democratic management in Portuguese public schools, this study focus on the role of the School Inspection System in failing to exercise a purely inspective and bureaucratic function, starting to have a more democratic and participatory role, having in mind that any changes occur among tensions, conflicts, ambiguities, as well as the complexity inherent to the inspection activity. The study examines the representations of school teachers and educational inspectors in the context of Supervision and Support Programs, the relationship established between teachers and inspectors, and the impact of this type of ‘support’ in schools. We find that teacher’s representations of the supervision and support activity and of the inspectors themselves are not the same as the representations that inspectors have of themselves; and that although supervision and support activities are not meant to be controlling in nature, this is how teachers perceive them, which hinders the development of a collaborative and trusting relationship. Lastly, teachers do not perceive any significant impact on student outcomes as a result of the inspection. Focusing on the new educational paradigms, school context demands a more flexible and democratic performance of school inspectors, who are asked for a more humanised and systemic view of the school. Also, it is expected that the inspector will display commitment, capacity, and wisdom, that rejects the authoritarianism of the past and adopt positions that contribute to improve the quality of education (Abreu, 2012).

Keywords: School Inspection, Support Programmes, Quality of Education;

References:
[1] Abreu, H. (2012). Inspeção Escolar: do controle à democratização do ensino. Pós em Revista. Belo Horizonte: Centro Universitário Newton Paiva.
[2] Carvalho, M. (2011). As multirracionalidades no contexto da organização escolar. Revista Portuguesa de Educação. Vol. 2, nº 24., pp. 33-56.